Scorched earth policy

In honor of some unknown, warlike inspiration, possibly the forthecoming movie Jarhead, or flashbacks to the IMAX film Fires of Kuwait, the husband and a person known to us as "Bird" created the following drink while walking down the streets of Seattle's Capitol Hill last weekend:

The Kuwaiti Oil Fire

Into a shotglass, pour:

3/4 oz Sambuca
1/2 oz Jagermeister

On top of this, float:

1/4 oz 151 Rum

Ignite.

Although I did not try one, I was unconvincingly told it was "great" by three tasters, all of whom hesitantly blew out the fire after 2 or 3 failed attempts, and then coughed, winced, and staggered after swallowing the shot (That its acronym is KOF may be no coincidence).

Semper fi, brave drink pioneers. I will be on alert for signs of Gulf War Syndrome in the coming days.

Note: I have been recently informed that a certain Nup actually *named* the drink, a pretty key contribution that I have neglected to credit.

Now, what's wrong with this statement?

"The 2,000 service members killed in Iraq supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a milestone. It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives."

-The U.S. Army, asking the press to continue their patriotic abstention from informing the public about the Iraq war

Words of wisdom

I'd like to offer a belated welcome to my new nephew, who brought a little good news to our beleaguered globe by joining the world last week. He has an immense collection of hats already, and his dad is really into video games, and so things are looking up for this kid.

I feel that in keeping with the pace of modern life, I will already begin to dispense auntish advice, even though he is busy mastering the art of wiggling and crying and may not yet be responsive to my truisms. Let's hope we have a multitasker on our hands.

Nephew, know this about life:

• There is no perfect pen. You will keep trying new ones, stealing them from the office or occasionally splurging on one from Rite Aid, but all of them will disappoint you in some slight but distinct way, much in the way of every person you will ever meet.
  
  
• There will come a point when Drunkle Makry will tell you about the great '95 Mariner Division Series against the Yankees and perhaps he may make you watch the old VHS tape if it has not yet been eaten by dust mites. Agree that no modern baseball moment will ever match it.
  
  
• If you ever want a dog, ask for a pug because I happen to know your parents like them and probably this would be the type of dog you would have the most luck talking them into.
  
  
• Understand that no hand-cut chipotle salsa at some mexi-fusion chain restaurant with ceramic howling coyotes in bandanas on the tables will ever surpass a 12 ouncer of La Victoria taco sauce, medium strength. They have been making this stuff since 1917 so you know it's not some salsa-come-lately.
  
  
• Know that your father wrote the book on precocious sarcasm, which means that you are genetically predisposed to start saying things like "what's for dinner there little ma... frozen?" at age 7, which your mother will really, really not like. However, remember that she is a police officer.
  
  
• Figure out early how to turn your hobby into a job, or you will either end up committing crimes for cash, or sitting through 40 years of meetings in beige corporate offices, listening to management drones talk about "needs wheels" and synergy while you seethe and send futile SOS communications to your friends with faddish digital devices under the table.
  
  
• Go to college, and take the year abroad.
  
  
• Grandma and grandpa's dogs ARE obnoxious but don't tell anyone. Also when they tell you that your auntie is to blame for the fatter one, know that this is a lie and that you can always trust auntie to tell you the real story.
  
  
• Do not let anyone drag you to a U2 reunion show at a sports stadium or tell you about the halcyon days of 80's college rock unless it is Drunkle Makry on the subject of the Replacements, in which case you should nod and agree. Actually he is right about the Replacements although it took me 7 years to realize it. Give it time.
  
  
• Just because no one ever listens to auntie's great advice doesn't mean you shouldn't buck the trend.
  

This is just the beginning of the great wisdom transfer, oh nephew. I may bind these sage-isms into a book for your future reference, in case you are having trouble focusing your irises or contemplating compound sentence structure at the moment.

Love,

Auntie

Spook Nite

Every so often around this time of year, I'll have a random dream set at my old grade school's Halloween festival, a mythic event known as Spook Nite.

As you can well imagine, Spook Nite was a place of plastic witch cauldrons filled with dried ice, and cotton spider webs from plastic craft-store packaging, and big chaffs of wheat propped up in the corners of the hallways. Each classroom featured some typical Halloween activity: a giant cardboard pumpkin with paper streamers for teeth, between which you reached, flinching, to retrieve a plastic black widow ring. A cake walk to which the mothers brought cakes, and old records were played on a record player as the children walked around on the numbers. The boy scouts took over the haunted house, my brother among them, and ratcheted things to inappropriately boyish limits, with fake blood and meat grinders and ground hamburger, and boys jumping out of dry ice clouds to scare the living crap out of 6-year-olds in "Greatest American Hero" costumes.

At the end of the night, you went to the cafeteria and ate pumpkin cookies with that smooth, hard orange frosting while your parents drank coffee out of Styrofoam cups. By then you'd been dragging the tail of your mouse costume behind you all night, and it was covered in dirt and hay from the hay bales stacked all over the place, that the kids had stomped into confetti.

