"Hey! What are you going as for Halloween?"

"Me? A dumbass."

"Hey! Me, too!"

Tito! Hand Me a Tissue...

Truly.

I am mean...

And Elvis has....

...horror show camel toe.

Isn't it Rich?

She knew when she woke up on the couch early Monday morning to the beeping of the coffee maker telling the world that it was done brewing, that this would be an odd week. For playing on the radio in her head in the moment just before full wakefulness overtook her:


Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns."


Later, she was to remark to those watched her day unfold, that she was surprised she hadn't woken up screaming....

UPDATE: The song has switched over to "Dancing Fool," vastly improving the quality of life on Planet Jen.

It's a Mullet, C'mon Get Happy....

Hey, Dave

President Bush spent some time in Warren, Michigan headlining a fund-raiser that raised $700,000 for Republican Senate candidate Mike Bouchard.

This went better than lunchtime in Des Moines, Iowa where he spoke about Republican congressional candidate Jeff Lamberti whom the President referred to as "Dave" throughout his speech. They still managed $400,000.

Blockages Lead to Mayhem

Which is a nice way to phrase the fact that a luxury cruise ship carrying 1450 people has had not toilets for three days. But, thank goodness, they're bring in a team of "super technicians!"

To late for some. According to Mrs Twigg, Mr Twigg's 60th birthday had been ruined by the plumbing faults.

They're High

This from Daily Fuel Economy Tip (the place to go to find out why you're paying what you're paying at the pump:

"Thanks in large part to this summer’s record high oil and gasoline prices, Exxon Mobil posted a quarterly profit of $10.49 billion - the second highest quarterly profit for a publicly traded American company ever.

Exxon Mobil’s third quarter runs from July through September, during which time oil prices began to slide off of record highs. Had oil stayed relatively stagnant or declined at a slower pace, this past quarter most certainly would have been the most profitable quarter on record.

And who has the highest quarterly profit ever?

That would also be Exxon Mobil, who posted a quarterly profit of $10.71 billion during the fourth quarter of 2005.

According to an article posted on Yahoo! Finance, Exxon Mobil’s third quarter revenue of $99.59 billion is greater than the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of both the United Arab Emirates ($98.1 billion) and Kuwait ($52.76 billion)."

Remember this comment from Mr. Stuart McGill, Senior Vice President of Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company: "'Realistically, it is simply not feasible in any time period relevant to our discussion today. Americans depend upon [oil] imports to fill the gap. No combination of conservation measures, alternative energy sources and technological advances could realistically and economically provide a way to completely replace those imports in the short or medium term. [...] end[ing] foreign oil imports is not only a bad idea, but also impossible."

How Many are You?

How many of you are here in the United States?

Ice Fishing

Our Survey Says...

Women are grumpier than men in the morning.

And women stay in a bad mood for longer.

A survey by The Sleep Council found 24 % of men say they never wake up grumpy, as opposed to only 14 % of women and that 13 % of women stayed in a bad mood for two to four hours, compared to 10 per cent of men.

The survey, published to not coincide with of National Sleep In Day on October 29 reveals 41 % of respondents are convinced crap sleep is the main reason for being cranky in the morning.

"As men appear to sleep better than women, perhaps it's not surprising that more women than men get out of bed on the wrong side," she said. "It also tends to be them that prepares the breakfast, spends time with the children, check their emails and attend to their beauty regime. Women far outweigh men in having a busy and packed morning."

Rope: the New Duct Tape

DIY that's DUMB

This Old House has put together a photo gallery of house inspection no-no's from the outlet hell to auto mechanic fixes for household problems and serious structural stupidity. My favorite is a new home construction that passed previous inspections despite a lack of plumbing for the bath tub.

Perilous Journey #227

Taking a much needed break

Print on Demand

The Google

HOST(from CNBC): I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.

UPDATE: don't know why I thought this was so funny, but... well, yeah.

The Google.

"You folks and the Google. What'll ya think of next? Some kinda new fangled way to type messages to each other with a phone!?!? That's just crazy..."

Which is Cuter?

Candy Ass

Yes, it's a meme.

And it's Monday.

