From the monthly archives: January 2010

Hammers and Sickles*

By On January 11, 2010 · In Danse Macabre

Our neighbors, the snoring, shouting, banging ones, have been involved in some serious renovation on the wall that separates our bedroom and theirs. Yesterday was hammering and scraping and thudding that was making the wall literally bow outward, as N and I stood there, holding our hands against it. I think they could hear us exclaiming Jesus Walking Fuck what are they doing now? because they sent a 12-year-old girl over as their spokesperson. According to her, they’re apparently replacing the wall, because it’s cracked and our landlord (as I’ve said before) is not particularly proactive. I’m not entirely sure I believe that’s really what they’re doing, but who knows. Hope springs eternal in our household.

Did you happen to see this Daily News article about John LeBoutillier, a crackpot ex-congressman who got ripped off by the mafia? If you didn’t, you might be surprised to find out that enlisting jailed American mobsters in an effort to track down Viet Nam POWs being held as slaves in Belarus is not an efficient use of $18K.

This 1988 article from the NYT shows that LeBoutillier’s been peddling crazy for over 20 years now (alongside Bo Gritz, another selfless humanitarian), claiming at the time that there were anywhere from 4 to 400 POWs still alive in Southeast Asia. There’s not a shred of evidence that this is true.

And yet, he persists. LeBoutillier began collaborating with Frankie “Blue Eyes” Sparaco a few years ago, reasoning that an illiterate, imprisoned mafia hitman from Brooklyn would make the best emissary to correspond with Russian mobsters.

“In our prisons are hundreds of Russians, many of nefarious background; some were even in the KGB,” said LeBoutillier last week. “You and I could not go and find these guys and talk to them. If anyone in there could talk to them, that’s what I want. It doesn’t matter what his background is, if he can help get information about American prisoners of war I’ll talk to him.”

And as a favor to Sparaco, he used his clout to have a man who was convicted of FIVE COUNTS OF MURDER moved to a medium-security prison.

But it turns out that Sparaco and a flower deliveryman accomplice (the brains of the operation, it would seem) were conning LeBoutillier. And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

The Minutemen, Sickles and Hammers

*Original title: The beat don’t stop til the break of dawn, at which time there will be a 15 minute intermission, and the beat will then resume.
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All I want is more beer

By On January 9, 2010 · In Adipocere

I found, via the Cinetrix, this Atlantic article about giant cocktails, which is well worth the read. The accompanying video features a drink described as “blue as a David Hockney swimming pool,” and that’s the sort of prose that makes me want to throw in the (bar) towel because I have never, EVER, come up with anything close to that good. And writing about drinking is my specialty! Or perhaps it’s not so much the writing as the doing that’s my specialty. Anyhow. Gimme my Fucking Book Deal already.

I challenge anyone to sit on “chat” with eBay’s customer support for 75 minutes and not drain a bottle of wine. Having a rather annoying technical log-in issue, not very interesting, and not very RESOLVED, either. The worst part is that I don’t feel a thing. Buzzkill.

After all was said and done, I typed, “this is actually really embarrassing that I can’t figure out what’s wrong because I work in IT,” and “Darwin P,” on the other end, typed, “It’s okay.”

So I’ve drunk all the wine and I polished off the bourbon days ago and now I am drinking the Genepi, which is a rather cloying and viscous remainder from N’s trip to the French Alps. (To be cured of homosexuality. It didn’t work.) There’s almost nothing left. It’s either that, the jalapeno tequila, or the 8-year-old grappa with the cork broken off in the bottle. WHAT I write about drinking, that’s what I do.

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2010: The Year in Review

By On January 5, 2010 · In As I Am Now

purgatoryOh for all that is holy why do I live in NYC? Our apartment, in past winters heated to nosebleed-inducing, skin-wizening temperatures, is now about 65 degrees in the day and even colder at night. My parents kept our house at 65 degrees in the winter. I hated my parents then. And I beyond loathe our landlord at this point, as he is responsible for installing the Situationists upstairs and the snoring, clomping, brawling family next door (about whom it must be said that they are probably just as miserable as we are, particularly when N and I practice our knife-throwing routine). He is also the man responsible for commissioning the bathroom artistry pictured above,* and which he is unwilling to repair, even though it is “nonconforming,” as the folks at the City would probably call it. (Oh, but don’t worry–I already have all sorts of forms downloaded from various agencies! He better hope that I don’t actually get around to filling those out!)

Worst of all, if you go to my landlord’s “website,” it immediately begins playing a midi version of “New York, New York,” which even Time Cube guy would agree is Bad Web Design.

Anyhow, maybe N and I should just move on down to Florida, seeing as we did just buy a house there and are spending eleventy-billion dollars to have the heater repaired today, given that it’s about 25 degrees down there, too.

Oh, speaking of down south, we have this, “Couple arrested for giving kids tattoos”:

They cleaned up a tattoo machine someone gave them, and used guitar strings as a needle. Out of the seven children in their custody, only the youngest child did not get a tattoo.

“They weren’t hurt by them,” Marsh said. “We would never do anything to hurt them.”

Little tiny crosses on their little tiny hands! I ask you, what is the point of having that many kids, beyond forming a gang or a basketball team? They needed those cross tattoos.

*This is only partly true. His father, from whom he inherited the building in the 70s (I know everything about this man, because I have super-detective powers, and if you have ever wronged me, it’s likely I know everything about you, too), was probably the one responsible for it, because those fixtures date back to the Eisenhower administration. And even Eisenhower, dead and in the grave, could tell you that.
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May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?

By On January 4, 2010 · In Cremains

Interesting (if simplistic) Economist article on the search for the world’s hardest language causes consternation, in-fighting, and bickering over at Metafilter, but also produces some really neat personal anecdotes as well as recorded examples of the !Xóõ dialect:

spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet).

Crazy.

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