R.I.P. Isaac The Cat

Yesterday I had to have Isaac the cat put down at the age of 19.  Sweetpea and I had adopted him from the Milwaukee Human Society way back in the spring of 1995, and he's been with me ever since.  Nineteen years.  Sweetpea was gone by the spring of '96.

And his passing is reason enough to post to HOT POOP for the first time in more than a year.  He was the greatest cat I have ever known because he and I found that perfect spot between independence and cloying.  In other words, we gave each other just the right amount of love/attention/companionship as either of us required.  He was always around, but rarely trampled underfoot, you know?

Isaac was a very small cat, that's the first thing you need to know about him.  He typically weighed between 6 and 7 pounds, though in these last few months had dropped down to a smidge over 5.  I wouldn't say he looked skinny, or unhealthy, and having lived to the ripe old age of 19, he was certainly the picture of health right up to the end, but damn was he lean.  Not an ounce of fat to be found on him.

The second thing to know about Isaac was that he was never a very active cat.  His favorite activity was sitting in an open window and chittering at birds and squirrels.  Beyond that, he showed little interest in toys, would do a couple sprints a day from one end of the house to the other, and otherwise enjoyed attacking a moving hand beneath a blanket.  Oh, and when he was younger, he could jump to amazing heights.  Somewhere, there is a picture of him sitting on top of a door that he had jumped up to from a bed.  I shit you not.  I was sitting right there, and watched him leap high enough to grab the top of the door with his front paws and pull himself up.

I don't claim to understand feline sexuality, but I believe Isaac was at the very least bi-sexual.  On many occasions I would find him mounted on Eno, humping Eno's tailbone.  Eno looked confused, and Isaac just looked at me like he wanted me to get the fuck outta the room.  Ahh, the bachelor lifestyle!

After Eno died back in the summer of 2011, I wondered if Isaac would become despondent, because beyond the humping, Isaac and Eno were very good companions.  Eno particularly enjoyed cleaning Isaac, and the size different was such that Isaac could easily curl up inside a curled-up Eno to the extent that you could barely see Isaac within all that black and white fur.  I don't believe Isaac got despondent, being mostly an independent soul, but he did get more affectionate with me in the last three years, and for that I am ultimately grateful.

Isaac left this world in about the best way possible, I believe. I was holding him in my arms when Dr. Berg gave him the injection, and I was cooing "goodnight sweet prince" and "goodbye sweet Isaac" over and over into his ears that could not hear, and he was warm, and he was smiling.  Isaac was loved.  It may have only been Eno and me, but I believe it was more than enough to keep him going for nineteen years.

Rest in peace, Isaac.  Ha ba na da!  A boojee-boojee boo!

Hank

Something 4 The Weekend # 254

Long Fin Killie:  Valentino:  "Matador"  [mp3]

Cows are slow, dumb animals, except that they can run as fast (or faster) than the average human, and when part of a herd, exhibit that so-called "herd mentality" that is frankly, quite chilling.

I lived for a year in Helenville, a very small, unincorporated farming town in south-central Wisconsin.  Our only neighbors, really, were Jerry and Sheri Vanderpoel, who owned the farm next to us, about a half-mile up the road.  They were an older couple, in their sixties, who's children had long ago flew the coop (literally!), and so because of age and circumstance, the Vanderpoels had thinned their herd of Holsteins to about fifty head, and even then, good ol' Jerry had a hard time managing them, because in the year I lived there, I probably had to help corral escaped cows about six or seven times.

In doing so, I ultimately found myself sunk several inches deep into the aromatic muck of the cow pen next to the barn, surrounded by fifty cows, several of which would inevitably start circling me, like seemingly slow, dumb sharks, or a street gang looking for cash and jewelry.

Here are the two things I learned the hard way about handling cows - first - you gotta let 'em know you're the boss, because cattle herds always have a pecking order, and if they sense weakness in you, they'll think you're just another cow (a small, weak, insignificant cow at that), and so they have no reservations about messing with you, muscling and bullying you around.  Imagine three or five or seven cows doing this simultaneously, me getting jostled and knocked around in the muck by these big beasts in close quarters.

Secondly, I learned that you gotta keep talking to the cows so that they know where you are.  Even though cows have eyes on the sides of their heads, their periphery vision isn't all that great, and they get easily agitated and startled unless you're directly in front of them.  When agitated, well, they jostle and nudge even more than usual, and when startled, they'll buck and kick.

