Holes In Thoughts: September 2007

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Swizzle-sticks!

So I just realized - after about a decade - that all those little Spanish swords I'd play with as a kid in my grandparents' (formal) dining room were for olives in martinis.

If only I'd known then...

Labels: random

posted by Steve @ 2:18 AM 0 comments

Friday, September 14, 2007

Parties & Progression into Perfection

Last weekend, Rachel and I hosted a party.

When we were in college, we had a house shared with a few other people and it really was the perfect party house: huge living room, a pool, decent kitchen, and a patio. We didn't have any money at all, so our preparations were always sparse, but people brought alcohol and we had cards and a stereo system.

As far as parties go, they were fun, but Rachel and I were never really big into drinking -- and she always cheats at cards.

Now we have an awesome little place of our own that's not unlike the place we used to have, expect of course that it's a one-bedroom instead of 3. Naturally, after an absurd amount of clean-up, we wanted to have a housewarming party.

We didn't quite finish cleaning, and I jumped the gun a bit probably since the party was scheduled a week before Rachel's vacation (she had to work the day after a party; that was my bad).

~-----~

We invited most of Bookman's and all our friends. We had few people come, though: Sami, her friend Camille, Nyssa (briefly), and Sean. Sean's friend Justin and his wife made a brief appearance in which we watched their wedding video - and Sean's best-man speech. It was very good and included this memorable line (paraphrased from memory):

"[Justin's parents] have nothing to worry about from this guy. He'll take good care of your daughter his whole life until he's dead. After that, I can't promise anything."

~-----~

I'm actually quite glad that the party was small. It was made more enjoyable, and fit our style. We had S'mores, even though the fire was a bit smoky. We played 2-on-2 basketball. Sami beat up Sean like a boxer. Sean was surprisingly nimble. Camille was a regular baller. I was much worse under pressure than I should've been, given all the practice I've had lately.

We played some video games - Rachel and Sami were playing a lot of Mortal Kombat, and we hardly touched the absurd amount of alcohol Sean and I split. I do however have a pretty awesome alcohol cabinet all of a sudden:

Blue Sapphire gin
1200 Silver Tequila
Bailey's Irish Cream
Kahlua coffee liquer
Captain Morgan dark rum
Bacardi light rum
Finlandia vodka
Triple Sec
Grenadine
Lime juice

~-----~

The party culminated in a pretty intense girls-versus-boys water gun fight. Thankfully Sean and I realized that the first place one should go when starting a water gun fight is the hose, and we fought off the girls' attacks in general. Eventually they (with 3-on-2 odds) managed to raid and wrestle control of the hose, and by the end it was a big, drippy mess.

It was awesome.

The survivors - Sean, Camille, Sami and I - went to Grill afterwards. It was certainly memorable, and I'm hoping to throw that kind of celebration more often.

Labels: friends, house, party

posted by Steve @ 10:26 AM 0 comments

Friday, September 07, 2007

250 lbs. of weeds

That's about right.
I had two hundred and fifty pounds of weed in a 20' x 20' area to the side of my place. Tomorrow, I get to pull up a similar amount on the side of the fence. Hooray.

Despite that, though, I would like to sing the praises of what's called the hula-hoe, which is not a derogatory term for a girl from Hawaii. No, it's a weeding tool that, on gravel, is amazing at digging up weeds. It just digs in under the gravel and pulls up weeds with the roots (usually). It was still a bloody ton of work, but doing that on my knees by hand would've taken an eternity.

My hula-hoe was a gift from my Aunt and I'm suddenly forever grateful.

I also got a chance to really use my camera's time-delay function to make a movie of the reaping of the weed forest. You can see the headlights of the truck dying, and eventually I had to quit just shy of being actually finished (will do that tomorrow), but it's still pretty cool, especially with the nighttime clouds going by. It was taken at a 10-second interval, which makes things go by pretty darn quickly when the frame rate is 24 per second. It means that every second in the movie is four minutes of work:

Weeding movie
0:17 (1MB QuickTime movie)

Labels: house, photography, work

posted by Steve @ 1:02 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Case for Isolationism

Selling billions of dollars of weapons to people that hate each other isn't the best way of going about bringing peace to any area.

