Category Archives: Life

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nobody ever suspects the butterfly

I saw this dude twice today, if it was in fact the same dude.  When I saw him this morning I stared at him for about five minutes.  Then when he came back this afternoon I took a picture.  But it’s a bad picture on a phone (dude was just too fast), so you’ll have to play Where’s Waldo to find him.  For those of you too young to know, Where’s Waldo was an old smartphone app that’s lost it’s popularity.

butterfly

I have no idea what type of butterfly this is.  I don’t particularly care.  I was fascinated by the complexity of God / Nature that made this little thing to eat while also expending limitless energy to fly around flowers.  This thing weighs less than a penny, but can fly all day and eat and be good to go.  We don’t appreciate it, but little things like this are freaking miracles.

My family’s been through hell and I’m hesitant to talk about it even to my own brain.  But my brother, for intermittent laugh purposes, brought up this Simpsons joke.  I have no idea why.  I didn’t care.  I laughed.  It was enough.  This clip sucks [thanks Fox copyright assholes] but you get the idea:

Then today I saw the butterfly and remembered my brother’s reference from a few days back.  I laughed.  And then I watched the beautiful butterfly.

My other brother (I have two, blessed by God) kept flipping to Gladiator the other day while the family was together.  For those who have seen it, Oliver Reed / Proximo has one of the greatest lines of all time:

“…we mortals are but shadows and dust…”

Yeah, we are.

Nobody ever suspects the butterfly.  That it could remind you of what you are.  But in a good way.  The butterfly is a freaking miracle.  And so are we.  But we can also do poetry, write songs, and drink beer.  So we’re better off than the butterfly.

But next time you see the butterfly?  Stop what you’re doing.  And watch for a few minutes.  You’ll be glad you did.

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Omar Sharif is The Most Interesting Man in The World

– Royal monarch visits his childhood home regularly

– Connoisseur of insanely beautiful women

– Able to converse in half-a-dozen languages

– Hooligan of mediocre EPL team

– Frequent French casino patron

– Mythically talented actor

– Drinking buddy of Peter O’Toole

– Accomplished bridge player

– Called a swanky hotel one of his homes

– Human in greatest movie entrance of all time

omar sharif

I don’t always applaud legends.  But when I do, I prefer Omar Sharif.

RIP my friends.

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on beer, breweries, airlines, airports, collusion, and selling out

So the airlines are supposedly colluding on price, eh? Who would have thought? I did. But I’m just some guy who flies regularly. I’m not a big shot at the Justice Department. But my Guests and I just did a brief half-hour of research to confirm what we’ve always suspected. It will undoubtedly take the Justice Department five months and $18M to do what I just did.

Kindly observe this tale of two airports: Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport & Manchester–Boston Regional Airport.

So I went to Priceline Senόr Bancό de Rόbber Bill Shatner’s website to fly between these two locations. I chose 10-12 November to:

– Eliminate the possibility of last minute flight booking disparities

– Non-holiday week

– Not on a Friday or the weekend

– Random boring normal week

Manchester to Phoenix NOV

And, hmm, I get $347 with Delta and United, and American / US Air is within 7%. So why are Delta and United charging the exact same price? So I figure, okay, maybe Bill’s got an inside Star Trek deal in place with Delta and United. So I journey directly to the Delta and United websites to get it straight from the airline’s maul.

United 348

United gives a figure of $348 or $1 off Shatner.

Delta 355

Delta’s $355 or a whole $7 more than Shatner.

Just to further investigate I strolled over to Southwest and no points for guessing how much they charge for this flight.

Southwest 348

Yeah.

So of the four major airlines (all now under Justice Department investigation) three of them charge the exact same price. The other is a whole 7% more expensive. I see. Yeah.

So is all of this just a coincidence? That $348 is just how much it costs to fly from Manchester to Phoenix and none of the airlines can mess with that price?

Put another way, none of these airlines seem interested in providing a price different from the others, so they could, like, make money. You know, compete with the other airlines for your business to make a higher profit than the other airline. Capitalism, competition, etc?

So are the airlines colluding on price? I’ll let you decide. But the answer’s yes.

Speaking of reasons why collusion occurs, it seems presidential candidates have taken it upon themselves to conduct campaign events at breweries. Why?

– Everybody loves beer

– Get to pose with industrial looking equipment

– Meet hard working Americans not yet replaced by some dude in Shenzhen

– Everybody loves beer

bush brewery

Here we see Bush 3 at Four Peaks Brewery in Arizona.

clinton brewery

And here we see Clinton 2 at Smuttynose Brewery in New Hampshire.