I miss it.

The quitter

What I really wanted this post to be about is Shatner. William Shatner. Because he is great. But it's early and I am not sure I can consolidate a lifetime of Shatner musings into two paragraphs and possibly do the man justice, and therefore I will have to talk about coffee.

I've been drinking coffee since I was 14, the reason being that I flunked algebra my Freshman year, and had to go to summer school. Naturally, I whined when my mom tried to wake me up each morning, because I wanted to sleep in until 10:30, eat Golden Grahams, tape "Life in a Northern Town" off the radio, and then spend the rest of the day in the pool. (No modern suburban kid can possibly imagine such an unscheduled life, but this is the way things were in 1986.) "Here," said my mother, sick of my mewling and refusal to get out of bed. "Try this."

For the next 20 years, not a single 24 hour period elapsed in which I did not drink coffee. It became a sort of focal point for my young social life, such as it was, sitting in cafes and psychoanalyzing whichever friend was pissing me off that week, or scribbling about what unimaginative jerks most people were in my diaries and notebooks. I liked coffee so much that it often became the theme of gifts I received at holidays. Whenever I had to go anywhere where coffee might not be readily available, I had a backup plan. I brought instant coffee on a business trip to Japan, unaware that, like everywhere else in the world, there would be a Starbucks 15 feet from the lobby of my hotel.

I never once entertained the thought of not drinking coffee. Quitting, despite being unimaginable, would be flirting with health zealotry, something I have always loathed. Do a search for quitting coffee online and you will discover fire-breathing masses convinced that coffee causes every disease ever identified by medical science. Such people have arranged their entire souls around this crusade, much the way that people speak in tongues about subjects like veganism, attachment parenting, low-carb diets, and other faddishly puritanical notions that doing things a certain way will provide magical protection from pain and suffering. It's all a form of religion, and I remain steadfastly an atheist.

These facts aside, I have quit. Here is how it's done: drink a little less coffee each day. Suddenly, you aren't drinking it anymore. It doesn't hurt. You don't get headaches. You don't feel incredibly better once you have stopped. Nothing changes. Don't believe the holy preachers. It isn't better. It isn't worse. It is a state of complete neutrality aside from saving a few bucks a day.

Health preachers, where is the overwhelming feeling of well-being and absolution I was promised? Ascetic food gurus, where is the drastically improved liver functioning, flawless sleep, and moral unburdening that were my due in the caffeine-free afterlife? Could it be I have discovered in life what religious folk will discover upon death, that actually it's really dark and quiet, and nothing much happens? That there is no braying of trumpets and flowing of robes? That it was all a social club for mortals, and nothing more?

Could be. Could be.

I'm sick of the internet

I am not sure what happened, but a few weeks ago, I just got really sick of blogs, and news crawls and bodycounts, and pun headlines like "Sunni side up," and entertainment stories like "Ashlee Simpson sings without incident on SNL," and I had to turn my back on the whole online thing for awhile, which has resulted in some really boring nontent on tiny dog.

After a few more naps and magazines, I plan to return to tormenting my three readers with more dreck later in the month. Just thought I would mention this.

Bun-Vac

There are certain movies you know right off that you want to see. There you are, in the googleplex, pissed off at the new, loud Fanta commercials that play when the lights are still up, waiting for the main feature that some snarky web journalist talked you into wasting your time on that weekend, and drinking your impossibly large Coke. Then the trailers some on, and suddenly, there it is: a movie that you inherently sense is not going to suck.

Now, I'm not saying this happens very often, the spotting of a promising trailer, unless you are one of those clowns who "likes movies" and/or, automatically consumes every big-budget sci-fi/fantasy sequel churned out by Warner Brothers each holiday season. You're only likely to see such trailers if you are already at a movie that doesn't suck, since trailers are packaged in collections that approximate the average presumed IQ level of the typical audience member for the main feature (thus, if you are at, say, a stupid 70's sitcom retread film with Ben Stiller, Snoop Dog, or Owen Wilson in the cast, don't go in with high hopes to catch a trailer lacking Johnny Knoxville or Paul Rudd).

Anyhow, for inexplicable reasons, I am feeling inclined to see "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," even though I don't particularly like family films, herky, stop-motion clay hijinx, or goggle-eyed, thumb-printed Sculpey protagonists. I chalk it up to the thought that, somewhere in this film, a device called a Bun-Vac sucks up rabbits, by way of humane pest control.

I really could have used a Bun-Vac a few summers ago...

Update: I knew this movie would rule. Example: scene in which Gromit is changing radio stations in the car, and he stops momentarily on Art Garfunkel's "Bright Eyes," the theme from classic animated rabbit slasher flick (and best novel ever written except for --oh my god-- Rabbit, Run), Watership Down.