In other words, when dealing with cattle, speak softly and carry a big stick. 

Be non-aggressive, be gentle and friendly and re-assuring in your speech and touch, try looking the cow straight in the eye whenever possible, but have that big stick around to defend yourself because they can, and will, mess you up.

Hotcha!  Hank

Tuesday's Fortune: 13 November 2012

MEAL:  1 Vegetable Spring Roll + 1 Roast Pork Egg Roll + 1 order (8) Crab Rangoon = $5.95 + $1.05 tip

Hotcha!  Hank

Tuesday's Fortune: 10 July 2012

MEAL:  2 Vegetable Spring Rolls + 1 small order Sweet & Sour Chicken = $7.05 + 95¢ tip

Hotcha!  Hank

Something 4 The Weekend # 234

Sufjan Stevens: Enjoy Your Rabbit: "Year Of The Dragon" [mp3]

The Dragon Year is supposedly the luckiest year. Not just for Fire Horses like myself, but all of us - Wood Rabbits, Metal Monkeys, Earth Snakes, Water Dogs - all of us! Now I don't know about you, but I intend on taking advantage of this extra luck.

I've started playing the lottery. So far I'm down $7, but the Dragon Year is young and I haven't been to my usual gas station lately.

I'm playing in a high stakes poker game later this month at a supposedly haunted farm house on the outskirts of Baraboo. I've had pretty good luck with ghosts. And Baraboo.

I've also decided this is the year I accomplish three things - acquire a literary agent, finish and sell a short story collection, and finally rid the Maple tree in the front yard of fucking squirrels. I'm counting on that extra Dragon Luck to accomplish these things.

(There is no Year Of The Squirrel, and there's a damn good reason for that.)

A smaller goal might be to reinvigorate this blog in the following months. Or maybe start something new and different. But what?

In any event, I hope that you, dear reader, have a great Year Of The Dragon as well, and that all the fucking squirrels in your world are dead or dying.

In the meantime, enjoy your Sufjan Stevens song.

Hotcha! Hank

Tuesday's Fortune: 10 January 2012

MEAL: 2 Roast Pork Egg Rolls + 1 small order Pork Chow Mein = $6.55 + $1.45 tip

Hotcha! Hank

Something 4 My Uncle

Willie Nelson: The Troublemaker: "When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder" [mp3]

My uncle Phil passed away Saturday morning at the age of 69 after a two year battle with lung cancer, although it appears he might have actually died when he tried getting out of bed and subsequently fell and hit his head on the edge of the nightstand.

Here's what I can tell you about my uncle Phil, and rest assured there are a number of "secrets", juicy as they may be, that I can never share out of respect:

My dad and uncle Phil were foster kids who were eventually adopted together by grandma and grandpa Mohaski. They were two of 14 kids that my paternal grandma birthed by several different men, and over the years, my dad and uncle were able to find and reconnect with five or six of them. Yes, my real grandma was a bonafide bar skank up in Antigo, which I've long maintained is the center of the universe. I'll maybe explain that theory another time...

Growing up, my dad and uncle excelled at baseball, and were also mechanically inclined. By their teenaged years, their interests lay mainly with hot rods and motorcycles, which they would build, rebuild, sell and race, sometimes for money, sometimes for titles. While my dad worked at a service station and finished high school, my uncle dropped out, started committing petty crimes, and got into drinking. Both ended up in the army.

After the army, my uncle was covered in tattoos he had acquired all over Asia and the South Pacific, and began his civilian life as a bricklayer, a mason. He built smokestacks, specificially, hanging from a rope a couple hundred feet above the ground. He got hazardous duty pay, and as legend had it, he swung around up there like Tarzan.

He got married, had four kids, and drank himself into full-blown alcoholism. I remember the afternoon he sat at our kitchen table waiting for my dad to get home from work, when he proceeded to empty an entire quart of gin in less than half an hour. It was another year or two after that, when all his bank accounts were empty and his job was gone, that he finally got clean. That was thirty years ago.

Other than the drinking, he was a good man. Hell, he was a fun drunk. He and my dad always had an arsenal of jokes, each one funnier, and often dirtier than the last, and at parties and family functions, at some point they would trade jokes back and forth, like a comedy team.