I like these breweries. Smuttynose’s Robust Porter is first rate.

Robust Porter

I’ve only drank Four Peak’s Kilt Lifter when I’m layover at Phoenix Sky because you can’t get it out east yet. Good stuff too.

kilt lifter

You can get Kilt Lifter at Zinc Brasserie’s in Terminal 4. By the way, Zinc Brasserie’s is the only place you need to eat at Phoenix Sky. Don’t bother with anywhere else. I literally schedule layovers at Phoenix Sky to eat there. Place is freaking awesome. I’ve never been at Manchester long enough to eat there, so I don’t know what they’ve got.

Anyways, despite my affection for Four Peaks and Smuttynose I’m rather unnerved they’ve decided to sell out like this. Don’t you go ahead and think breweries host campaign events for free. They want payback, eventually. A phone call here, a campaign contribution there. A little access, a chance to remind somebody later when you need a favor. A concept otherwise known as collusion.

If the airlines are colluding against the law they’ve been doing it for at least a decade. And now the Justice Department wants to get involved? Honestly I’m surprised they’re actually doing something. Businesses have gotten so good at rigging the game or selling out that I’m always surprised when the consumer is handed a real victory, like when Comcast recently lost the chance to become the true giant octopus.

But I kind of expect the airlines to break the rules. They’ve been doing it since the dawn of flight. When Sarsaparilla Airways was shoving $2 bills into Woodrow Wilson’s pocket. But beer is supposed to be better than that. Beer is for us, more personal, intimate. You drink it at home, while relaxing with good television or a great book. Beyond crooked awfulness. It irks me to see them in the game this way.

Is beer the next total sell out? I guess we’ll know if Bush 3 or Clinton 2 wins, and then I stroll into my local shopette and see six packs of Robust Porter and Kilt Lifter. And they’re both the exact same price.

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outrage is now apparently the taste of victory

Great news! Your team just won. It’s a moment to celebrate glorious victory on the soccer / football field / pitch. You have many choices available on how you’ll enjoy this wonderful moment:

 

 a) Drink lots of beer with family and friends in an unbridled moment of enjoyable life

 b) Calmly read a book with your mate, pausing repeatedly to contemplate how lucky you were to get to see your team win

 c) Viciously parse random social media comments and shout loudly about how outraged you are that somebody wrote something that bothers you

 

Yeah, I know! I’d choose (a) or (b) too, and, oh, what, [unintelligible muttering] I’ve chosen (c)? When? [unintelligible muttering] But I did (a) and (b) last night. Doesn’t that count? [shakes head] [unintelligible muttering] Oh.

Once upon a time social justice warriors and the news media had pretty awesome causes to get behind. You could go to Alabama and do battle against goons who’d turn fire hoses onto people based upon the color of their skin. Or you could go to Nazi Germany and work against those guys who were too focused on mathematics and spreadsheets to realize what horrible fucking people they were.

You can do these things today too. For instance, you could go to Lebanon and deliberately cover the mass human misery and help millions in desperate need of support. Or you could go to Baltimore and cover the grinding day-to-day (not a single brief week) of how hard it is to live in America’s urban wastelands.

But why do any of this hard stuff when you can spend your time parsing somebody’s tweet and get mad at its content. After all, solving ISIS or urban America is awfully hard. Eh, whatever, let’s do nothing of actual value. Let’s sit behind a desk and trash free speech. It’s much easier that way.

I, of course, do this too. But the difference between me and somebody who works for the BBC or Washington Post is I don’t get paid for this. Plus, they’re on the nagging side. And I’m on the anti-nagging side. I want people to be free to say whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want. Their ilk literally wants to control human thought.

Two lunatic events to this end:

The Washington Post thinks this tweet is the most offensive thing England has done since the vicious firebombing of Dresden #BomberHarris #toosoon:

 

“Our #Lionesses go back to being mothers, partners and daughters today, but they have taken on another title – heroes: …”

 

Activist, journalist, and stormy-cloud-frowny-face-man Ishaan Tharoor, who used to be a senior editor at Time and a Yale man (must be a coincidence) called this a “sexist tweet”.

But what if I alter this tweet a little and make it say this:

 

“Our #Lions go back to being fathers, partners and sons today, but they have taken on another title – heroes: …”

 

To which my point is: What’s the fucking problem?

Is it illegal for us to refer to these female humans for what they are? I’m pretty sure every female player on the England team is somebody’s daughter. Quite a few of them are mothers too. Maybe we need to sanitize this speech to the point it sounds like a faceless machine wrote it.

