It's been a while since I've been on one of these, but not much has changed. Standing out in the early morning chill, trying to keep warm, trying to shake off too much food and drink from the night before. Long stretches of inactivity, perfect for sketching. In other words, good times.

No, no, not anger management training, you charmingly silly people. I refer to ArtRage the painting software. It's annoying that you would think otherwise. In fact, it's beyond annoying. It makes me see red. Or more like an Alizarin Crimson. The elderly gent, by the way, is Lord Strathcona. And believe it or not, he's the inventor of the strathcona. I know! You'd never have thought that the strathcona was named after a real person, but it was. Just like the sandwich, or kleenex. Now I'll never use a strathcona without thinking about this fellow.

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Less than tragic, perhaps. Maybe more like poignant. I believe that when we're invaded by aliens, they'll look like this. Cutting great swaths across the country, swallowing up our garbage. Or us, depending on their sense of humor.

Where the hell was Pat Robertson this week? For you non-Hampton Roadsters, he has in the past claimed responsibility for praying away storms that were bearing down on us. This year he must have used up his quota of supplications getting his protegé elected governor, because he was nowhere to be seen when the nor'easter hit. Lots of low-level flooding, bridges and tunnels closed, power outages. This tree fell a few blocks from CSB World Headquarters, due as much to rain-softened ground as anything. Our cable (and therefore my internet) went out until about 20 minutes ago, but the electricity stayed on. Basement's flooded, though. City workers tell us the sewers are backed up to the Fairfax Avenue pumping station. The thought that Hague dookie is bobbing about downstairs really annoys me--never liked that crowd.

Last night Jon Stewart caught Sean Hannity faking crowd footage in a story about some right-wing mob gathering or other, and Fox advertised a response by Hannity tonight, so like a fool I sat through the whole hour waiting to see how he could possibly refute Stewart's charge. What an hour. If you'll notice, all the remarks above are followed by exclamation points. That's how they talk over there. They're one disgruntled bunch. You could see them working themselves up into a fine froth. The thrust of the evening's discussion (and there was nary a dissenting voice, except for the tiny peep I recorded above) was that it's an outrage that the Ft. Hood killings aren't being called terrorism by Obama's lackeys, who evidently include the Army brass, and this atmosphere of correctness promulgated by Obama shares in the culpability for the massacre. A sub-thrust was the delay in manufacture of the H1N1 vaccine, and if the government can't get that right, how can they possibly get healthcare right? Unfortunately, since there weren't any naysayers or question-raisers on this All-American panel, there was no one to say, "The vaccine is being manufactured--and its manufacture is being delayed--by the pharmaceutical industry, a proud pillar of private enterprise, not the government; so by your logic, how could we expect private industry to run healthcare if they can't even get this right?"

Oh, and at the tail end of his broadcast, Hannity did apologize for the false footage, but dismissed it as purely accidental. I'll strike a blow against political correctness by calling that bullshit.

Yesterday I received this lovely gift from a good friend--in honor of Veterans Day, I'm thinking. You can't put a price on good friends, can you? On their heads or anywhere else. What I like about this packaging design is its earnestness in hammering home the point, just in case you might mistake this for a tasteful mainstream product. Adding the value proposition "plump and ripe" was an especially nice touch. By the way, these things taste as wretched as you might imagine, and the mouthfeel is not really like a zit at all. At first I thought it was more like a boil, but now I realize it's exactly like a blister about to burst. But the package designers wisely stayed away from "Blister Bursters" as a name, zeroing in on its target audience instead. Which is another reason for cherishing good friends. They know you so well.

I'm listening to a talk show on the radio that just posed the question "What do you do when a cat sneezes on you?" I was about to jettison that little collection of nerve pulses from my memory bank when I heard Bernice sneeze. I turned around to see her on the table, slowly and lovingly licking her butt. Suddenly I don't feel so good. Now I'm going to have to buy her a little jacket, so she can sneeze into her sleeve.

I've been biting my tongue about developments on the healthcare front and the predictable responses to those developments, in an attempt to keep this blog from becoming a bitter rantfest. God knows we've got plenty of those around already. But it's so hard to spin silly little monologues about nothing when weighty issues are in the balance. Okay, allow me to rant about one little thing, and then I'll return to silly walks.

Socialism. Socialized medicine. Obama is trying to force socialism down our throats. "I never took a dime from the government." Idiots! Did you not go to public school? Have you never been in a public library? Where do you think public education comes from? Underneath a cabbage leaf? No, the community of citizens decided it would benefit us all to throw some money in the pot and offer a "free" education to all our children, even the ones who can't afford it. That's socialism, you nitwits! The only difference between universal education and universal healthcare is that education has been around long enough that we've started thinking of it as a god-given right. Really? Where is it written? The Bible? The Constitution? No, we as a nation decided it would be good for us, just the same way we decided to put out our fires, build our highways, wage our wars, look out for our senior citizens, and police ourselves. Just as we're now discussing looking after our health. There are really important things to work out: how will we pay for it? How will it work? Who will be covered, for what? Let's talk about these things, and stop trying to scare the shit out of each other by shouting epithets that we don't understand all that well.

Every few years I give piano jazz another chance. I have friends whose cheerleading for this vile branch of popular music is relentless, and the feeling that I'm missing out on something slowly builds and needs release every so often by the application of a brutal dose of reality. So I listened to an hour or so on the radio this morning--really, really early this morning, since the station's programmers have the good sense not to cause the majority of its listeners to vow angrily to withhold their contribution from next year's fundraiser. Piano jazz reminds me of nothing so much as the doodling I used to do on the margins of my pad during interminable, boring meetings at work (no aspersion intended at any particular workplace; I could have worked at a Lap Dance Training Center, and once the hour milestone was reached in any given meeting, I would begin lazily obliterating any notes I had taken with little cubes and starbursts and scathing caricatures of the higher-ups.) Beginning, often, with a hoary old standard, the pianist slowly becomes bored and lapses into indolent filigrees, notes tumbling out like a cascade of Chiclets, full of C dim7 and A sus4, signifying nothing. There is no discernible passion to it, to my ears. When I want piano jazz, I'll travel back to Professor Longhair, and revel in his raucous outbursts of energy. So now my pipes are cleaned, my prejudices are comfortably replenished, and I can relax for another few years.

This is a bona fide 2009 storefront in NoBra (North of Brambleton, a neglected but visually rich little commercial stretch of Granby Street (anchor store: Bob's Gun Shop.))

This particular ancestor appears to have a greatly elongated right arm. I could hazard a guess as to how that happened: excessive churning of yak butter as a teenager. Why, what were you thinking?

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