He was also the strongest man I've ever known, and he always said that my cousin Chico and I wouldn't be men until we beat him at arm-wrestling. To this day, neither of us are men, I guess.

He was an outstanding poker player, nearly as good as my dad at cribbage, and maybe better than my dad at sheepshead. For the past 20 years they've been partners in a Horseshoe league, and have won the league's title seven or eight times.

Him and my cousin Chico were also hunters, and along with me and my dad, would go hunting up in Brillion, staying with very distant relatives on a small horse farm, and I've got enough stories from that place and time to write at least a book or two, but I will leave you with this story...

About one hundred yards from the farmhouse, across the road, there was a small grove of about eight or ten apple trees, and almost every evening, about half an hour before sunset, a small herd of about six or seven whitetail deer would wander beneath those trees to eat fallen apples. My uncle one afternoon, got the bright idea that he would wait up in one of those trees with a very large knife, and when the herd stopped by to forage, he would jump down out of the tree and plunge that very large knife into the neck of one of those deer, preferably the buck of the herd, which appeared to be about a eight-pointer through the binoculars.

And so my uncle Phil did just that. After about an hour of waiting up in one of those apple trees, sure enough, the herd shows up, and my uncle's quiet enough, and above their scents, to be able to wait long enough for the buck to get right under him.

And my uncle jumps, and he lands on the back of the buck, and the buck kicks and snorts and barks and swings his antlers around, trying to knock my uncle off his back. And one of the antlers DOES nail my uncle in the arm, and it does knock him off balance, and somewhere along his way to the ground, the very large knife slashes across one of his arms, and all we see is the commotion of six or seven deer, including the buck, sprinting away from the apple trees as my uncle wails and moans.

Crazy Richard drove my uncle to the hospital. Between the antler and the knife, he ended up with about 90 stitches, and one of the better stories that got told and retold over the intervening years.

Anyways, he and my dad were also huge country music fans, especially the so-called "Outlaw Country". Willie Nelson was my uncle's favorite.

Rest in peace, uncle Phil. All in all, yours was a good and interesting life.

Hank

Something 4 The Weekend # 208

Thin Lizzy: Jailbreak: "Cowboy Song" [mp3]

I usually play CDr's full of random MP3's on my car stereo, and this was the song that was arbitrarily playing during the five minute drive from my house to the veterinarian Wednesday morning.

As I wrote yesterday, Eno the cat had died earlier that morning, and I was taking him to the vet for cremation.

So, I sat there in the parking lot, cold rain pelting my car, and I half-sang, half-sobbed along to the final chorus of "Cowboy Song", staring down at Eno, wrapped in an old Minutemen t-shirt. What Makes A Man Start Fires? was his favorite album.

The wistfulness of this song, mixed with a free-spiritedness, seemed appropriate not only for my final moments with Eno, but his life and personality in general.

"It's okay, amigo, just let me go..."

Rest in peace, Eno-beeno.

Hotcha! Hank

R.I.P. Eno The Cat

Eno the cat, the younger of my two cats, died yesterday, after 15+ years of fun and companionship.

I got him as a kitten in the spring of 1996 from a farm in Lake Mills that had more cats than it wanted or needed. When I saw him for the first time, he was walking on the back of a cow laying in a barn stall, and I was smitten. My pick of the litter was made for me, because really, how can anyone deny a cat who walks on cows?

Eno was a large kitten that became a very large cat - 21 pounds of cat, in fact, when he was weighed at the veterinarian earlier this year. He was large, but never fat - fairly tall, and rather long, with plenty of muscle underneath his long and luxurious black and white coat. Despite his size, Eno never lost his tendency to climb big, dumb animals. I don't think a day went by that he didn't climb all over me. Half the time I found this quite hilarious, half the time I found it annoying, quite frankly. You ever try reading Lem novels with a 21 pound cat trying to balance on your shoulder while pawing at your hands and the turning pages?

Eno was a vocal cat. Every evening when I got home from work he and I would talk about our days while I washed the dishes or prepared dinner. I have absolutely no idea what the fuck he was saying, but he always sounded happy and rather pleased with himself, so I always figured he was cool, I was cool, and we were cool. He also liked to sit on the back of the couch and watch the world outside the living room window. More specifically, he liked to "chitter" at the birds and rabbits. Yes, the birds and rabbits, and even that groundhog that took residence next door for the better part of 2007, but never the fucking squirrels. Eno understood the score with the squirrels, and he feared and loathed them with the same kind of passion that I do. He did. I know he did. Yes.
..........