So I took it.

And it was sooooooooooo insightful.


discover what candy you are @ quiz me

"Name that Decade" Mullet

Weighed Down

My Budgie Love

Samson has fallen for Delilah and fallen hard.

But this is no bible tale.

This is a wee blue budgie, Samson, who has taken a shine to a wood pigeon who is more than twice his size. All of this is taking place at the DWARF animal sanctuary in Southend, Essex under the amused eye of Iain Newby.

"Some blokes like big birds. He is so loved up. He chases other birds that come close, as if he'’s saying, "That's my lady."

Samson is quite protective of Delilah, feeding, preening and trying to mate her, even jumps on her back for walks around . Because that's when you do when you're in love.

Dance of the Spastic White Boys

It's Friday Night!

Time to shake your groove thang!

Mirror, Mirror on the Bike

Hairy Legs it is..

What Jen has to say about this week:

These are the people/institutions/companies that can fuck right off:

• The people using a favorite charity to try to scam money out of me
• The cat that puked on my bed
• Whatever has caused my email to crash, like, five times today
• The person who stole my MySpace i.d. and sent out a retarded bulletin
• All psychotic despots
• Paris Hilton

Dancing Toe-to-Toe

Sometimes Size Matters

Vote on whether or not I should do a photo montage on:

1.) Man Boobs

2.) Crusty Things

3.) Hairy Legs

In Sickness and in Whoops!

And Not a Peep Was Heard (a sort of Halloween Story)

As he approached the jewelry department, he could see the large haired, polyester clad fashion mavens as they scurried about like over caffeinated mice in a maze, looking for good deals.

Julius maneuvered his way through the crowded aisles and barely missed tripping over a large black purse in front of the cash wrap. He did a deft leap and spin, thankful for the ballet classes his mother had forced on him in his youth. He landed lightly on his feet and looked back on the offending bag with a glare.

A very large, very redheaded woman with a Pucci print dress lumbered over and grabbed the bag possessively with her left hand. The right clutched a box of brightly colored Halloween peeps. She glowered at Julius long enough for him to enjoy the lovely sky blue of her eye shadow and the immense amount of pancake makeup currently melting under the hot halogens. Julius sighed.

"Sorry, ma'am."

"You should be. I've been a customer of this story for over fifteen years." She had a small smear of orange gob at the corner of her red lips. Julius looked away, his stomach doing a flip.

"I know, ma'am."

"Don't you give me any of your lip, young man," she bellowed, shaking a well-jeweled finger at him. "I'm paying your salary."

"I'm very sorry, ma'am." Julius did his best to look contrite then stared down at his shoes. Anything to keep himself from seeing the peep spittle precariously perched at the corner of those lips.

"Well!" huffed his number one fan. Grabbing an orange pumpkin from the box, she popped it into her mouth. "See that this doesn't happen again," she managed around a chewy confection. More orange ooze began to seep as Julius watched helplessly.

With an air of melodrama, Halloween Peep Woman slung her black bag over her shoulder, pointed her nose to the heavens and waddled off down the cubic zirconia aisle. She stopped briefly to look at a very large, bright yellow cocktail ring. She picked the ring up and placed it on her pinky. It wouldn't slide past the knuckle. She wrestled with it momentarily until she saw Julius watching. Grimacing, she wrestled it off her finger and stormed off. Julius smiled, shook his head, and made his way back to the time clock.

He had his hand on the backroom door; ready to push it open, when he saw a small flash of orange out of the corner of his eye. He turned to look and didn't see anything but the gaudy carpet and racks of necklaces. He shrugged and pushed the door open.

Punching in, Julius listed in his head everything he needed to do today. It was a long list. After taking over for the last manager, who'd been caught stealing, the mistakes and formerly neglected duties left him with little time to breath. As he placed his time card back in the slot, an odd granular squishing noise met his ears.

"What the heck is that?" He pulled the card back out to find not a mark on it. He looked down into the slot and saw nothing. "O.K., that's weird."

He placed the card back in slowly but did not re-encounter the strange noise. He gave his second shrug of the day, grabbed his nametag from the desk and hit the floor.