After all, isn’t the term “lionesses” sexist too? Doesn’t that imply that female athletes can’t be male lions? Isn’t the fact that we say a female human can’t be a male lion the most offensive English anti-feminist thing since King Arthur beat (alleged) his wife over an (alleged) adulterous act? The BBC doesn’t seem to think so (surprisingly). The term’s plastered all over their website.

Whatever, I got my Guests to write this very, very professional tweet:

 

“Our #humans go back to being humans, workers and oxygen consumers today, but they have taken on another title – winners of the game: …”

 

See how much safer and kinder this tweet is. If only all our speech sounded this way. Then nobody would ever say anything valuable or fun ever again. Think of how awesome that world would be.

Next up is the BBC who (not surprisingly) raises the issue of how many low-class-haters took to the airwaves to use the term Pearl Harbor in conjunction with the Japanese loss.

Apparently, poking fun at history is horribly offensive and juvenile. What kind of insensitive pig would do something like that? Well, me. This is what I posted prior to the game’s start on an unrelated social media platform:

 

“On July 5th, 1942 USS Growler torpedoed IJNS Arare and two other destroyers off Kiska or 2,527 miles from today’s stadium. Here’s hoping for an anniversary repeat. ‪#‎theystartedit ‪#‎toosoon”

 

But what if I alter this tweet a little and make it say this:

 

“On August 8th, 1942 Admiral Mikawa’s forces torpedoed and sank four Allied crusiers off Guadalcanal or 6,140 miles from today’s stadium. Here’s hoping for an anniversary repeat. #longlance #youstarteditoilembargo #toosoon”

 

To which my point is: What’s the fucking problem?

If we as a human race cannot laugh and tell jokes (even offensive jokes) about the most horrible war in human history, we’ll rapidly discover that humor no longer exists and we’re just a bunch of boring losers.

Somebody needs to get Tharoor and the BBC a bunch of beers and watch them drink until they calm down. Then they can just simply celebrate victory with the rest of us. They should try it now and again. They’d sleep better at night.

Normally I wouldn’t care, except that Tharoor and the BBC are powerful enough that people who actually matter are going to listen to them and further do what they can to control our speech.

It’s going to get to the point that anybody, anywhere is going to be afraid to tweet or say like, things, or anything at all, because they’ll be too afraid that what they say is offensive to somebody, somewhere, over something.

And what we can / cannot say will be dictated to us by an elite BBC woman and super-elite Yale man; upon pain of outrage and social ostracism. I fear this world. For when it arrives, it’s going to be a freaking miserable nightmare.

As an example, I almost, almost didn’t post my Kiska thing because I thought it’d offend people or folks would think it too juvenile. But I did it anyway. I’m glad I did.

stormy

The Arcturus Project’s Weekly (Not Weekly) Stormy Cloud Award goes to His Ivy League Eminence Ishaan Tharoor. Smart Yale man you might be, but wise you are not. Do you get it? I did a thing there.

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Triumphator lily

lily1

My Mom’s, just outside the front door.  They only last for a few days.  In the short term, they attract a lot of ants and bees.  Which is always delightful because my dog(s) are of the mind they can eat bees without any negative consequences.  [foolish canine act not pictured]

lily2

I don’t have my camera with me so this was shot on my Samsung S3 Mini, a piece of technology that many of you would classify as a paperweight, but which still manages to baffle me on a regular basis.

lily3

She’s had this same, simple vase for decades.

lily4

This vase is new and so I asked where it came from.  She says, [shrugs] “Somebody sent us flowers and I kept the vase because I figured the color would match the lilies.”  Indeed.  And she says, “By tomorrow morning the whole room will smell of them.”  Sweet.

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I want to self-identify as a ham sandwich

The topic of identity seems rather uncontroversial lately. This shouldn’t be a crazy issue to wade into. Nobody has strong feelings at all. But I guess to be clear, I truly desire to self-identify as a ham sandwich.

Think of the benefits! Well, no, I guess I can’t really think of any benefits, but at least I’d be cool. And free to choose to live my life as a ham sandwich because it’s my desire. I’m not actually a sandwich, but who cares. Seriously, who cares? It’s my call. My life.

Well, I guess a lot of people care. Caitlyn/Bruce/Human Jenner is apparently more popular than the Pope because he has enough money to dramatically alter his life in a way that doesn’t destroy it. If he was poor with traumatic gender confusion, he’d just be screwed. But he has money and so he’s good to go. Money!

So despite what his chromosomes say, he’s self-identified as a female. And despite what her genetic code says, Rachel Dolezal says she’s black. In other words, both of them have self-identified as something that they are clearly not.

