John Edwards is a douchbag...who didn't know that?

Rule #1 Don't Cheat.

Rule #2 if you cheat, don't get caught.

Rule #3 if you get caught, deny everything.

Rule #4 If there's DNA or a paternity test that you can't get away from, make sure you won the election because there's one rule that overrides all other rules: If your wife is the First Lady it doesn't matter what you do as long as she still gets to be First Lady.

Reason #32 why I'm UN-ELECTABLE: Healthcare

If you want to hear something shocking, here it is: I think we should abolish for profit health insurance. It is one of the dumbest and most harmful “innovations” in history. (thanks very much, Baylor University Hospital).

We should either be on a single payer system OR if you don’t want to throw 1M+ people out of work (if you work for Blue Cross you should be shot, not fired) they should be on the cost plus 10 model, which is the pricing that government vendors are forced into.

How is Healthcare any less important than electricity, gas, or phones? Those are public utilities whose pricing is regulated by state and federal governments to make it accessible to all Americans. Healthcare is too expensive, wasteful, and not universally available because we’re paying retail on something that has such a high markup to benefit stockholders and not the public.

I know, I know. I’m a communist and Glenn Beck would gouge my eyes out. Problem is, I don’t get the stipend and honorariums from the insurance lobby that Glenn Beck gets for his “speeches”.

And no, I won’t be supporting either the Pelosi, Reid, or Baucus versions of healthcare. Half measures will end up costing us more and providing less. If they can’t garner a consensus in this environment that healthcare is irretrievably broken as a direct result of for-profit insurance then they don’t deserve their phony baloney jobs.

President Obama, if you want impress me, stop fighting the fights you think you can win and START FIGHTING THE FIGHTS THAT NEED FIGHTING!!!

My dad is an illiterate dumb fuck hick

That pretty much says it all. Every email I get from him feels like an offense against the English language. Just a snippet:

so I would apprieciate it if you and WIFEUNIT could try to help him with hi faty and carbohydrate diet he is eating to much of,,,,,He only works 6hrs. and sleeps 10 to 12 hrs. so he isn't burning near all calories he is eating,,,,U and he have same problem so get together,,,will u,,,It is difficult I know especially sence KID#1 and KID#4 ,,,KID #3,and KID #5,,,,need to eat hi fat,,carb diet it seems but u and KMP defintly don't.

Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Even dad isn't so dumb as to refer to my wife and kids thusly.

Even if he's got a point, how can I listen to him? Every little gem he throws at me feels like it should be chucked back at his head.

Feels like I'm being disrespectful, like I'm breaking the 4th commandment.

That's what I was shooting for anyway. Going to Hell anyway for the other five broken commandments. The man is not worthy of my respect. Bad grammar and a lack of understanding of spellcheck are the least of his shortcomings.

I need a time machine

I would go back in time to tell myself in 1985 to:

• Never, ever supersize.
• Instead of buying stock in etoys, buy Apple.
• Don’t play pocket jacks in 2007 & 2008. Just fold’em and move on.
• For the good of humanity, you must assassinate a man named Michael Bay. You will find him in 1986 on the set of Miami Vice playing goon#3. And while you’re there warn Don Johnson that if he records an album then he’s next.

Vainglorious Basterd

Don't get me wrong, I like Quentin Tarrantino, or rather I like his movies. Quentin himself comes off bit daft and more than a little manic. But hey, loved Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and Kill Bill Vol. 1. Vol 2 was okay, as was Jackie Brown. Grindhouse, not so much. As for True Romance, that was Tony Scott's fault.

Spoiler Alert: I'm going to be talking about Inglorious Basterds.

Who am I kidding, nobody reads this blog.

Saw the film tonight. Overall, not bad. A little talky, and not in a "Royale with Cheese" kind of talky. More like C-Span-at-3:00-in-the-morning kind of talky. Editing was a little under the top, and as expected the gratuitous violence over the top. But that's not a complaint, I knew what the score was going into the theater. One does not go to a Russ Meyer movie and complain about the abundance of female bosoms, just as one does not go to a QT movie and complain about the generous application of squibs and karo syprup with red dye #5.

