The institutional mouthpiece of Kjel.org

Hurricane Katrina is not funny. I tried jokes about the Superdome always being a disaster for anyone in it, or the Saints not covering the spread this week, or even something about a desperate shortage of new Girls Gone Wild In New Orleans dvds next year. None of them worked. Katrina has the upper hand.

This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. This whole thing reminds me (to loosely paraphrase Sr. Marquez) that although I don’t really believe in God, I’m still afraid of Him.

Some worthwhile thoughts on the sometimes hidden but very real fragility of humans and all we create.

New ongoing site feature: Monkey Watch. This one is wearing blue pants if you happen to see him.

At least that monkey doesn’t know sign language. Simians communicating with humans freaks me out: I don’t like thinking that Koko has an inner monologue. I’m not sure entirely why this makes me nervous, aside from the obvious danger of her or another sign language trained ape or chimp escaping back to the wild, training the apes how to communicate with signs, and then launching an interspecies war against mankind. We couldn’t even defend ourselves without violating the Endangered Species Act. Anyway, besides that I’m really not too sure why Koko and her kind make me nervous.

I really didn’t like the monkey flashback scene in Being John Malkovich, either.

This may not be real, but it is funny nontheless. I feel better knowing that Herr Kommandant Schmidtberger is on the case.

If I wasn’t so sick this weekend, the boy and I would have liked to attend this. Well, I might have at least. He would have come along without too much complaining.

This boxing match between some redneck southern boy and a psychopathic, nearly homeless woman sounds like great entertainment. Reasons it works for me:

The male fighter is named Bo Skipper. He was quoted as saying ““I love kissing a woman and hugging on them, that’s what they’re made for,” and ” “At first I said, ‘Man, I ain’t fighting no woman, …[b]ut she challenged me and I can’t see a woman beating me. I’m going to train like I never did before.” I’m sure he said this between drags on his Marlboro. How can you not pull for a guy like Bo? I call him “The Southern Dandy”

The woman in the match has said if not for boxing, she would be a serial killer. It’s probably for the better that she discovered boxing.

Vegas wouldn’t touch it; the bout is to be held in Mississippi. “Too insane for Vegas” ought to be the new Mississippi state motto.

Equality among the sexes has always been a passion of mine, and I’m known to get quite vocal about it. Don’t think I don’t walk the walk: in order to live up to my ideals, I’ve never shied away from a fistfight with a girl (that she started, of course). That’s the kind of guy I am. This bout is obviously a great step forward for gender equity.

Chick thinks she can beat up a dude. This should be funny. Kick her ass, Bo.

. . . .or salmonellae, or lysteria, or giardia or cholera or whatever the hell it was I had this weekend — I was a total waste. My total food intake on Saturday consisted of three sips of Gatorade and a Tums; Leon was certainly not getting larger. By night time I was basically unable to move, but still unable to eat or drink. Luckily I still had strength to work the remote, but just barely. The Rumble pretty much ended by Sunday afternoon, but still I ate half an english muffin and felt full for almost all day.

I’m back today though, several pounds lighter, and I’ve learned an important lesson: if I think the pizza tastes funny (and I don’t mean “ha-ha” funny), I’m not obligated to give it a second (or third or fourth or fifth) chance. Important life lesson I think. Now where the hell did I leave that giant sandwich from last week?

Sometimes, when I know a telemarketer is calling my house, I do an impression of Corky when I answer the phone.

40 oz To Freedom playing in the car this morning. Not a good thing for me to listen to as I head toward a busy day. You know how some records remind you of a certain activity or time in your life? This is one of them for me.

This is a great story. I don’t understand the suspension; neither does Brad Penny:

“It’s kind of ridiculous that you get a 10-game suspension for steroids and a six-game suspension for milk.”

Might be time for the yippy mutt next door to take a little South Seas vacation.

I’ve always loved one particular utensil we have kicking around in our kitchen drawers, and I use it whenever I can get away with it. It is a spork, and a nice one at that. However, “Sporky”, as I call zim*, has never been deemed appropriate for “fancy” Organization dinners, like Christmas or Opening Day or what have you. Well, last night I discovered that in our fancy silverware pattern (Towle Candlelight, if you must know) a fancy spork is available — they call it an “ice cream fork”. Apparently for some reason those crazy Victorians ate their ice cream with a fork, a utensil remarkably similar to a spork. Fascinating the things you learn researching spork history. Just fascinating.

