Palace Happenings

DISCLAIMER: Some of the material contained in this post may have been delivered previously in individual communication with certain members, your resolute yet compassionate Ruler does not now warrant, nor has He ever warranted, consistent originality of posted contents.

So last night the Ranee informs me that the Ranette is now qualified to teach piano.
No fuckin kidding.
Not bad for a 12-year-old kid, yeah?
I guess she won't be freezing her ass off pumping gas in -45C for minimum wage.
Excellent.

I saw last night when I got home that the bumwad company has started putting artwork from Cars on the package. This is not such a terribly WTF thing as you might think, since previously they had a picture of a Golden Retriever puppy, and the sheets are STILL printed with little puppies, who would doubtless skitter away, yipping like mad, were they to suddenly become aware of their eventual fate. Anyways, when I saw the new packaging, I asked the Ranette, So, what, I'm supposed to wipe my butt with Lightning McQueen?

Which, when you consider who voices him

Isn't really that unwelcome of a prospect.
Ranette cracks up, but the Ranee calls from the next room and says "No, but it'll make you poop faster"
Which is pretty dang hilarious, really.

So I watched Oliver Stone's Alexander.
Most noteworthy is, of course, the fact that Dawson not only gets 'em out for the lads, she gets 'em out all OVER the place.

Plus the fact that they really are splendid.
The second item of note is that Farrell does some kind of really screwy quasi-Dublin accent deal throughout.

I read somewhere that he was unable to lose his Irish accent so Ollie had all the Macedonians fake an Irish accent (even though at least one of them is clearly speaking Scottish English). Val Fatmer

delivers probably the most embarrassing version of this.
Personally I don't buy it, I've seen Farrell do a perfectly acceptable Yank accent before.
More than likely, it was some stupid conceit that Ollie came up with at 4 AM and then realized after the fact how asinine it was.
Anyways, Farrell spends the whole fucking movie sounding vaguely like Bono.

OK, no, really Bono.

(seriously, who can fucking tell?)

I kept waiting for Farrell to stand up in front of his conquering army and say:

Thess is a battlefield the Bactrians stole from the Thracians...well tonate werr stalin' it back.

Oh, and the hair didn't really bother me.
Compared to the rest of the crapfest, I mean.

Raj

I'm not BULLSHITTIN' back here...

As the Boss would say.
Why does the Comedian merit his own post?
Well, not only is he one cool mofo, I find myself in pretty major fundamental agreeance with his worldview.
The default condition for existence is, basically, shit.
People generally, having reached the age of majority, if left to function according to instinct, will be selfish thoughtless assholes.
When's the last time someone forwarded you an email containing a news story about somebody being a greedy self-serving prick who operated totally in their own interests and everyone else on the planet could go pound sand up their ass?
Probably never.

With, of course, the obvious exception of Jobbo the Hutt's keynote address at the WWDC.

No, it's only when someone does something nice and/or selfless that everyone talks about it.
That's because caring about other people and being considerate requires the application of actual effort, to overcome the natural tendency to be a greedy self-indulgent cocksucker.

Which includes injudicious application of aftershave or perfume, which is, I think we can all agree, among the most unforgivable crimes against one's fellow man.

And hey, don't fucking kid yourself, pure, functional evil is all around you.

I knew this one guy, call him Jerry. When me and the first ex-Mrs. Raj were first going out, she ran a record store I used to work at. She had this Jerry dude working there.
Guy was a fucking BEAST of a man, 6'5", 325 lb easy, all tattooed and bearded and stuff.
And we used to hang out, it was a trip for me, I was used to being the big bearded long-haired biker-type guy, but with this guy, I looked like Boo Boo with Yogi.
In addition to part time at the store, Jerry worked days at a group home for profoundly disabled adults.
Very much the whole Gentle Giant deal.
Actually he got me hooked up with my first tat, now that I think of it.
Anyways, years went by, and I didn't see him for a long time.

Nearly 10 years later, I was single and living by myself in the funky part of town, and would go to this one biker bar to see friends who were playing in blues bands there.
I started running into this other guy that I'd known in my teens, call him Mike.
Really nice guy, he had become a pretty serious hobby (HD) biker in the meantime.
Sure enough, one Saturday I go down, and who's there but Jerry, hanging out with Mike.
Awesome, I really liked both these guys, and here we were.
Anyways, although they both rode, neither of them was affiliated, and they both had a bunch of different patches on their cutts.
So this one day, I see this one they both have that I don't recognise, and I asked Mike about it.

He kind of laughed and said, you don't know it?
And I said no, I didn't.

He gave me a business card.

Yeah, babies, evil walks in the noonday sun.
Stay vigilant.

Raj

You gotta laugh...

An ordinary burglar?
Kill the Comedian? Ridiculous.

Fireworks. You gotta be kidding me.
You know, you'd think this goddamn
country had had enough fireworks.

Me? Bitter?
Fuck, no. I think it's hilarious.

There's nothing to talk about.
See, I'm leaving.
I'm gonna forget about you...and your horrible, sweaty,
little piece-of-shit country.

Get the fuck out of here.

Justice.
Justice is coming to all of us. No matter what the fuck we do.

Goddamn, I love working
on American soil, Dan.
Ain't had this much fun
since Woodward and Bernstein.

Our days are numbered.
Until then, it's like you always say:
We're society's only protection.
- From what?
Are you kidding me? From themselves.
Son of a bitch.

-What happened to the American dream?
What happened to the American dream?
It came true!
You're looking at it.

It's a joke.
It's all a fucking joke.
You know, I thought I knew how it was.
I thought I knew how the world was.
I've done some bad things.
I did bad things to women. I shot kids.
In 'Nam, you know.
But that was fucking war.
This...
I never done anything like this.

