every man a meatloaf

There was a morning a few weeks back and in the midst of that sad accordion of stop and go morning traffic on I-24 that I found myself alongside two cattle trucks. I generally try to avoid eye contact with other drivers in those creeping interstate parking situations, but cattle rarely allot fellow travelers the same courtesy. No matter how I tried to overtake the trucks or allow them to pass me by, there was no respite from the forty yards of moonfaced cattle staring back through thin metal slots just outside my passenger side window.

Having grown up in Alabama, the dull gaze of a bovine is not foreign to me. Father Camino raised a handful of cattle for a couple of years, and I would often wander among them in the field behind their house. I would taunt them with red towels and make other attempts to prove my intellectual superiority. Then I would invariably step in their shit while running away.

Ah, but I was a younger man then, and those afternoons were a good way to pass the time while visiting home during college. However, these interstate cattle had reversed the roles on their captive audience. The tauntee had become the taunted, and something about the ten hour days and six and even seven day workweeks I was putting in at the time couldn’t help but make me feel like we were both on our way to the slaughter.

So I stared back at my brethren cattle. I was blasting the 'loaf's Bat Out of Hell at the time. It worked well to drown out the stray snort or bellowing moo, but I wonder now if they heard me singing to them at the top of my lungs:

“And I know that I’m damned if I never get out

And maybe I’m damned if I do

But with any other beat I got left in my heart

You know I’d rather be damned with you”

Their unchanging expressions certainly didn’t acknowledge my pumping fist and various other theatrics.

Well, that soul crushingly difficult and taxing project that was the subject of much bitching and moaning finally reached its end around lunchtime today, and I can think of no better way to celebrate than with a big ass steak alongside and endless river of martinis.

what's she building in there?

Here our Rex will attempt the seemingly difficult task of impersonating Brad Schmitt, Nashville’s version Joan Rivers trapped in the unkempt body of a drunken and disheveled Steve Gutenberg long after fame has passed him by. Can a man engage in local celebrity gossip and still maintain a shred of dignity? Read on to find out, brave reader.

I can understand a healthy dislike of Steve Gutenberg, but what do you have against Schmitty?

He is a grown man who (and perhaps I give him too much credit with my choice of verbs here) feigns interest in the Backstreet Boys for a living.

I have nothing but respect for the man and find him to be a beacon of journalistic integrity amid a sea of worthless hacks.

Don’t tell me you’re holding out hope for a shout out, you pompous bastard! We don’t need that kind of pub.

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Just get on with it.

Anyway, a reliable source witnessed my sweet Gillian emerge from Nashville’s Woodland Studios and climb into an awaiting Cadillac Escalade on Saturday afternoon.

I parked beside Gillian outside the Station Inn a few years back, and she certainly wasn’t driving a Caddy Escalade at the time. I don’t remember the specific model of vehicle, but it was something long, pointy, and vintage. It looked like the kind of car that Hank Williams could’ve died in, and I gazed upon it and smiled.

Does this indicate that Gillian Welch all about the bling now? Is she working on a new hybrid genre of “folk hop” or perhaps even “gangsta folk”? Will she and David Rawlings blend their sweet and other worldly harmonies on lines about how hard it is for a pimp out there? Was there a chilled bottle of Cristal awaiting my lovely songbird in what may or may not be her new ride?

I know not the answers to these or similar questions, as Mrs. Welch could not be reached for comment. This probably has more to do with my having no idea as to how one would go about reaching her than an attempt at avoidance on her part, but I thought it needed to be said.

This much is true: Whatever emerges from that studio will be infinitely better than anything else that comes out of this town between now and whenever my Gillian decides to again grace a local studio with her presence.

And anyone who says otherwise is obviously itching for me to bust a cap in his or her respective ass.

you shouldn't have to ask, but it will be made with gin and it will not contain apples, chocolate, and other assorted blasphemy.

However, I would certainly like to be that person for you, dear google searcher.

the time i didn't meet leonard nimoy

It was December of 1999, and Mrs. Camino and I were on our way to our honeymoon in the less touristy inland destinations of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. We had flown from Nashville to Cancun with the lady behind us attempting to read the whole damn first Harry Potter book to her young son, and my then employment as the manager of a large chain bookstore had already thinned my patience for all things Harry Potter. I blasted Physical Graffiti into the headphones and peered out the window to watch the Mississippi and Louisiana topographies roll by some forty thousand feet below until we hit the ocean where the brown Mississippi spilled out into the deep blue-green gulf like some third grade watercolor.