I won't recall to you the details of Eno's last day, except to say that it all happened rather fast. He went from sick to gone in less than 24 hours, and when he took a sudden turn for the worse at about 2 am yesterday, I knew that he wasn't long for this world, and the best I could do was be near him, talk to him, and hope he wasn't in too much pain.

He took his last, labored breath at about 6am yesterday morning, and it was heartbreaking to actually witness. The finality of it, his sudden absence, was and remains surreal to me. Less than 24 hours earlier he was headbutting me awake and crawling on my back.

15 years together that started and ended with him crawling around on the back of a big, dumb animal that just wanted to sleep.

It was a fun and interesting 15 years, and I will miss him more than I thought I could, and more than he'll ever know.

Rest in peace, Eno.

Hank

This Is What I Mean - An Anti-Squirrel Machine

Squirrel Attacking Residents Of Vermont Neighborhood

For years I've been sharing with you my fear/hatred of squirrels. I have warned you of their evil ways. They are black-hearted beasts who should be eradicated from this earth. If you think that's extreme, consider that the fucking squirrels want to do the same to us.

Check out the link above. The squirrel currently terrorizing Bennington, Vermont is not unique, it is simply doing what comes naturally to these adorably sinister predators. Rest assured, the squirrels in YOUR neighborhood are ruthless and deadly, and if you aren't vigilant, you might just find yourself mowing the lawn one beautiful June afternoon, when suddenly one of these deplorable creatures has dropped out of the maple tree, dug it's claws into your face, and is burrowing through your eye to get to the sweet brain meat within.

That is why you should ALWAYS wear your goggles.

Hotcha! Hank

Tuesday's Fortune: 21 December 2010

MEAL: 4 Roast Pork Egg Rolls + 4 Vegetable Spring Rolls + 1 Large order Sweet & Sour Chicken = $16.75 + $2.25 tip

Hotcha! Hank

Tuesday's Fortune: 30 November 2010

MEAL: 1 order (8) Fried Dumplings + 1 large order of Kung Pao Squirrel = $6.70 + $1.30 tip

Hotcha! Hank

Tuesday's Fortune: 02 November 2010

MEAL: 2 Roast Pork Egg Rolls + 1 order Hunan Triple = $11.15 + $4.85 tip


Hotcha! Hank

Tuesday's Fortune: 19 October 2010

MEAL: 3 Vegetable Spring Rolls + 1 small order Squirrel Fried Rice = $5.55 + $1.45 tip


Hotcha! Hank

Something 4 The Weekend # 184

The Mountain Goats: Heretic Pride: "Lovecraft In Brooklyn" [mp3]

Friends and casual readers of this blog are well aware of my deep and abiding hatred for fucking squirrels. They're vile vermin that would be hunted to extinction if this were a more perfect world. But most of you don't know that I also loathe chickens.

The year was 1987, and I was hanging out one Saturday afternoon at a friend's house. We were out in the yard, drinking malt liquor, smoking weed, and listening to Jethro Tull on a boombox. At some point I started playing catch with a football with my buddy's younger brother.

It's at this point in the story that I should mention that his family owned about a dozen chickens that they allowed to wander around their yard. I didn't loathe chickens at this point, but that was about to change.

My buddy's younger brother threw the ball way over my head, so I turned around to run and fetch it, and it was at this point that one of the chickens fluttered and flopped and flew straight into my face without warning.

Now, some of you might be saying right now, "but Hank, chickens can't fly," to which I can only reply, "yeah, they sorta can, you dumbasses." Chickens can get themselves airborn for short distances, which they often do in the wild to check out their surroundings. I bet you also didn't know that in the wild they usually roost in trees. How do you think they get up into those trees? Here's a hint - they don't climb 'em like fucking squirrels.

So, anyways, a big fucking chicken flies into my face, and I immediately crumple to the ground in exquisite pain, with blood spilling everywhere because the bird's beak had stabbed me in the forehead.

