I honestly thought that I Like Dick political parody buttons would capture the imagination of the American electorate. I was wrong. Unfortunately, now CafePress is stuck with the tens of thousands of items that I had expected to sell.

When I worked for a local lumber baron in Canada, his daughter ran for office. After her loss, I was one of the guys that spent an afternoon shouldering her campaign posters into the upstairs storage area of my workplace. They were saving them in the event of a second attempt for the same office in the same riding. She was too successful to consider being a politician by the time the next election rolled around.

Say what you want about Cheap Hotels, but you can’t deny that they cost you less money than expensive hotels. I am going to relay my best and worst experiences, starting with the worst. We decided to have a night out at the big clubbing district on the island that we were visiting. It was a spur of the moment thing. We realized that we were officially too old to go clubbing so we figured that we should go one last time before we admitted it to the world. We booked a room at the only reasonably priced hotel that wasn’t full. It was smelly. It wasn’t that bad of an experience, since it was just meant to be a place to crash for 6 hours after our night out. we did have headaches from the mold, but how could we really be sure it was the mold after our bar hopping?

The best experience by far was our stay at Archi Rossi in Florence. It is actually a hostel, but they have a few private hotel rooms on the top floor. We actually had a desktop computer with free internet in our room AND free wireless. The ground floor’s walls are covered in frescoes that were created by artists who have stayed at the hostel. The walls that don’t have ambitious artwork have graffiti. Here is my favorite, it is written on the wall of the breakfast room:

JAPAN IS NOT THE LAND OF MANGA, WE HAVE GOOD CULTURE !!!

If you are visiting a strange city in the near future, you would do well to check out a city guide at HotelsByCity.net. You don’t want to copy my worst experience. As an example, I looked at Dublin. I am going there this weekend

The Holiday Inn seems like a good deal. Many hotels that showed up on my search featured a Best Rate Guaranteed logo beside them. You will find that booking hotel stays online can save a lot of money. Even when a hotel has lots of vacancy, people walking in off the street asking about a room will pay more than the person who shopped around online. Hotels in Europe seem to vary quite a lot in terms of quality and value.

The Jagermeisterbraunschweig.jpg is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia’s deletion policy.

I don’t think this is fair. Please do your part to make sure that it remains for the education and entertainment of future generations. I think that there should be a Hollywood movie made about the drama. I think that Ben Stiller should play the guy wearing yellow jersey that started so much controversy.

If we allow those tyrannical wiki editors to run roughshod over the rights of contributors to add images of Germans with bad 70s hair in football jerseys, who knows what they’ll do next.

TAKE A STAND

Das ist des Jägers Ehrenschild,
daß er beschützt und hegt sein Wild,
weidmännisch jagt, wie sich’s gehört,
den Schöpfer im Geschöpfe ehrt.

Chief Dan George suspected that it might rain, otherwise he might have hung up some laundry.

I have somehow managed to live half of my life without being told by some organization that I can’t have a clothesline. I was a bit surprised to read that 60 million Americans (the Land of the Free???) are not allowed to hang out their clothes. I got the statistic from the Laundry List Project. Advocating for the use of free solar and wind energy to dry clothes is a great cause. Clothes dryers are the second most power hungry appliance in the modern home after refrigerators. I think we are all too sissified at this point to go back to drying meat in the sun, but drying clothes on a line is not that hard to manage.

I received ZERO comments on my last self portrait. It’s good to see that everyone remembers the advice of their mother about what to do when they have nothing good to say.

I am enlisting cuteness this week. We have a gas heater in the office and we have occasionally had to throw this cat out into the rain because she would not stop walking right up to it. I think she has finally figured out the association. Laps good, open flames bad.

Sculpy Artist Brad Finn of Gainesville, Florida makes the Chocolate Jesus dude look about as blasphemous as the Pope. His outsider art is not the kind of stuff that gets sold to gay couples who are out on their Sunday drive. I actually suspect that his wife makes him chop his work up quite finely and double bag it before he takes it to the curb. It wouldn’t do to have the neighborhood cats dragging these abominations home to their owners.

Hey, look at me, I’m an art critic now

I was a bit off this morning. It looked like it was shaping up to be a beautiful day, so I put a load of wash in the machine. Our washing machine is in a small courtyard that is half under cover and half opened to the sky. After I put the wash in, I decided to move the drying rack out into the open part to get more air and sun. It contained some clothes that are vital for this evenings plans. Then I sat down to have my morning coffee in the office. When I took my cup back out to the kitchen, I was greeted by the spectacular rainbow you see in the picture. As always, the rainbow was more amazing to the naked eye than it appears in the photo.

The rest of the story involves me forgetting about the laundry while I go out to take a picture just before the downpour and then uploading it DURING the downpour. When I heard someone exclaim later on, it took me a good five seconds before I realized the the clothes had gotten rained on.

I have occasionally been jealous of those ‘outsider artists’ that live in squalor well below the poverty line and get discovered by some light-loafered art dealer after which they get to live in squalor slightly above the poverty line.

I knew of some famous and prodigious makers of folk art in Nova Scotia. I could easily make stuff just as primitive as them but my education and hygiene are like an albatross around my neck.

My real unselfconscious foray into outsider art came when I discovered computers and MS Paint. Someday my Jpegs will be worth hundreds of dollars and I will eat more kraft dinner and bologna than I had ever imagined was possible.

I was reminded of this video while reading a post about etiquette on a wedding ideas blog called Wedding Idea Source. The post advises against drinking too much at wedding receptions.

The lady singing the duet in this video is Kathleen Edwards. I had an awkward moment standing beside her down at the Khyber many years ago. She’s the kind of woman that attracts me against my better judgement. The manager had been comping all the performers with Jagermeister shots from his fancy new sub zero dispenser and she was quite tipsy. When we made eye contact I got the impression that she was worried that I would say something lame and that she was too impaired to be gracious in that way that minor celebrities usually are when dealing with that crap. I said nothing and I felt appreciated for my silence.

Bert Fields, the attorney for Tom Cruise has branched out into the field of literary review. He had the following thing to say about Tom Cruise, An Unauthorized Biography…

It’s a boring, poorly researched book by a man who never talked to anyone involved in Tom Cruise’s life or anyone close to him. There’s no real independent research. He hasn’t spoken to his mother, his sister, me, Paula Wagner, his agent, his wives, David Beckham, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez or any of the famous directors he’s worked with. Instead you’ve got this long, boring reference to people he knew 30 years ago.”

I don’t think we are going to see that quote on the dust jacket, even though the fact that Tom’s lawyer is giving interviews makes me want to read the book more. I don’t want to read it badly enough to go out and BUY it. I think I will wait for the movie to come out. I think they should get David Spade to play Tom.

The lawyer is a very smart man, he actually figured out that the content of this book has been crafted in a deliberate attempt to entice people to buy the book. That is just wrong.