Earlier tonight, hours before I struggled to get my wife to go to sleep so I could enjoy 3 episodes of the Tonight Show, half of Bill Moyers Journal, and a porch ss, I went to the grocery store to pick up a few ingredients to make cookies. I don’t make cookies. Nothing could be stupider to me than baking cookies. I’ll eat a couple cookies if they’re forced on me, but usually I just think about how stupid they are. Anyway, my part in things was to buy some ingredients, and while I was at the store I was talking to myself. I went by the deli area and all the artisan cheeses were there. I’m not a cheese connoisseur. I love cheese, but most of the time I’m slicing Kraft cheddar. That was pretty much an actual quote of my brain. Because it’s paraphrased, I left out quotation marks.

Several grocery store trips before this I’d remembered Thanksgiving and wanted to try to find a nice chipotle cheddar, but had forgotten. This time, however, I was determined to do it. I’d just spent a good 10 minutes looking for molasses, so at that point I just wanted to find it quickly and get the hell out of there. I saw what I thought was a similar cheese. I read the word “cheddar” and saw the obvious pepper pieces mixed in, so I put it in my basket like a good urban citizen and went through checkout.

I must be blind. I just had some of that cheese, and it is so damn spicy it makes my freaking elbows itch. I took a bite and immediately knew I’d not read everything. And there it was. Habanero. Not only in a stupid font, but also pictured. My mouth is on fire. This cheese is good, but man, it’s hard to see the point in it. Also, let it be known that Sam Adams is no match for the habanero pepper. If the English had this cheese, all those original rabble rousing Pats fans would have curled up into balls and paid them taxes.

Them taxes was much, but this spicy cheese is much mores. Oh man. Oh.

New York Times

Chicago Tribune

Los Angeles Times

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

I’ll leave you to figure out the mysteries of these images, except that I want to make it clear how hilarious I think it is that the Post-Dispatch proudly displays yesterday’s most e-mailed instead of today’s. If I lived in St. Louis, I think I’d switch on KMOX every few hours just to make sure that aliens haven’t blown up the White House. Yet.

Good Lord.

And to think what a Big Gulp cup with a half ounce of frozen backwash/Coke Zero would do…oh…the humanity. I love how the best response for the space men was to literally go and hide.

Wasn’t our country spending some Ben Frank’s on a laser that would pulverize something like this? Was the robotic arm that was mentioned in so many of the 3-2-1 Contact articles I read as a child a lie? Could a space walk not be arranged for the soul purpose of slapping this piece of crap down? It hurts my skull to think.

Space is not for the faint of mind.

Normally I wouldn’t ponder my own level of loathing in the privacy shroud that is Dank, yet some things have gone down lately that I am ashamed of. Also, today I ate lunch at this little place near Loyola and they played the same three Bob Marley songs on repeat for the entire half hour that I was there. According to my Rastafarian brother (and an ad-ravaged lyrics website), I’m the only one that can emancipate myself from mental slavery.

Emancipate myself from mental slavery.
Emancipate myself from mental slavery.
Emancipate myself from mental slavery.
Emancipate myself from mental slavery.
You get the idea.

I sail to your shore as an immigrant from the Land of Desire to Profit from Ilk. My stay on Ilk was short-lived, but my time there was eventful and fraught with indulgence and hedonism. I purposely didn’t care when the natives mistook me as their king and worshiped me.

When they sacrificed a Princess to me, I looked the other way.

I am sorry for the calendar I made that reflects various times the Ilk residents will attempt to profit from a controversial triple-homicide.

When they offered starving children golf swing tips, I pretended to be asleep.

I apologize to anyone that gives in to deceptive copy combined with the promise that God might care (it’s in there) about bettering a golf swing.

When they set the creature before me that they’d determined to be the “missing link” between humans and apes, I held a press conference and neither confirmed nor denied their findings.

I am regretful that the eyes are huge and burnt orange, and I am sorry that a pre-emptive strike wasn’t taken against this past, present, and future molester.

I do feel better. And I’m taking some solace in the fact that the next time a Looney Tunes character exclaims “Oh, the humanity!” I’ll be right there with ‘em.

You also can’t look at the sun.  Say what you will about cigarettes, asbestos and obesity, at least you can look at those things and not go blind.

Think about it too much and you’ll start questioning your faith.  I mean for 12 hours every day there is a giant carcinogen in the sky that can render you sightless, and yet without it we’d all be dead.

"I'm kind of an asshole..."

Anyway, obviously from time to time our hosts miss a few shows or take a break from their hosting duties. I received this from one of our baseball podcasters 5 minutes ago. Mind you, this is the slowest part of the baseball offseason:

Lou,

Sam

Wow. I’ve considered how I should respond while writing out this post, and I think I’ve arrived at this:

Sam,

Lou

At about 4am this morning I was sitting on my toilet, in pain, thinking about the unknown impact shitting has probably had on society, and how if people could be a little more upfront about it life would be pretty different. You can’t tell me for instance that I’ve never watched a sporting event where an athlete performed horribly because he needed to drop a deuce. But an athlete would never admit this, even though I really think we’d all understand. Can you imagine if Rex Grossman, after throwing 2 picks and fumbling twice in that Super Bowl said something like, “Yeah, I hate to use it as an excuse, but I was crowning out their in the second half. Honestly I was just happy not to lose it in my pants.” You wouldn’t forgive him for sucking, but you’d understand a little better.

After the economy exploded and everyone figured out that Sarah Palin was retarded, I started running doomsday scenarios through my head that could keep Obama from winning. The only one that really worried me involved him having digestive problems during a debate and having to walk off stage, or worse. In reality this was more likely to happen to McCain because of his age, but still, this kept me up on the nights before debates. If Barack Obama had sharted on stage while answering a question about his policy towards Israel he wouldn’t be president today.

There’s a tipping point for so many different things in this world and I think shit, and more specifically liquid shit, has more to do with it than we may think and will ever know.

If “cleaning your toilet” means purposely pissing on a shit stain….you might be a redneck.

However, the sun rose on Friday and the wind blew into my apartment despite my clear plastic-covered windows. It was a cold wind of change. Friday was a client circus, from 9:00 nonstop until the end of the day. I made post-it notes for all the jobs to keep track of them. I pranced on that high wire, and when I fell some douchebag that waited 3 weeks to reply to my bid was there to catch me. It was a lot of fun. I made my wife listen to the story of my post-it notes, and she smiled politely while her mind sought full online episodes of Friday Night Lights.

But now I’m deep in it. I’ve got to finish this site by 4:00 and I just talked to the lady on the phone. She just suggested that I “take a shot” at putting a complicated photo gallery and a perfectly-sized calendar on two separate pages of the site I’m working on. I hung up with her, said something aloud, and then recorded it for a post I was about to write.