If the story ended here, we might be able to simply call this a random event, but the story doesn't end here because as I'm laying on the ground, writhing in pain and bleeding everywhere, several other chickens immediately attack me like a pack of ravenous wolves. Tiny wolves with feathers instead of fur, and beaks instead of fangs.

I admit that at this point I passed out, and you can call me a pussy if you must, but you weren't there.

When I came back into consciousness, there were cuts and scratches all over my body, and my clothes were tattered and torn, with random feathers stuck to the drying blood. I wept softly. My buddy's younger brother was bawling. My buddy was laughing. The chickens had retreated to the area behind their garage.

A lesser man would fear chickens after such an incident, but I am not a lesser man. I am a great man, and I did what only a great man would and could do - on that day I started to loathe, nay hate, chickens, and twenty-three days later, my hatred for them still abides, and each and every Saturday since, I've eaten a 10-pack of McNuggets with honey mustard dipping sauce.

Never forget.

Hotcha! Hank

Things I Liked Last Week 061310

01: Ice Cube w/ The Roots: "Straight Outta Compton": Ice Cube appeared on Jimmy Fallon's show last week, and did the old NWA chestnut, "Straight Outta Compton" with The Roots. And it was goooooood.



02: Owen Pallett: "Game Of Pricks": The Onion's A.V. Club has been doing an ongoing feature called Undercover, in which contemporary bands do cover versions of older, more classic songs. In this week's installment, Owen Pallett (aka Final Fantasy) covers "Game Of Pricks" by Guided By Voices. It's a great rendition (love his voice) that really showcases Robert Pollard's knack for writing awesome melodies.

03: The Cat On The Silver Mountain: Not much needs to be said here - cats are fucking awesome, and this one's climbing a mountain.

04: Dunder-Mifflin floorplan: While The Office isn't quite as good as it used to be, it's still a quality show that delivers plenty of laughs. That doesn't matter though, because this is merely the floorplan for the Dunder-Mifflin office. I love floorplans. I wanted to be an architect when I was a teenager, but my math skills weren't good enough to get me into the program at UW-Milwaukee. Such is life.

05: Keebler Townhouse Flipsides: It's a pretzel shaped like a cracker! It's a cracker that looks and tastes like a pretzel! Will wonders ever cease? I've been putting cheddar cheese spread and sliced Manzanilla olives on 'em, and that's another wonder.

06: Jim's Pancakes: This is a website all about a guy named Jim who makes insanely awesome and inspiring pancakes for his daughter. Must be seen to be believed.

07: Hell's Kitchen [FOX, Tuesdays 8/7c]: I loathe reality shows. Just fucking hate 'em. Hell's Kitchen is the one exception. I believe I like this show because I've had several cooking jobs in my life, and I understand the dynamic of a working kitchen, and how the job is much, much harder and demanding than it might first appear. There's the heat, naturally, combined with the pace of a busy restaurant, that makes the job a bitch. Even with an able staff, there's always alot of different things going on at once, making one's timing perhaps as crucial as one's cooking skills. It's a very delicate balance that can get shot to hell in a heartbeat, and once that balance is gone, it's sooo hard to regain. One of the elements I like best about Hell's Kitchen is how the contestants brag about how great and skilled they are, which is ALWAYS followed by a segment showing them fucking things up royally, betraying their own egos and exposing their questionable skills. Seriously, I oftentimes think the producers pick some of these contestants just to humiliate them. Risotto and scallops are two mainstay dishes on the show, both being excellent barometers of the contestants skills, and almost every contestant who has appeared on Hell's Kitchen over it's seven seasons has fucked up both dishes. And then Chef Ramsay goes ballistic. I find this hilarious. People who have never worked in a kitchen think Chef Ramsay is an asshole. That's debatable, of course, but I can say that his demeanor is commonplace in the restaurant industry. Most chefs I've known and worked with over the years ARE assholes. I can't say that being a prick is a job requirement, but it is a high-stress job that tends to bring out the worst in people, and I just love when Chef Ramsay calls somebody a "useless donkey" or worse. Maybe it's nostalgia. Anyways, I consider myself a pretty good cook, but I don't think I'd fare very well on this show, so as moronic as I think most of the contestants are, I don't know if I could do any better under the circumstances.