I will not ever again spend a Christmas dinner sporkless.

*Although I may have anthropormorphized one particular utensil, I’m not so crazy as to have assigned Sporky a gender. Seeing as how Sporky zimself has self identified as nongendered, as a mark of respect to zim, I refuse to use him or her. Especially him.

The CFO is gone until midnight many nights this week. This is about how I am doing:

This is is how I look when I am trying to feed the Jr. VP. Yes, the facial expression is correct. As is the belt.

Ode to Martin Stadium brings a crimson and grey tear to my eye, and I didn’t even attend WSU.

I have before though joined with the throng of tailgaters outside of Martin. Five men and a big dog in the RV. I was very pleased to get my full damage deposit back.

I there participated in traditional WSU pregame rituals with actual WSU students. Ignore the man in the OSU Beaver shirt: he was some homeless guy that kept following my sister around.

On that weekend, truly, dog was my co-pilot. Which was fortunate because none of us except her brought a map or knew where the hell we were going.

No more televised wrestling for Jr. VP. He landed a wicked reverse headbutt on daddy last night, and this one was not faked. I took a (barely) standing 8 count before I was solid again. To Jr’s credit, I never saw it coming — he’s quite wily, like his old man. He’s lucky that the CFO was there to tag in for him because daddy was gearing up to respond in kind with an Inverted Atomic Drop, or something off the top rope a la this gentleman.

I’m considering making him wear this before I pick him up again. That’ll learn him.

The CFO is working a ton this week and won’t be home much. This is how I feel about it.

The Mariners finally released Scott Spiezio the other day. Now, most baseball people will point to his nearly unprecedented level of suckitude over the past two seasons as the reason he was DFA’ed. But the M’s had already stuck with him for a length of time well beyond what sanity would indicate. Why now? What was the final tipping point prompting the organization and Spiezio’s teammates to say “goodbye”, “adios” and/or “sayanora” ?

I’ll tell you why: they got tired of Scott talking about his imaginary hot girlfriend back in California. “Uh, she’s like, a model. And you know, models are like totally busy. That’s why you’ve never actually seen her. I got these pictures of her though.” I don’t know how long this went on, but eventually someone (I like to imagine it was Richie Sexson) called bullshit on him: “Dude, give it up.” Not content then just to keep taking a page out of the George Costanza playbook and push the pictures, Scott went and got a tattoo of “Jenn”, his “girlfriend”. Wow. You can say this for Spiezio, he certainly understands how to keep a Big Lie going.

Anyway, the level of ass-hattery Spiezio displayed by getting that tattoo and saying it was of his model-girlfriend was the last straw. The M’s realized that he was never going to give it up, and just couldn’t take listening to him anymore.

Congratulations are in order to my sister and brother-in-law (different brother-in-law, not the jihad target). Their West Seattle restaraunt, the Alki Crab and Fish Co., was mentioned in the September issue of Sunset magazine on page 53:

Succulent cod and halibut, hefty skin-on fries of immaculate crunchiness, and a drop-dead view of the skyline rising across Elliott Bay.

Not too shabby.

Found out today that two people I know are headed off to Nevada for the weekend. Crazy kids.

The National Safety Council on playground swings:

Swings are dangerous because babies and toddlers can slide out of them.

A new (to me) 800 Octane cd arrived in the mail the other day. The Junior VP loves it. Oddly enough, he does not like music that is actually meant for babies. He’s way ahead of the game — I didn’t start liking punk until I was in junior high.

I’m sure that any right thinking parent would completely agree that 800 Octane (turned up to “11″) is absolutely appropriate for babies.

And really, which album cover is scarier?

This or ?

Brilliant, friendly folks down here in Old Town, like this gentleman:

PORTLAND, Ore. - A self-professed meth addict broke into a car in front of an Oregon State Police office in Portland and was immediately busted by an OSP detective.

Enough beef ribs to kill 6 average men, and the boy who watched 6 special men and women tackle them. Jr. VP in the organization is pictured; this was taken at a beach house on the Oregon coast this summer.

The CFO’s brother (my brother-in-law) is headed to Dhaka, Bangladesh in a few weeks; he’ll be there for several months. So it is not exactly welcome news to see this headline today: 111 simultaneous bombs explode in Bangladesh 111 bombs seems a bit excessive to me, but who am I to tell the terrorists how to run their business?

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