May 2006 Archives

hallelujah!

i have been born(eo) again!

now i am all filled with the healing light of jebus and, oddly, strongbad. you would not peg those two to run together, but man, jebus likes him some teen girl squad and can you blame him? no. who could cast the first stone at jebus? besides some romans, i mean? and, uh, other people with rocks.

i am stunned by your sacriledge. stunned.

or maybe i am stunned because i just spent two weeks with my brother lumpo and by the end we had fully devolved into junior high school wall-bouncing madness. i do believe my wife has a new-found respect for my sister.

although my wife has never been conscripted to act in one of my sister's plays so...

as you avid readers will know, lumpo was joining us from new york and he did not know where he was flying to. i understand his encounter at check-in went like this:

agent: you're all set. your bags will be checked all the way through to kayell.

lumpo: huhwhat?

agent: your bags, sir, will be going to KL. no need to worry about them in Hong Kong.

lumpo: ah. uh. kayell?

agent: (still smiling) Kuala Lumpur, sir.

lumpo: right (sotto vocce) what country is that in?

and so, verily, did brother lumpo come to join us in kuala lumpur, which is in malaysia if you dinnae ken. and we plied him with alcohol. and plied him with pliers. and saw big buildings. and walked till the little feller was plumb tuckered out.

then we took him to the perhentian islands, to perhentian kecil in fact, where he learned to scuba dive and dance to really bad pop while a dj obsessively interrupted to shout "irish in the house!" it was purty great. we saw sharks and ate bbq and a house exploded and we got to carry water pails and say things like, "dude. that thing is going to collapse any minute." then i stuck some peanuts up my nose and lumpo had to pretend he had a stutter. i thought bartlebee was going to wet her pants. the pictures, which shall be posted in due time, are certain to be classics of the modern age.

it was lump's birthday, and lo, he was borned again. and the lot of us flew to borneo so we could all get borneoed again. or me at least, 'cause i'd been to borneo before in ninty nine and it hadn't changed much. a few fancier restaurants in kuching. some nicer roads. some proboscis monkeys. some bearded pigs. an orang utan. a neon shrimp. macaque on a cat (which is funnier if you say it out loud every five minutes until your wife hits you.) and yeah, the monkeys stole lumpo's condoms and ate his foot powder. we saw pitcher plants and a bright green snake that wasn't a pit viper but i'll pretend it was 'cause hey, that's cooler. and we laughed and we cried and we ate a lot of noodles.

but today, sob, lump flew back home. we're preparing to train down to singapore where we'll daly for a day and then -- golly! -- fly down to melbourne. for winter.

so it seems like yet again this trip is in transformation. a new stage is beginning. no more asia, on to the antipodes for the borning again and again. and hopefully some steak.

that's the punchline to some old hollywood story. it's also an introduction to our latest batch of photos.

these take us from sri lanka to laos to thailand.

i think the one of me and anne looking like coal miners is my new favoritest photo ever.

welcome to the first ever troublonia Chose Your Own Adventure story!

1.

you are in new york. you are almost thirty years old and you wear ties to work. sometimes you do business with the Yankees. it's awful. you must get away. in a fit of insanity, you give your credit card number to your unpredictable brother and his "foreign" wife. they buy you a plane ticket with your own money but don't tell you where you're headed. the idea is, you can meet up with them for your thirtieth birthday, have a laugh, and then go back to stabbing the Red Sox in the back.

you have little idea of what to pack so throw a pair of boxer shorts, some suntan lotion, a saddle, three apples and a tuning fork in your luggage. you grab your passport and head to the airport. when you get there do you:

a) get in the check-in line for dhaka, bangladesh? (go to #2)
b) get in the check-in line for hongity kongity? (go to #3)
c) get in the check-in line for boracay, philippines? (go to the bathroom)
d) tell security you have a nuclear device in your rectum? (go to #4)
e) i cannot read (dude. that sucks for you.)
f) hold your breath until help arrives (go to #6)

i'm writing up another article for interfaithfamily.com. this one is about the wrassling bartlebee and i have done over the definition of god. it's a lot more fun to write than the others. more me. should be posted in june although the other two should be posted now and don't appear to be up yet, so...

in my piddling about, i come across Arthur C. Clark's Three Laws of Prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

don't you see! if we get enough elderly distinguished scientists together ANYTHING is possible! if they say it's possible, it IS. if they say it isn't THEY'RE WRONG! (almost certainly and probably)

so here's my proposition: does anyone know any distinguished but elderly scientists who might want to start a proto-magician think tank? it would be a lot more fun than speaking to the elks club. i'd provide the iced tea and mah johng.

we could get them together and toss fantastic ideas at them until someone says, "possible!" (or "impossible" it really doesn't matter) and then hire a bunch of lab monkeys to work it out. they could wear capes and scowl at politicians and generally feel bad ass instead of painfully-arsed. insert metamucil joke here!

power to the elderly! magicians unite! someone buy me a milkshake!