Hotcha! Hank

Things I Liked Last Week 060610

01: Last Days [2005]: Writer and director Gus Van Sant goes out of his way to inform us that Last Days is NOT a Kurt Cobain biopic, but rather a "meditation on isolation, death and loss", but one only needs look at the poster to know this is mostly bullshit. Michael Pitt (as Blake, the protagonist of this film) has an uncanny resemblance to Cobain, helped in great part by the cinematography, in which we rarely see Blake close-up, and almost never see his face full-on. Instead, we see him stumbling around the large wooded estate surrounding his decaying "castle" in the woods, or shuffling aimlessly around the house, always on the verge of passing out. While we never actually see Blake doing drugs, the heroin use is certainly implied. Aside from the stumbling, Blake is nearly incapable of speech, and what does come out of his mouth is muffled and largely incoherent. Drugs or not, Blake is obviously a man with a serious, likely undiagnosed, mental illness. A mental illness that presumably doesn't matter to anybody else in the film because Blake is a huge rock star, and all those people around him have something to gain from his fame, whether it's bandmates needing him for a huge European tour and the wealth and fame it provides, his sycophantic housemates, who need him for money or lyrical help for their own songs for their own demo, or even the Yellow Pages salesman who simply needs another account, completely ignoring the near-catatonic Blake who sits across from him in the decrepit house. Yet somewhere beneath Blake's surface incoherence, it's quite obvious that he's aware of these leeches, because the entire film is really nothing more than a snapshot of Blake attempting to ignore, avoid, and escape them all, and when a friend brings a private eye hired by Blake's wife to find the rockstar, recently escaped from a drug rehap center, suddenly Blake doesn't stumble, but quickly and effectively escapes the house and evades the two. In the end, what Van Sant presents us is a portrait of a ghost, whether by choice or circumstance, who seemingly moves in a parallel world where everyone around him is incapable of seeing him for who he truly is, and more literally, often can't find him at all. It's a slow, haunting film, with little dialogue or plot, a strange audio track full of sounds that have absolutely nothing to do with what we see on the screen (ghosts, again), and even in the end, as the police stand over Blake's dead body in the greenhouse, one can't help but think he was gone long before he took his life.

02: Girl Eating Hotdog: Is it wrong that this photo turns me on? Yeah, it probably is.

03: Wolfguin: They can't fly, but they waddle rather fast. Long story short, you may want to laugh at the wolfguin, but once they clamp onto your leg, the joke's on you.

04: Whoomp! There Obama is!: The big question/conspiracy this week is that President Barack Obama appeared briefly in Tag Team's 1993 video for their hit, "Whoomp There It Is". True or not, the likeness is certainly uncanny, and I, for one, hope it's true.



05: Music & Lyrics by Stewie Griffin: I must admit, I don't like Family Guy all that much, but I happened to catch a syndicated rerun of this particular episode. "Things are a little more complicated than they seemed at first." Indeed, Stewie, life is often a stone-cold bitch, and yes, writing songs isn't very difficult, although writing good songs is something else entirely.

06: Milios' "Charlie The Tuna" Sub: Milios is a midwest-based sub shop chain, and aside from the absolute best French bread rolls I've ever had anywhere, their sub sandwiches are second to none. Now, usually I go with their Italian Club, but sometimes, as I did this past week, I opted for their Charlie The Tuna, which is most excellent for two reasons - Milios' secret gourmet sauce, and the fact that they don't use too much tuna. That might seem counter-intuitive, but think for a moment of a tuna sub that had too much tuna salad - it's dry, chewy, and ultimately, not very satisfying. The fine folks at Milios have found the exact right amount of tuna for their sandwich, and it makes all the difference. Just make sure to hold the bean sprouts. Sprouts suck.