One interesting point of note, I noticed an homage to one of the most brilliant WWII movies ever, Kelly's Heroes. They lifted the soundtrack from the penultimate scene in KH and spliced it into one of the scenes in IB. Didn't catch the credits to see if Quentin put in an acknowledgment to Clint Eastwood, my kids (K and A, the little ones stayed home for this one) were dragging me out the theater.

Happy face

I just got off the phone with my wife. We were talking about her mom, who just moved to a nursing home in Evanston from the hospital in Joliet, and will now be going to a new nursing home in Rockford that is on the same network as another nursing home in McHenry that we want to get her in so she'll be closer to us.

While I'm talking to my wife I must have been stress-chewing on my finger, because after I hung up I looked at my hand and the most absurd looking happy face was imprinted on my finger. The gap in my front teeth (from my genetically inherited missing eyetooth) gnawed a perfect set of eyes and the lower teeth somehow dug a furrowed smile into the fleshy part of my index finger. It was almost as if my hand was telling me to cheer up, lighten up, let a smile be my umbrella.

I told my hand to fuck off and went back to wallowing in stress.

Not the worst movie ever made...

...but certainly in the bottom 10%.

I refer of course to "G.I. Joe". I was dragged kicking and screaming by the wife unit in the spirit of family togetherness and whatnot. I would have preferred to spend the day on the bike trail, but it was 100 degrees and 80% humidity in the northwest burbs. Also, My youngest daughter's asthma was acting up and that was the stone that tipped the seesaw. Conditioned air and popcorn for everyone!

So, it sucked, but not as much as I feared and not as much as Transformers 2. At least I didn't feel like I needed a shower after this one. It was certainly the finest movie ever made that featured a member of the Wayans family. After I saw Transformers 2 I wanted to petition the Hague to bring Michael Bay up on charges for crimes against humanity. G.I. Joe was at most a misdemeanor.

It would have been vastly improved with the addition of a scene where Meryl Streep makes a pear tart.

Which brings us to the second film of the weekend. We don't usually see two movies a week, but we did one for the kids and one for mom and dad this week. We managed to sneak away to see "Julie & Julia" on Saturday morning. Not exactly date night but in one respect it was a vast improvement on our usual "dinner and a movie" date. Usually we have to rush to eat so we can make the 7:30PM showing, and if the film is long enough to prevent us from getting home by 10 then the date does NOT progress past the "movie" phase. If I don't get the wife unit tucked in before 10 then I don't get "tucked in".

Am I being too subtle?

Anyway, "Julie and Julia" was not bad but I walked into the theater knowing a bit more about the characters, or at least the people the characters are based on, than I needed or should have known. Sometimes you just have to let art flow over you without knowing where the artist bought his brush or where he dipped it.

I didn’t know much about Julie Powell, the woman that wrote the blog/book that half the movie was adapted from, so I googled her before we went. What I found didn't help, but it did reenforce my belief that fame is bad and should be avoided at all costs. It started with an article in Newsweek about how the blogosphere had turned on her, and how people who had once reverred her were now "hating" on her. The article, which actually was written to defend her, led to google searches for "julie powell divorce", "julie powell infidelity", "julie powell bloodthirsty cleaving maniac".

The truth is, I'm not a curious person when it comes to gossip. I didn’t want to know unsavory details about the real-life woman that inspired the “Julie” part of the movie. I didn’t need to know what she really looks like (Amy Adams is much cuter, but so what? Matt Damon, who will play me in the movie version of my life, is marginally better looking than me). I didn't want to know that sometime before or after she achieved some level of fame from her blog/book she apparently cheated on her husband with some guy. And I REALLY didn't want to know that her next book is about her new favorite hobby: Butchery. By the time I finished the ten minutes of "research" it was virtual certainty that the fictionalized version of her life would be much less repulsive than the real thing (Just like the fictionalized version of my life). Even so, it was hard not to color my opinion of the movie, at least the "julie powell" parts, with the bits of superficial knowledge about the real Julie Powell gleaned from the web.