The chaos at the cashwrap was what could be expected of a Fall sale. Brenda, his lead salesperson, seemed to have instilled as much order as was possible by instituting a single file line in front of the register. Gathered around the fringes were "guests" with questions furrowing their brows. As Julius walked up, four pairs of anxious eyes swung over to him and a flurry of questions followed. He dealt with them one by one, in a calm manner, until he stood with the last woman by the fine gold chains. As he explained the difference between 10, 14, 18 and 24 karat gold another flash caught his eye. This time it was black. He hadn't realized he'd stopped speaking until her loud, "E-e-e-ehm."

He turned to see the faintly amused customer raising her brows and pointing to the chains in his hand.

"Sorry," he smiled, and continued his speech. Once finished, with the "guest" happily on her way to the register, he placed the chains back in the glass display case. As he closed the door, it stuck an inch away from the magnetic closure. He looked down to see what was in the way only to see a black peep cat smushed in the door. He wrinkled his nose in disgust.

His hatred for the bright, sugary confections was well known among the staff. Beyond abhorring them because he was a vegetarian (peeps contain gelatin!), he found the various shapes and colors they came in nauseating. The chick peeps he thought of as just plain creepy. It was an white ghost that resided in a half-flattened state in the jewelry case. He opened the case and the peep seemed to re-inflate before his eyes. His lips curled.

"Yuck," He pulled a tissue from his pocket then reached down and grabbed the offending peep. He held it away from him as he carried it off to the garbage. Tossing it in, her turned to Brenda. "Who put the peep in the gold chains display case? That was really a gross trick."

"I have no idea," Brenda said bemused. She was well aware of Julius's dislike of peeps and could barely stifle a giggle at the expression on his face. "I would never waste a peep like that."

"Ewww!" Julius moaned, "How can you eat those things? They have no nutritional value, they're full of chemicals and you can't destroy them."

Brenda could no longer hold back and snickered at Julius's diatribe.

"I'm serious!" he said, emitting an aura of sincerity. "Emory University actually did experiments on peeps trying to discover what would dissolve them. Smoking, dipping them in liquid nitrogen and even boiling them didn't‚ work. Only microwaving and burning them for a sustained period will destroy them. What?"

Brenda was now in full guffaw. She tried to stop and briefly succeeded, then began all over again. Julius sighed and headed to the backroom to catch up on his paperwork. He sat heavily in the chair and grabbed for a pencil. The stack of paperwork in front of him was immense and promised a very boring day. Seconds into his task, the lead broke with a loud chunk.

"Wonderful," Julius muttered as he searched for the pencil sharpener. Moving a particularly tall mound of paper, he found the desk mounted sharpener and inserted his #2. It felt like pushing it into clay.

"What? I don't need this," heaving a sigh, he took the cover off to see ground pencil lead and orange peep in an insidious mix within the grooves.

"Oh, gross! How am I going to get that out of there?"

He made a valiant attempt to extricate the sugary stuff, but to no avail. Searching through the desk, he found another pencil, then sat, eraser to lip, as he thought,

"Where all of these damn peeps coming from?"

He got up from his chair and headed back to the floor, on a mission. He would track down the peep prankster if it took him the whole shift!

His mission was over a scant ten minutes later. Julius was no closer to finding out the identity of the fiend behind this peep attack. But now, half the staff now thought he was completely nuts. Not a bad day. And, only seven hours to go.

By the time Julius got home seven and half-hours later, he'’d seen eighteen winks of peepage without a concrete sighting. Then, he found a peep in his lunch and sat on one while taking a call from corporate. The ability of the things to rebound back into shape sickened him.

When he had reported these sightings to a friend, over the phone, she told him maybe he should check the expiration date on his Kashi. Even the newsgroups, his last refuge, sniggered at these happenings. They all thought he was paranoid. Hell, half the group loved the disgusting things.

Once in his driveway, Julius parked his beloved VW Bug and carefully closed the door. As he headed to the house, he turned around to wave to a neighbor. That's when he saw it. Or them, to be more precise. All over the wheels of his car were bright blobs of flattened peeps. Scared now, he ran for the house, stopping only to get the mail. He was expecting a book. Maybe it finally came.