I removed the headphones to check on the third grader behind me. His mother was still failing him in regards to his bourgeoning literacy. She wasn’t even doing different voices or having him sound out words that would’ve been new to him, and the whole experience…

Actually, this part of the story really has nothing to do with Leonard Nimoy, and I honestly don’t know why it is here, but it is. You have read it and now you cannot unread it, and it would probably be best for us to simply move on.

The international side of the Cancun airport is virtually unrecognizable from any number of Florida beach destinations. Everything is bright and commercialized and yelling at you in English. People wandering in for their return flights wear Cancun t-shirts over their reddened and formerly pasty white flesh. These t-shirts often boast of the amount of alcohol they have consumed while on holiday, and the wearers often choose to complete the ensemble with a giant novelty foam cowboy hat or something comparable in the world of tourist booty.

The in-country side of the airport is something completely different. It is in another building nearly a mile from the international side, and one immediately notices the difference when he steps from the commuter van and walks in while rummaging through his cargo pants for a cigarette. There were no designated smoking sections, brightly painted advertisements for establishments that will aid in getting sickly inebriated, mechanical parrots hawking the same establishments, Hawaiian shirted Mexican boys collecting tourists for their hotel vans, or any number of other trappings to make it the “Florida away from Florida” we had first encountered. The open room was painted in a hint of seafoam and filled with green plastic cushioned metal benches looking to have been taken from any number of American waiting rooms from the nineteen fifties and sixties, each containing its own ashtray every few seats. Mrs. Camino and I had plenty of time to sit and smoke and people watch before catching the next leg of our journey to Merida.

Everything here was in Spanish, and the people we saw were mostly Mexican business travelers with the occasional European backpacker sitting against the wall and pouring a stream of German or heavily accented English into the payphones. There were no Americans here, and the contrast between the two sides of the airport would’ve made for great entertainment were one to just spend a day going back and forth to people watch and sample airport cuisine. However, we did have a schedule to maintain.

With an hour and a half left before our flight we made it over to the line to check in and stood as the lone Americans in that primarily Mexican sea. The airline employees spoke fluent English, but still we filled our time in line going through the Spanish dictionary and trying to get some value out of the foreign language electives we had to take to achieve those all but lucrative English degrees a year or two before.

It was then that we heard a family in the next line speaking American English. It was a husband and wife and two women who appeared to be their grown daughters. The husband was asking the wife about a friend of theirs who was going through cancer treatment and then asked if she had remembered to pack the alarm clock and a certain shirt that he didn’t remember seeing laid out on the bed. It was typical married-couple-standing-in-line fare, but I immediately recognized the voice as the narrator to the seventies paranormal TV series In Search Of. Then I remembered that the narrator of that series and Leonard Nimoy were one in the same. I quickly alerted Mrs. Camino, and we went back and forth in a whispering debate for a few minutes until Leonard Nimoy turned around to check the departure time for their flight to Guatemala on the sign just behind us, thus ending all debate.

There was a brief but surreal moment when Leonard Nimoy looked at us. We don’t look much like Trekkers, I suppose, so I hoped that the look was something more akin to recognition of other Americans. We probably looked back with the very real expressions of those who unexpectedly happen upon a Nimoy family outing in the last place they expect to find one. I gave him a smile and a nod and refrained from hugging Leonard Nimoy or in any other way making a scene. He cautiously nodded back and then went returned to flipping through a travel brochure with his wife.

After we emerged from the line we still had over an hour to kill and therefore settled into a booth at one of the airport restaurants with a couple of beers. A few minutes later the Nimoy family settled into booth across the small room with a basket of nachos and diet Cokes. They were directly in our field of vision, and we couldn’t help but stare. Leonard would look up from time to time and cautiously glance at us while retrieving a tortilla chip from the basket. Mrs. Camino and I contemplated approaching them, and in retrospect I suppose the anticipation of having strangers come up and tell you that they enjoyed Star Trek (to a healthy degree, mind you), In Search Of, and the Simpsons guest spots was probably more unnerving than having it happen and done with. Disturbing the famous isn’t something that either of us would normally engage in, but the circumstance of being the only other Americans there almost required it in a strange way. After a few beers I really wanted to walk over and tell him something like, “T.J. Hooker kicked ass”, but I didn’t. We never spoke to Leonard Nimoy or his lovely family, and I don’t regret letting the opportunity pass. I have plenty of awkward moments with regular people on a daily basis, and angering Mr. Spock would’ve been a rather sour note on which to begin one’s honeymoon. Also, having a story about the time you didn’t meet Leonard Nimoy sounds more intriguing.