Here I am...spilling my guts...to one of my archenemies.
But the truth is...you're the closest thing to a friend I got.
What the fuck does that say?
Shit.

Mother, forgive me.

Instant clarification

Sorry, when I said before that one guy

"thumped her like he was getting paid for it."

 I meant punched her around, he was one of them.

In case some of you thought I was using "thump" as a euphemism for sex or something.









\

You never forget your first Olympic athlete...

Boy, I was coming in this morning and there was this girl ahead of me. She was wearing a T shirt for some Water Safety Organization or something, and she was obviously a swimmer/lifeguard.
She was wearing shorts and she had these fuckin delicious muscled-up legs the colour of butterscotch pudding, her hair below her helmet was that kind of frizzy matte black that Chinese hair gets when in the sun and water a lot.
And I was remembering this girl, I think she was the first girl I kind of went out with after I was married the first time.
She was a competitive swimmer, and had been on the Canadian Olympic Swim Team that didn't go to Moscow in the 80's there.
I was a pretty serious pool rat when I was a kid, so I kind of got where she was coming from.
Anyways, Man Oh Maneshevitz (as Disco would say), she was just... well, luscious.
Those same exquisitely formed legs, just rippling with muscles, and she had the most incredible shape, like a SERIOUS vee shape from her waist up to her shoulders, fuckin lats for days and abs you could play Tito Puente on. And the most mouthwatering tan lines, yikes.
Real good looking, too, in a kind of tomboy-undecorated way.

So, of course, she was, you know, crazier than a shithouse rat.
She used to cheat on me with her former fiance, a guy who thumped her like he was getting paid for it.
This one time I discovered that she'd spent the afternoon over at this guy's house.
So I asked if she banged him, and she admitted that she had.
The best part, though, was her incredible indignation that I would be upset.
She said, and I swear this is verbatim:
"But it's OK. I didn't come."

I, for one am dang glad it's Friday.

Raj

These truths we hold to be self-evident...well I do, anyways

Hey, don't you just fucking love the way girls with long hair will just sort of grab it and tie it back when they want it out of the way? Real casual like.
I don't know why, that really drives me nuts.
A lot of girls here will do it before they put on their helmets to ride their scoot.
Of course, the backwards jacket can be a bit of a wood-kill...

So I was toying with the notion of hooking up a mike and recording the conversation I have with myself every morning on my drive in to work, because there's more than a little comedy gold going on there. But then I realized it would be worse than meaningless if you couldn't see what was going on.
You guys would be all like
"Why's that guy a FUCKIN JERK?"
"How come he called that kid Cyclops?"
"Why is he asking that guy if he's fuckin Batman?"
"What did that lady do to make her a DOPEY. FUCKING. BITCH?"
"What does 'Nice work there, Serpico' mean?"

I think you get my point.
And no, I ain't even close to being a numb enough cunt to wear a fucking stupid helmet cam rig.
Like one of them Gargoyles out of Snow Crash.

So I'm trying to distill some useful knowledge here, for my daughter, and as a Royal Edict from your compassionate yet resolute Ruler.
I'll talk more later about the presence of Mr. Edward Blake in the new header.
For the time being...

Never get into a towel-snapping fight with anyone who's ever worked in a kitchen or at a swimming pool.

Not everyone who drives a Mercedes is a rank asshole, but you'll probably never go wrong working from that assumption.

But EVERYONE who drives a Lexus is.

Never trust  a cop. Government worker + gun. Oh yeah, that's a good deal.

If something makes you happy, never let anyone else tell you it's no good. More than likely they're a miserable fuckhead looking for somewhere to diffuse their  personal rancor.

The Creator doesn't make assholes. The Creator makes babies, and they're perfect. The world makes assholes.

We live in a world that embraces the thermodynamic and biological capability to make ice cream. It would be kind of disrespectful to not take advantage of that.

Human Relations are bullshit (Mikhail Stanislavsky, circa 2002). You  will never achieve perfect emotional or functional synchronicity with any human not connected to you by blood. It's always going to be a compromise. And, as Larry David says, the nature of compromise is that nobody gets what they want. Get used to it, and you won't be disappointed.

Playing cover songs is not intrinsically worse or of less aesthetic value than playing originals. It's a sad truth that everyone wants to be Bob Dylan and James McMurtry, but almost nobody is.

Girls and black guys are the only people that can smoke menthols and be cool. A (straight) white guy who smokes menthols is not to be trusted.

One guy who spends his whole life trying to provide for his family is worth a million guys who spend all their time accruing Shit You Can Buy. Period.

A Career is something people substitute for a meaningful life.

I don't care what anyone says, if you can't touch it or hold it in your hands, you didn't buy it.

"Nobody earns 20 million dollars. People earn 30 or 40 thousand dollars. 20 million, you stole it." - Fran Liebowitz

Firefly could easily have gone for 3 or 4 more seasons without getting even a little stupid. Angel, on the other hand, should have packed the whole fucking deal in before that (fake) Irish kid got smoked.

Peanut butter, no matter how crap your life is going and how miserable you're feeling, will always be peanut butter when you need it to be.

And last, but not least, as me Grandpa used to say, if we all liked the same things, why, everyone would be after your Grandma.

Hey, tomorrow's Friday!

See you then, babies.

Raj

Can I get a ride in that invisible plane?

Hey babies.
Take off your trousers and throw some Peaches & Herb on the 8 Track, it's time to wish a rousing and heartfelt
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
To Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman, the Smartest Girl in Taiwan.

I think she's 17 today.

Happt Birthday Darlin', hope you have a great one.
XOXOXOXOXO
Raj