He reached into the mailbox and to his horror, felt only granular cat shapes. He pulled his hand back with a yelp and ran inside.

"I'm safe in here. I never let the little beasts into my home."

Reassured, he climbed the stairs to the bathroom, hoping that a shower would wash the filth of peep from his skin. He dumped his bag in his bedroom, gave the cat a quick scritch on the neck and grabbed the velour robe his Mom had gotten him for Christmas.

It didn't take long for the shower to heat up and Julius stepped in with a sigh of relief. Maybe now he could leave this day behind him.

He closed his eyes as the hot water streamed over him and felt his muscles relax. Then, his instincts kicked in.

Something was wrong.

Every hair on his body stood on end. The air was filled with a sickly sweet scent. He looked through translucent shower curtain and saw a shape moving towards him. He was frozen, unable to do anything but gulp. The steam obscured the shape a bit, but he could swear it was vaguely bunny shaped. His heart thudded so hard he thought it would pop out of his chest. The bunny thing moved toward him slowly as he shrunk back to the corner of the tub.

Suddenly, the curtain was yanked back. There it stood. Six feet tall and two feet wide at the tummy. A giant purple peep bunny. Julius screamed as the bunny lunged for him....

...and awoke to find his cat licking his face. He sat up, dislodging his loving kitty with a mew of compliant. The sun streamed through the window. The birds sang outside. He looked over at the clock. Just past eight. The house was filled with silence.

Everything was ok.

"Oh, what a horrible dream I had," he told his cat. "And you were there. And there was this giant peep bunny. It's just too awful."

The cat began to purr and sidled up along him affectionately. Everything really was ok.

He went into the bathroom for his morning dew. When he was done, he went to wash his hands and looked in the mirror. On his face, dripping from his mouth, was a line of purple saliva. He touched it, and it was granular. He tasted and it was sweet.

Julius screamed...

The Cat is the Hat

"Honey? I had a little problem with the car today..."

What Jen Wants for Her Birthday

See this man?

Too much for me to ask the he be released from a detention center in Arizona.

But I wish him, Ali Partovi, to have legal representation. I wish to have the Geneva Conventions apply to him. I wish that he could see his family and others that love and miss him. I wish him to have hope for justice.

"If Paris Hilton were a Redneck Man" Mullet

I Like the Pretty Lights

A fantastic time lapse film of the Aurora Borealis: here.

A smattering of photos for your viewing pleasure all over the place.

“My client is tired of being the butt of jokes about his sexuality.”

So says Marvin Keister, attorney for one Tom Cruise in regards to the Mission Insertable butt plug.

Cruise has filed a $50-million lawsuit against Holesome Fun Incorporated, the world’s largest manufacturer of sex toysand is also demanding “the immediate and complete withdrawal” of the Mission Insertable butt plug from Holesome Fun’s Dark Side of the Moon catalog and from any and all persons “currently harboring” this device.

Trey Guccione, CEO of Holesome Fun, responded angrily to Mr. Cruise’ lawsuit.

“Like I’m sure Tom’s never been shitfaced before,” said Mr. Guccione. “He can take his lawsuit, hold it sideways, and stick it where the sun don’t shine.”

The device at the bottom of this controversy is a 3-inch silicone statuette designed to be inserted into the anus and rectum for sexual pleasure. A butt plug can be inserted during sex or it can be worn while its user is gardening, shopping, or attending the theater.

Ok. Another false news story but, holy hell ,is it funny.

My Hairy Valentine

Philosophical Bartending

He can mix a mean (but not stingy) drink. And he can discuss the issues from politics to the meaning of life.

He's the philosophical bartender.

And he's got blog a book out.

So, yeah.

Oh, and a little late for B'con, How Not To Get Drunk.

Of course, not drinking is always an option...

Methinks You Doth Not Protest Enough!

Protest.net. A site dedicated to finding out where you can go when you've got your sign in a dither. There is not lack of things to protest in this chaos-ridden world of ours.

This led me to a photo montage of ginormous proportions. I tried to restrain myself.

BTW, check out this groovy link of protest undergear.