Anyway, the man who has lived too long in the shadow of Shatner turns seventy-five today.

the first 9 questions i would pose to willie tyler were i hosting a show able to score big time guests like mr tyler, preferably accompanied by lester

1. May I hold Lester?

2. Why not?

3. Fine. Do puppeteers really do well with the ladies, or was the man who taught that puppetry correspondence course knowingly engaging in false advertisement?

4. Did Lester start off with the “Lester” hat, or was that something you added to counteract a growing confusion about which of you was actually “Lester”? One would think that people would assume the puppet to be the one without the surname, but you never know.

5. Did you happen across a number of hats proclaiming “Lester”, or was this something you had to special order?

6. Were there nights when you were backstage pinning the “Lester” hat onto Lester that you thought to yourself, “Why the hell didn’t I just get a ‘Willy Tyler’ hat?”

7. Did it ever occur to you to call the act "Willy Tyler and a puppet that strangely resembles Arthur Ashe"?

8. What exactly goes through a man’s mind when he’s dressing a puppet?

9. Did you ever think about coming out in the “Lester” hat just to fuck with people?

a bass embiggened

I finally took a pic of the upright to post here for anyone who happens to be interested in that sort of thing. I placed my favorite electric bass in front of it for scale. The picture to the left is a map of the Appalachian Trail. It is long and irregularly shaped, and you should not let it interfere in any way with your perception of the instrument. In retrospect, I probably should have removed it before taking the picture. It is a regret that I must live with, and I had very nearly put it behind me before you bastards had to go and bring it up.

By the way, the bass, as you may have noticed, is roughly a third longer than the Appalachian Trail.

There are many names for the upright bass. One might refer to it as an upright, a double bass, a stand-up bass, a bass fiddle, bass violin, string bass, contrabass, bull fiddle, bunkhouse bass, doghouse bass, large mouth bass, acoustic bass, Lord Thunderpants, or the widowmaker.

Playing it is quite a bit different from playing an electric bass. An electric bass is little more than a couple of manageable planks of wood screwed together and ergonomically cut and fashioned, while an upright bass is essentially a piece of furniture. To imagine playing a bass guitar one needs only to pick up a piece of crown molding and affix it to a thick cutting board. To imagine playing an upright one needs to dance around with a comparably sized chest of drawers balanced upon a remarkable strong fountain pen (this will represent the bass’ endpin) and with a large two by four strapped to the front.

Playing an upright bass makes an electric bass feel like a mandolin, and it is easy to see why bassists outside of jazz and bluegrass made the switch in the nineteen fifties. Still, an upright has a sound that even fretless electrics cannot match. It may be a bit impractical and cumbersome, but there really is no comparison as to which is more fun to tool around with for my own amusement.

More importantly, it will allow for us to finally get that Smothers Brothers cover band off the ground.

Indeed. Let us hope that this venture goes more smoothly than that time we tried to make it as Willie Tyler and Lester impersonators.

Who knew that blackface was still so offensive?

The folks at the Apollo Theater’s amateur night certainly did. Also, having “Lester” launch into that Dolemite routine probably didn’t help matters.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Let us hope that we fair better in whiteface.

I’ll practice my yo-yo.

six ways to get here

And I'm afraid that each of the six left here disappointed. However, it was good to be listed on some searches that had nothing to do with Danny Boy, Rosie Greer, or Heather Orne for a change. However, should these fruitless searchers ever find their way back to my humble blog of doom, I feel they at least deserve some commentary.

1. It really does need its own website. I couldn't agree more. Someone should look into that, but I'm afraid it won't be me. I have the damn thing stuck in my head now, and that sort of thing would occur on a daily basis were I to be the "keeper of the shrine", as it were.

2. I don't get it either. Perhaps it is to distract from the birthmark, poor fashion sense, or all those damn muscles. Wait, scratch that bit about the poor fashion sense.

3. Are they a separate race of people? Will they cobble my shoes while I sleep? Should I fear them?

4. I think you can, my young Filipino friend. I think you can.

5. You don't want to do this. Facial hair gives a Mexican palm tree all its "machismo", and a Mexican palm tree without "machismo" will soon lose the will to live.