And yet, seriously I’m so very confused here, one of them is a hero but the other is evil? I honestly don’t get it. Logically it doesn’t make one bit of sense to worship one and hate the other. But in our super-modern culture nothing makes sense. So why should this?

But generally speaking, I don’t actually have a problem with this. If Jenner wants to be Caitlyn, okay. If NAACP lady wants to be black, okay. If I want to be a ham sandwich, okay. It’s our lives. Get off our backs.

Where I guess I get concerned is where people get shovey about it. They get the idea that their freedom of choice is more important than the freedom of choice of others. And so Jenner will likely sue so she can use whatever bathroom or cake shop she wants. And NAACP lady will, or has already sued a whole bunch of people for things I haven’t bothered to read about. Lawyers!

You know, I’m awfully sick of all of this. Generally speaking, on really, really controversial issues I think I’m beginning to learn my preference is that as a society we should either be all in or all out. So let’s go all in.

What do I mean? Well, if you remember, the media Titan race and gender baiter in Oprah interviewed Raven-Symone who expressed her desire to be:

“…a human who loves humans.”

At which point she was demolished by Oprah and by idiots for not self-identifying as black, or gay, or female, or a ham sandwich, or whatever. In other words, people wanted to tell her who she was. Uh, so, like, I’m pretty sure nobody but Raven-Symone has the power to tell Raven-Symone who she is.

And so that should be our baseline.

Nobody but Caitlyn Jenner has the right to tell Caitlyn Jenner who she is. And if Rachel Dolezal says she’s black, so be it. And if I’m a self-professed freaking ham sandwich, then I’m a freaking ham sandwich.

You know, speaking of that Pope guy, I think he gets it too, when he said, “…who am I to judge?”

We need to tattoo that phrase on everybody’s eyelids before our judgment / criticism culture destroys us all. And we also need to take a step back and realize that some things just aren’t that big a deal, or go against our ideals and values.

Who uses what bathroom or what cake shop or leads what race based organization are all concepts that are infinitesimal compared to ignoring the most important lesson we have as a human race in, quite simply, “…love one another…”

So let’s just make every bathroom a human bathroom and get it over with. And yeah, sorry, this means the 43 year old soccer mom has to let Jenner into the girl’s bathroom with her 11 year old daughter. Otherwise mom needs to get off social media about what a hero she thinks Jenner is. We have to be all in, or all out.

And I’m pretty sure that if Jesus owned a bake shop, and a gay / trans / multiracial / whatever couple wanted a cake, I think he’d be like, “Of course my children. What flavor would you like? Peace be with you.” I think similar things happened in this book I read that he was in.

And this after all, is the highest expression of our humanity. That you can disagree with somebody, hate who they say they are, or despise what they do, and yet still love them as a fellow human being. So I guess, forget ham sandwich, I want to self-identify as a human.

ham sandwich

Mmm, tasty, tasty love.

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it’s perfectly okay to stare at the wall and do nothing

Depending on what your cultural background is, this may not come as a shocker.  However, I grew up in a society where Seinfeld’s David Puddy was a comical guy because he tended to stare off into oblivion like a lunatic.  That was the joke, that’s it, that he just stared at nothing.

Puddy's_apartment

It also helped that Patrick Warburton did the joke particularly well.

Years ago, during one of the rather darkest moments of my life, I often found the urge to sit in a chair and accomplish nothing. This is real dark shit, where you don’t want to / can’t work, read, eat, sleep, nothing. You just want to sit there staring at a wall for twenty minutes. It’s all you’ve got.

At the time, I confided to a wise person that this behavior bothered me immensely. That there was something wrong with this ala David Puddy. To which the person said in response, “It’s perfectly okay to stare at the wall and do nothing.”

Boy was she right.  Even now when life isn’t as, relatively, dark I still allow myself to do this on a regular basis.  When made a regular part of your daily life, it helps to cleanse your brain.

And when you think about your caveman self, this makes perfect sense.  Once upon a time some hunter dude would just blankly stare at trees for eight hours while he awaited the forthcoming sabertooth tiger kill.

When I traveled to Sicily I heard them refer to this concept as, “The Blessed Nothing”.  I’ve never forgotten that phrase.

And yet in our high-impact-super-modern-culture we never bother to employ this cleansing.  We can’t even sit down for eight seconds without having to do: something, anything.

When I was on the road this last weekend and on long layover at the airport bar I happened to notice that of the twenty or so folks sitting at the bar, every single one was holding a smartphone.  I was the only one just sitting there slowly sipping my beer and staring at the wall.  It’s relaxing.  But taken at face value, somebody would be like, “Who’s the weirdo just sitting there without his phone?”

