State or federal, it's all good

Massive, steroid abusing baseball players are ruining this country and must be stopped at all costs. These men are the scourge of the nation and no problem is more pressing, no issue more important than whether or not Jose Canseco gave Mark Maguire a shot in his ass.

How do I know? Because Congress evidently has nothing better to do than worry about who has been taking steroids. So much so that rather than enacting a bunch of great laws this week – let’s just say proclaiming it National Strange Biller Week and creating a law designed to provide free beer to people who are Strange Biller – they spent their time asking people who are obviously taking steroids whether or not they have been taking steroids.

Not for nothing, but I didn’t need a Congressional hearing to tell me Mark Maguire and Sammy Sosa are juicing any more than my wife needs to appoint a fact finding committee to learn whether or not I’m in the mood – the answer is so obviously “yes” that to even ask makes you look somewhat retarded. Of course, looking retarded is what our elected officials seem to do best.

For further proof, I give you the Big Dig. For those of you not “in the know” or not “up on current events” or those of you who are members of Congress and are clearly operating at intelligence levels on par with a wedge of cheese, the Big Dig is an enormous tunnel that was built under the city of Boston and the harbor, ostensibly to relieve traffic congestion. In reality it hasn’t relieved all that much traffic and is cost over $14 billion dollars. Billion. A 14 followed by 9 zeros.

Now, we can sit here and debate the merits of the Big Dig - which I have done before in previous columns – and you probably aren’t going to convince me that the project should have been undertaken in the first place, but I’d be open minded and I would hear you out. However, for my $14 billion, I do expect the fucking walls to repel water. I’m not an engineer and I know nothing about construction, but I believe that if you gave me $14 billion dollars, I could probably come up with a reasonable solution to keep the ocean on the outside of the tunnel.

How bad is the problem? Well, how bad would you think the problem was if I told you there was one leak? How about if I told you there were ten leaks? Imagine now, for a moment, that the tunnel is riddle with hundreds of leaks, some flowing thousands of gallons of water per day. Does that seem right to you? I was pissed when my hot water heater died and had one leak of about two gallons of water a day.

The good news is that in November some independent scientist/construction guy (Ha! If you believe there was a truly independent review of the Big Dig, I have a leaky tunnel to sell you) confirmed that the tunnel, while leaky and annoying, posed no threat to people driving through the tunnels – meaning even though some lanes may need to be shut down because they are, technically, part of the ocean, at least the entire thing isn’t going to have a catastrophic failure and crush/drown the hundreds or thousands of unlucky souls who happen to be driving from the North shore to the South shore. At least we have that going for us.

The bad news is that last week the same guy came out and said he was wrong and he can’t vouch for the safety of the tunnels.

That’s right – no one can vouch for the safety of this $14 billion dollar project. There are no words to describe the 67 different levels of lunacy the Big Dig has created. No words.

At least my government has the whole problem of steroids in baseball under control and we expect that after pouring $14 billion into the issue, at least a portion of the players will be steroid free. That portion may hover around 3%, but still, your $14 billion doesn’t buy as much these days as it did in the past.

Changes in my posting

Blog. I was a blogger long before blogging was cool, but I didn’t call myself a blogger back then. In those days I referred to myself as an on-line columnist, which, while not completely a lie, was not completely true, either – I think in order to really be a columnist, one must have a following. But that doesn’t matter, because now blogging is the cool buzz word, so I’m a blogger. Once blogging becomes passé, I’ll call myself something else – folklorist or storyteller. Whatever.

Now that I have that out of the way, let me explain a few changes taking place on my blog that some of you have been reading (Hi, Mom!). First, I’m going to be updating more frequently – I’m shooting for getting back to once a week, but we’ll see. Second, while I’ll probably still be talking quite a bit about the adoption and the kids, I will once again be touching on politics, celebrity trials and the complex business that is the world of international romance. No, not international romance. I meant the complex business that is getting on an elevator. YOU HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL THE PEOPLE ON THE ELEVATOR GET OFF BEFORE YOU TRY TO PUSH YOUR STUPID ASS ON, DIMWIT – IT’S A SIMPLE MATTER OF PHYSICS!

Also, I promise to have 100% fewer entries like this one where I talk about my blog in my blog. Sweet Pete, it’s like watching another fucking movie about being a struggling script writer. When will Hollywood stop green-lighting that crap? If that is all there is left on the entire West Coast to write about, then someone please just call me and I’ll give you a story about the time my friend Jeremy Brenner put Cheez Whiz on his forehead, stuck a condom to it then climbed and fell off a telephone pole all in the span of about thirty seconds – what a night that was. I’ll give you that story for free if you promise to shoot the next hack that tries to sell you a script about writing scripts. Or a script about being a struggling actor. Lord.

Anyway, since I already am talking about my blog in my blog, I should give you the update on what happened to my blog so far. You may remember that the entries in my blog were all part of a book I was writing. Well, now the book is finished (the first three drafts, anyway) and there are a whole bunch of new sections not published here. I also managed to find an order for all the stories, which I think worked out really well. Blah blah blah. I couldn’t be more exciting with this update, now, could I?

Bottom line – if you would like to read my book as it is written now, e-mail me and I’ll e-mail you a copy of it free of charge. It’s about 200 pages and would have been written in crayon had it not been written on the Lappy. All ask is that you don’t sell it and if you must sell it, I think I deserve at least some of the profit. I’m thinking in the neighborhood of half of what you get – even if that is half of an old burrito or some pocket lint. Undoubtedly, open sharing of my work on the internet has some potential down sides, such as someone stealing it and publishing it under their own name, but I’m not worried because you guys are my witnesses that I wrote this, right?

In case you are wondering, I’m currently shopping the book around to agents and having it read again by other people because I suck at editing my own work, as evidenced by all the grammatical, spelling and, quite possibly, mathematical errors in this blog.

Now, without further ado, on to this week’s feeble entry.


I’m walking to school with Lady McBeth yesterday so we can pick up the other four rugrats and we pass an old lady (well, she wasn’t that old – probably 60s or 70s, but old lady sound better) and she looks down at Lady McBeth and says, “Aren’t you tan?” and keeps on walking.

Tan? Old woman, is there something wrong with you? I honestly couldn’t think of what the hell to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. I should have said something to the effect of, “You should see her in the summer” or “That’s because she’s a Negro.”

The incident isn’t really offensive, per se, as it is instructive of just how far outside the realm of people’s reference points our family is – this woman didn’t look at me and Lady and assume I was married to a black woman and she certainly didn’t assume Lady was adopted. I may as well have been walking a Martian down the street.

On an only somewhat related note, what the hell is wrong with people who still tan, anyway? I drove by someplace that had a sign advertising “High Performance Tanning.” As opposed to what? Low performance tanning salons where you get sunburned in a little circle on your stomach while your legs remain pasty white? I suppose it’s better than calling it “Extreme” which is what they call everything else these days – maybe you and the tanning bed could be pushed from an airplane.

Anyway, that’s it – there is no more to the story. I don’t really have a point (as usual) and I really don’t want to continue working on this column. I mean blog entry. So I’m ending…now.