6. I am glad you left here disappointed, sir (or madame or Matt Lauer) and I hope you either find a healthier perversion or a great deal of disappointment in your journey.

the real meaning of saint patrick's day

A thin branch of my ancestry, no doubt fleeing a number of angry redheads and unpaid bar tabs, crossed the Irish Sea a few centuries back to immigrate from Ireland to Scotland. Perhaps it was really the kilts, bagpipes, or all-you-can-eat sheep entrails that drew then to and then scattered them about Lochalsh, Inverness, and the Isle of Sky, but that bit is lost to history. All I know for certain is that they inhabited this area for centuries and briefly inhabited a bona fide castle. The castle actually belonged to Clan MacKenzie who happened to be away fighting Clan MacDonald at the time. My people were obviously betting on Clan MacDonald and had a bit of explaining to do when the MacKenzies showed up victorious after the Battle of Blar-na-Pairc in 1477.

Clan MacKenzie: What the hell are you bastards doing in our castle?

My People: Uh…Yourn be on the other side of yon loch. However, thee hast made an honest mistake, as methinks we hath used the same builders and floor plan.

Clan MacKenzie: Our name is still on the bloody mailbox.

My People: Shite.

Clan MacKenzie: And why the hell are you talking like you’re Amish?

My People: Isn’t this how we talked in 1477?

Clan MacKenzie: Hell, no. We probably use Scotch, Gaelic, Middle English, or a combination thereof. I don’t really feel like looking it up at the moment, as I am a bit tired from saving your sorry asses from Clan MacDonald.

My People: Ah, yes. Thanks for all that. We never doubted you.

Clan MacKenzie: Then what’s up with the “Welcome To Your New Home, Oh Conquering Clan MacDonald” banner hanging outside?

My People: Uh…We figured whoever won would most likely be illiterate and not notice anyway.

Clan MacKenzie: The fifteenth century has been the beginning of the “information age”. With the advent of Johaness Gutenberg’s printing press in 1455, the ability to copy books and manuscripts more easily has allowed for literacy to spread exponentially.

My People: We never read the papers. You can’t trust the liberal media.

Clan MacKenzie: Didn’t you notice our bloody library?

My People: Uh…about that. With all that afternoon sunlight it seemed like the perfect place for a bar and hot tub.

Clan MacKenzie: What manner of banshee is this that I hear coming from there now?

My People: The music? Oh, it’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ Whipped Cream & Other Delights on the Crosley Stack-O-Matic. I think the Star Wars disco record is up next. Care for a martini?

Clan MacKenzie: Do you get paid each time you mention that damn thing on your blog?

My People: Not yet, but I keep hoping for a celebrity endorsement.

Clan MacKenzie: You know we happen to be living just after the medieval period.

My People: Vinyl is still cool, right?

Clan MacKenzie: No, we’re pointing this out to let you know that it is well within our rights to get medieval on the asses of castle squatters.

My People: Point well taken. Keep the hot tub and congratulations again on the whole "Battle of Blar-na-Pairc" thing.

Clan MacKenzie: Thanks. Those MacDonald bastards didn’t know what hit them. May their offspring mire for a thousand years in the industry of fast food.

My People: There was one other thing.

Clan MacKenzie: Yes?

My People: We had the snake exterminators over while you guys were gone and were wondering if we could get reimbursed for that.

Clan MacKenzie: Snakes?

My People: Yep. This Patrick guy was already doing some castles in the neighborhood and stopped by to offer us a special deal.

Clan MacKenzie: Snakes have been gone from the British Isles since the last Ice Age some ten thousand years ago. What are you, Irish?

So, I think that we’ve learned from this that St. Patrick was full of shite and that he preyed upon the gullible Irish and then the gullible Irish who had long since left Ireland. He knew full well that people in history are poor students of history and was thus able to charge a fortune for the removal snakes from Ireland and other assorted snakeless lands.

Never mind that Patrick had already been dead for some nine hundred and eighty-four years in 1477. I left out the part about him being a vampire.

Maybe we'll get to that story next year.

in the wrong business

I would like to thank Business Tennessee for the recent shout out of sorts. A.C. “No love for pimps” Kleinheider has kindly taken exception with the Seinfeldian labeling, but I’m more concerned with a few other things. Here is their description:

“Via his ‘Blog of Doom’, Murfreesboro-based Rex L. Camino, is the Seinfeld of Tennessee bloggers. He writes about nothing and does it so well that he keeps readers entertained and coming back for more”.