Even worse was the couple at the small table behind me who instead of, you know, talking to each other were just sitting there in silence tacking away at the smartphones.  I haven’t been in a decent relationship in a long, long time.  But I’m pretty sure that if all you’ve got to talk about as a couple is a smartphone, that there’s a problem at hand.

So friends, the next time you’re at the bar, or seated alone in the terminal awaiting your flight, or waiting for your friends on a park bench?  Just sit there and do nothing.  Stare into oblivion.  And see what delicious places your mind can take you.  Once you get used to doing this on a regular basis, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.  Your brain will thank you.

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what if velociraptor fought terminator?

There’s very little I wouldn’t give up to see this vicious bout. What purpose would it serve? I don’t care. Why should you? It’d be senseless and fun. That’s good enough for me. I assure you, you’ll pay money to see it. Plus, for one thing it’d make a movie ten times better than the mess that’s about to appear on screen.

For I have seen into the future. My Guests facilitated my journey into the outer reaches of the cosmos where I had the opportunity to see through time, grab a beer, solve the unified field theory, speak with Hitler, and watch both Jurassic Actual Park and Terminator Misspelled Word.

In order to increase the hi-larity, Hitler insisted that we use the powers of the sixth dimension to summon the corporeal form of Richard Attenborough. We also used these powers to procure enough alcohol to overcome even the level of suffering that Steven Spielberg and James Cameron are likely to endure once they realize what these people did with two of their finest creations.

Of course, this is to assume Spielberg and Cameron actually bother to watch these movies. Which of course they won’t. Instead, we’ll get the glory of two hack directors who’ve never made a decent movie but do their best to prove just how much they’re exactly like Michael Bay. Because that’s where the money is.

About halfway through World, Richard started to chug uncontrollably from a bottle of gin and then blacked out mumbling, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.” A third of the way through Genesis (sic) Hitler remarked that the only thing worse than this film experience was when he watched Downfall and realized what a total asshole he actually was.

And now having seen both of these movies, I have thus proven my original two conclusions correct:

1) Both these movies are horrible

2) Each of these movies will make $1B minimum

Kindly observe the awfulness on display before you’ve even watched five minutes of these putrid creations known as their trailers:

Terminator Minor Sins:

a) Arnold fighting his younger self; one liner to young Arnold: “Don’t run for office you dirty fuck! Don’t do it! I know your fate!”

b) A flying yellow school bus action scene that puts the Los Angeles river motorcycle chase scene from Terminator 2 on par with the chariot race from Ben Hur (by the way, replace the word Terminator or Jurassic with Ben Hur; and you’ll also receive a perfectly accurate film review of the forthcoming Ben Hur remake)

c) Arnold flying through a functioning death saw known as an airborne helicopter; a situation that would completely destroy the character from Terminator 2 known as The Terminator

Terminator Heinous Sins of One’s Soul:

A) Turning John Connor’s character into a half-man / half-machine psycho

Jurassic Minor Sins:

a) genetically engineered super dinosaur that will make all humanity wonder why this movie isn’t called Godzilla 19

b) a body count higher in the trailer alone than all three previous movies combined thus proving the intent to make slasher porn rather than an actual movie

c) implication of a cinematic tone so devoid of adventure and excitement as to make one wonder if the desire was to make the audience depart the theater exhausted and convinced life is just a big meat grinder

Jurassic Heinous Sins of One’s Soul:

A) brain control of the velociraptors to the point they become either mind slaves or allies of Chris Pratt

Jurassic Park is in my top five of great movies. Terminator 2 is likely in my top ten. If you think I’m a lunatic for these assessments, then you’ve read too much of this blog post to begin with. But even if you disagree with my rankings, you cannot dispute that these two movies were at least, movies.

I’m not sure what Terminator 5 and Jurassic 4 are? But they’re not movies in the sense that I understand the term. At best they’re like loud theme park rides. Which I think is the new concept for the summer blockbuster.

Take a name the populace will recognize, make it a Bay style action movie, and shove it down everybody’s throats whether they like it or not. And when you make $1B? Nobody will care.

Well I care dammit! I care a great deal. Because I have no life, and my Guests won’t leave me alone. So I’m always out to distract myself. Such as with the advertising and marketing campaign for my new sixth dimension creation where the velociraptor and terminator will participate in a Dual of the Fates at Madison Square Garden on July 25th at 8pm. Live. Pay Per View! $100.

You will pay. I assure you. I bought Chris Pratt for one afternoon to use his sexy mind control powers on millions. I can’t lose. I’ll make $1B for sure!

dual of the fates

Clever Girl over Cyberdyne in seven rounds