Hotcha! Hank

Things I Liked Last Week 053010

01: LOST: "The End" [S6EP17]: Pop culture is mostly irrelevant. Television is a mere distraction. LOST was/is a red herring in this thing we call life. Indeed, when all is said and done, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the producers of LOST, gave us a series finale that ought to be a hard slap in the face to all the hardcore fanboys who were demanding, are still demanding, answers to so many of the the mysteries of the island, the characters, the show itself. Cuse and Lindelhof were all but literally telling those fanboys that all those mysteries, those puzzles, were red herrings when it came to "the meaning of LOST". There would be no reason for all that Hanso Foundation stuff. Walt's superpowers will have to remain unexplored and unexplained. The numbers were apparently random and held no great powers. So much time wasted on Eko. The books Sawyer read had no deep meaning, really...Or did they? Widmore's motives would remain unknown. Etc. Etc. Etc. In the end, LOST was steeped in death, or rather, the intermediate state between life and death, called "bardo" in Buddhism. It is here, in the "sideways universe" of season six, that Jack Shephard's soul must connect with the souls of all those from Oceanic flight 815 so that they can move on. In season one, Jack Shephard gave us the first big catchphrase of the show, which ultimately came to define the entire series. Simply put, "live together or die alone", and here at the end of the show, they needed to live together through the plane crash and all the weirdness of The Island, so that they could forge strong enough bonds to find each other after death, in Jack's bardo. And here we are, fanboys obsessed with the trivial minutae of LOST, and all six seasons of that stuff, the meaning of all that stuff, is irrelevant, and some of it makes sense, and plenty of it doesn't, and some of the questions got answered, but others never will, but none of that matters. What matters is that we watched the show, shared in that experience, and then we got together around the watercooler, or in discussion boards on the internet, to talk about all those red herrings, those distractions. So many puzzles, so many theories, so much discussion. And now even more discussion about this series finale. Love it or hate it, Cuse and Lindelof brought us all back together again, their show a spark to connect us in this waking dream we call life.

02: Commodore Pumpkin: You might suspect some photoshopping going on here, but I'm not so sure this picture isn't real.



03: SNL Digital Short: "Great Day" [NBC]: In general, I really like the Digital Shorts put together by Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone (The Lonely Island) for Saturday Night Live, and this one, from last week's season finale, is a trim and fantastic thrillride from start to finish. Just remember kids, drugs are fun until they're not.

04: Royal Crown Cola: I'm not much of a soda drinker. Aside from the can of Mountain Dew I pound down first thing every morning at work, I just don't drink all that much of the stuff these days. Having said that, I always have some Royal Crown Cola in the fridge. Compared to the big two (Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola) RC isn't as sweet as Pepsi, and doesn't go flat as quick as Pepsi (seriously, Pepsi is shit), and RC is slightly sweeter than Coke, holds its carbonation almost as long, and in general, I find Royal Crown to be a creamier and tastier cola than the other two. Also, there is the Pair Of Kings cocktail to consider. I typically like my whiskey served neat, but if I'm going to drink a whiskey and coke, it seems only right that it be made with Crown Royal and Royal Crown. The Pair Of Kings! Thank goodness my boss gives me a bottle of Crown Royal every Christmas...
05: Wise Beard Man: If I'm not mistaken, beards in all their glorious variations, were the status quo in civilized (to say nothing of uncivilized) American society right up to World War I. It would seem head lice became a serious problem for our military men in the trenches of Europe, and shaving off all the hair on one's head was the first step in getting rid of the little buggers. And because society held soldiers and soldiering in much higher regard back then than we do now, soon it became fashionable for civilian men to go clean shaven. And here we are. Aside from some short-lived fads (moustaches in the '70's, goattees in the '90's) the clean-shaven look has remained the status quo, especially in the business world, since the 1920's. Take it from me, a dude who's worn a goattee every single day since the autumn of 1986, there are alot of uptight dicks in the corporate world who might appreciate an expensive blue suit, but will not take you seriously if you've got any sort of facial hair. You might be the smartest person in the room, but to these people, you'll always be a neanderthal. BTW - this post obviously doesn't have anything to do with Mark Bunker and Xenu TV, Scientology or 4Chan...Once in awhile I just gotta represent. I like beards.

06: FUCKING METAL: Is it possible that the infamous "duck face" craze popularized by plasticized celebutards and "real housewives" got its start in Fucking Metal?

Hotcha! Hank

Modest Sideways Dashboard Mouse Maneuver

Modest Mouse. Isaac Brock. Beards. Maps. Microphonehand. Radiohead.

Hotcha! Hank

Sir Isaac Isaacs

In case you missed the link in the previous post, this is Sir Isaac Isaacs, the Governor General of Australia in the 1930's. About nine times a week I call Isaac The Cat "Sir Isaac Isaacs", though as I said, he wasn't named after this man and his regal moustache.

Here he is without the wig and the moustache. The uniform is dynamite, but I think he needs a nice hat... And the 'stache.

Hotcha! Hank