This has brought to light some harsh failures that had previously gone unnoticed. This blog was never meant to:

1. be well written.

2. entertain.

3. keep readers coming back.

No, my original three purposes were something completely different. My whole intent was to:

1. counteract Brittney and the rest of the Main Stream Media by exposing their Communist lies.

2. provide pie recipes.

3. post upskirt pics taken with my modified shoe camera.

The fact that Business Tennessee did not pick up on any of these exposes me for the utter failure I am. Needless to say, this has prompted a great deal of introspection that quickly turned to looking for a way to blame others. I now place the source of my blogging inadequacy on the fact that:

1. politics makes me sleepy and I rarely vote anyway.

2. I generally steal my pies from the farmhouse windowsills where they lie cooling, as it fulfills both my need for pies and my insatiable kleptomania.

3. women wear far too many pantsuits and the rest are often wary of standing too close to a man with a Polaroid camera duct taped to an old pair of Converse All-Stars.

Thank you, Business Tennessee, for helping me remember the Rex within and why he got into this crazy blogging game in the frst place.

god bless global warming

It isn't like we've had much of a winter, but the eighty degree weekend was certainly welcomed.

I spent today mowing the west lawn we relinquished to the rabbits last year. They proved to be poor stewards of their allotted land and did little more than reproduce and pockmark the terrain with their abandoned nests. However, I pushed through unleveled land and came in smelling of gas fumes and freshly chopped wild onion. My balding head was considerably pinker, and I opened all the windows and finished off half a sixer of Miller High Life while playing the upright bass for a while.

I take it that the the plan to use heavily sedated mink as a makeshift hairpiece didn't work out.

The common mink under heavy sedation may seem quite docile, and I suppose that it is, but what they don't tell you is that the slumbering bastards are gassier than Ed Asner.

There are birds in the bird house. They spent the day copulating on top of the bird house and taunting a neighborhood cat that sat perched along the back fence. I walked in on my own cat in an intimate embrace with one of my shoes. He shamelessly continued while staring me down. It was both amusing and disturbing, and I thought for a moment about giving the other shoe to the neighborhood cat in the back yard.

It's hard out there for a pimp.

I suppose so, but it would be hard for even unfulfilled wildlife to complain on days like these.

I'm still living under the oppression of March's six day workweek, but the representative of the current project's hated client has returned to the hell from which she had crawled and thus made the workplace a more tolerable environment. I had a doctor's appointment on Friday morning to check up on the stress-related mystery illness and was thus able to catch most WRVU's Nashville Jumps. The only drawback was having a nurse jab a needle deep into my veins for a few blood samples only to complain that there was little more than bloody mary mix flowing there.

She had only told us that we couldn't "eat" breakfast.

She had, and we obliged.

The twitching eye and dizzy spells have yet to completely leave, but a few eighty degree afternoons with beer, the upright, and copulating birds outside the window has made for some effective therapy.

how bush lost the half cherokee and choctaw vote

I must admit to being a bit amused by Tim McGraw and Faith Hill's comments earlier this week.

Wow. I bet they haven't been that pissed since they found out they weren't cousins.

Oh snap. Oh no you didn't.

If Mr. McGraw thinks he can kick the ass of a disembodied voice he can BRING IT ON!

I should point out that I have every right to be pissed at Tim for some past transgressions.

How so?

Well, like most whites, I often go around saying that I am part Cherokee. I can't remember if it's true or not, but it really doesn't matter anymore now that the federal gub'ment has denied my plans for the Rex L. Camino Casino of Doom.

I tell folks that I'm part Anasazi.

What part?

The part that counts, if you know what I'm saying.

I don't. Still, the part of me that made up the thing about being part Cherokee was offended by this early McGraw classic.

Uhhh...

What?

Did you mean to link to "Afternoon Delight"?

Shit. Hold on, I'll just look up a sampling of the sort of thing that McGraw can't even write himself. Trust me, it will make the Starland Vocal Band look like Randy Newman.

I'll wait here.

Thanks.

(awkward silence)

Sooo...That was an odd mistake..Don't you think?

Randy Fucking Newman. Trust me.

No problem...I was just gonna say that you could've probably changed the link or something if you had really wanted...

A-ha! Behold:

"I'm an indian outlaw/Half cherokee and choctaw/My baby she's a chippewa/She's one of a kind/All my friends call me bear claw/The village chieftin' is my paw-paw/He gets his orders from my maw-maw/She makes him walk the line/You can find me in my wigwam/I'll be beatin' on my tom-tom/Pull out the pipe and smoke you some/Hey and pass it around."