But that's what the U.S. has been doing for years and years, including a new$20 Billion in weapons going to Saudi Arabia soon. The Daily Show said it much better than I can, and I'm so impressed that at the risk of losing the video somewhere -- I transcribed it. Here it is:

Transcript:

Obviously, the Iraq war is very complicated. It's another reason why Barack Obama's foreign policy inexperience is going to be an important issue in this campaign. You can't have a newbie
overthrowing the delicate balance that we've engineered and maintained in this complex region.

For instance a week in Iraq has meant a strengthened Iran; and since Iran is Shiia, our Sunni friends in Saudi Srabia are none too happy about that. But that's no problem in our experienced hands.

[America to the rescue graphic with G.W. Bush: "We will bring freedom to others -- and we will prevail."]

Yes, a few weeks ago, the White House announced plans to sell 20 billion dollars in weapons to the Saudi Royal Family.

Boom! Balance of power restored.

Trust me, you don't have to worry about billions of dollars in weapons being sent to a country like that, because may I remind you: a full 20% of the 9/11 highjackers were not from there.

Of course, this move may intimidate our curcumsised friends to the west [Israel]. They may be nervous because Saudi Arabia is considered somewhat friendly with Hamas. Although, I don't want to overstate the case. I mean uh, the Saudis like Hamas, but it's not like they've had telethons for them in the past, and it-- ah-- O.K.-- I'm being told they have actually held telethons for Hamas in the past, but that's not going to be any problem.

[America to the rescue graphic]

Because last week the white house announced that it will increase aid to Israel by 25%, meaning an additional 30 billion dollars over the next decade to them.

Oh billions of dollars, is there no dispute you can't settle?

You might ask, "how did we get so experienced at this?" Well we've been rescuing the Middle East for some time now. Think back to 1990, when a oil-rich, very nice little country named Kuwait was invaded by the very not-nice Iraq.

[America to the Rescue, "'90s version" with George Bush, Sr.: "We will help any government that wants our help."]

That's a 90's version of that graphic [laughs].

Of course, we stopped short of actually invading Iraq at that time; I think you remember the Secretary of Defense at the time [Dick Cheney] made a pretty strong case against it. Said it would be a quagmire. He was smart.

See, at that time we had to weaken Saddam Hussein, who had become very powerful after purchasing a s---load of weapons from-- oh boy.

[America to the rescue '90's graphic]

Oops! See that time we had to give him the weapons because then he was at war with Iran.

But see then, once Saddam got real powerful, we had to worry that he would topple our friends in Saudi Arabia. Which is why we put troops there, which kinda pissed off, uh, that guy [Osama bin Laden], who had also become very powerful fighting the Russians in Afghanistan after getting weapons from SONOFABITCH!!!

[America to the rescue "'80s style" with Reagan: "Reach out a hand when they fall"]

WHAT THE FUCK?!

My point is that foreign policy experience is very important! Because it helps you learn nation-building! Which is knowledge we can take -- to our country and apply to rebuilding our own infrastructure, like when our roads crumble. [Looks to the side for a prompt; apparently told this is a bad example]. Or when our bridges collapse [looks hopefully at his prompter and is told to try again]. Or when a hurricane wipes out one of our cities [same prompter says no way]. Midnight basketball?

[America to the Rescue graphic comes on but screws up and ends up with a beeping Indian test signal]

[pregnant pause]

Fuck.

Labels: idiots, politics, religion

posted by Steve @ 7:45 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Being politically neutral

It's becoming very difficult for me to stop liking Mr. Obama. He's erudite, poised, and even has some well-reasoned, level-headed policy.

I told myself I would investigate each candidate, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to bother, as I have major, grating issues with all of them except one.

But I will keep watchin' YouTube of Hillary, Guliani, et al., just to be sure. But I'll probably watch it with grating teeth.

Labels: Obama, politics, president

posted by Steve @ 1:24 PM 0 comments

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