Sweet Candy Coated Jesus that is awful!

What'd I tell you?

Thanks for not putting that in italics.

He's a regular Chomsky, ain't he?

It seems that his CDs would do more to hurt his CD sales than his political views.

Indeed. Tim McGraw's political views are not what keep me from buying Tim McGraw CDs. The man has a consistent track record of absolute suck, and all indications show that his career is unlikely to diverge from this chosen path of overly produced modern country ear cancer. He would be unlistenable from any side of the aisle, and I wouldn't purchase anything with his name on it even if it came with a free Faith Hill.

Whoa. I might not be so quick on that last bit.

We'll revisit that one if and when such a promotion avails itself.

So the purpose of this whole post is to defend your boy Dubya?

Oh hell no. I never voted for the guy, and my intention was not even to say that Tim McGraw was wrong or that he didn't have a point. To be honest, I didn't really pay that much attention to what he had to say.

Then what is the purpose of this?

One should never waste the opportunity to take cheap shots at a grossly overpaid karaoke hat rack.

Indeed.

crash? part 2: other films I may have missed the boat on boogaloo

Was Red Dawn suppose to teach me something about foreign policy in the nineteen eighties?

Was there a lesson in Caddyshack about the encroachment of golf enthusiasts into the natural habitat of the gopher and other assorted rodentia that I perhaps overlooked?

Did the drama of the arm wrestling tournament distract me from Over the Top's bold statement on the role of the modern truckdriver as it pertains to interstate commerce.

Was Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants trying to get me to start wearing pants when I travel? Did you know that the pants turn into a real boy at the end of the film? Is there a direct correlation between my lack of traveling pants and the frenquency of macings I receive from the average stewardess?

Was Stuart Little trying to help me accept rather than stomp on the talking mice that visit me when I'm sad and alone?

crash?

Crash won best picture? Are you effing serious? Did I completely miss something here? That was supposed to be a thought provoking statement on race relations? Are we talking about the same film containing young black men stealing cars, racist cops, an angry Muslim, and Sandra Bullock?

I understand folks acting as if they really got something out of it, but that percentage of the population should only equal roughly the same number of people who read Dr. Phil or maybe have trouble locating Waldo. It shouldn't equal a majority number of academy votes.

I sat through Crash, and my first thought was that a more fitting title for the film would've been 40 Stereotypes/Cliches and a Funeral.

But there wasn't a funeral.

There was not. However, notice how you focused on that and not on the bit about the stereotypes/cliches.

Still, I hate to be completely negative here. Crash did contain boobies and stuff getting blowed up (though all too brief on both counts), but I think I learned more from any given episode of "Welcome Back Kotter".

I suppose that's why I don't get a vote.

(your advertisement here)

Between my ten hour work days and six day work week, my guitar lessons and various band practices, the sacred cocktail hour with Mrs. Camino, and my recent purchase of an upright bass (more on that later), I haven't had much time to get through the assorted books I'm reading.

This list now includes Todd A's Being Good, and I thought I should say a couple of things on my impressions from the few pages I've had time for. Others on the list have already posted their thoughts, and I didn't want to wait until my completion of it, as that will probably occur sometime in April.

1. First, I dig the idea of sending out free copies of your book to folks with blogs of all shapes and sizes, and for that I offer my meager bit of free publicity on this site. There are plenty of folks out there with the skill to scribble out an interesting or compelling chunk of wordage, but most lack the salesmanship to take it beyond their laptops, typewriters, manifestos, and blogs. Kudos to you on this, Todd. I think I might even blatantly rip off the technique if my Misery Loves Chachi: The Unauthorized Biography of Scott Baio ever gets untangled from its current legal troubles.

2. The first line compels me to read on. I will reprint it here without permission:

It is a humbling moment in a man's life when, as he enters his late twenties he first loses a button off a pair of pants because of his expanded mid-section girth.

I can relate to the whole first paragraph. I too wore a size thirty-two in college. Okay, maybe it was thirty-three, but I think it's only up to thirty-four now.

Anyway, I just wanted it to be known that I will always accept free stuff.

problem solving

There are those who will tell you that they simply cannot whisper and that their voices are as quiet as they can physically make them. Do not believe this. It has been my experience that an unexpected, yet precise rabbit punch to the throat will prove them wrong every time.