Especially if you’re New Orleans Magazine, and have published an article in your August issue about how to throw the best hurricane party.

Choice unfortunate sections:

In the unfortunate event that The Big One does comes our way, every hurricane party fits the potential for “the last thing you do before you die” category. With such a profound classification as that, the party had better be good. This level of enormity requires us to call in the big dog – the man who “at any given time is always having more fun than anyone else in the city,” according to a friend and colleague – local writer, man about town and unofficial hurricane-party expert Ian McNulty.

…

Most people would assume that serving Hurricane drinks are a natural fit for a hurricane party. But not McNulty – he thinks they’re a cliché.

…

A rookie mistake is buying cold beer.

Also, having a drunken party instead of fleeing a Category 5 hurricane.

(Thanks to Sploid for pointing this out)

I love coming home to extremely loud road work being done directly outside my window at 9pm. And continuing until 10. And probably until 11.

As nice as it will be to have pressure sensors to make the light timing at my corner make sense, they really could have done this on the weekend.

If only I could remember where I put my earplugs…

Update, 12:13am: Still going, although across the street for now. And if I correctly heard the yelled conversation between my neighbors and the construction workers, this will be going on all night. Joy!

Apparently, in addition to cancer, diabetes, alcoholism, insanity and heart disease, Human Cannonballism can run in families.

The stunt that sparked that story was apparently part of something bigger:

Javier Téllez told NBC 7/39 that his goal with One Flew Over the Void is to create a powerful political message about open borders.

During the performance on the beach in Tijuana, American Dave Smith will be shot out of a cannon while dozens of psychiatric patients from a Baja Institution perform.

…

The other element of Téllez’s display involves 35 mental patients from Mexicali, who will be dressed in circus costumes and performing on the beach alongside the human cannonball.

For sheer weirdness factor, there’s nothing like mixing Human Cannonballs, performance artists and mental patients.

I’m absolutely exhausted and I have to get up and work tomorrow morning, and I can’t sleep.

An uncertain job situation (which I will not go into here, mostly because it would take pages to explain) is the main cause of it, though the angst from that seems to be bleeding into other parts of my life.

It’s left me totally restless. The fact that there’s something interesting on CNN (the possible transformation of New Orleans, Louisiana into Atlantis) is not helping.

The banter between Carol Costello, the anchor and Chad Myers, the weatherman, is twistedly amusing. Take this bit from about 4:15am Eastern time:

Costello: My favorite description this morning, and I shouldn’t say favorite because that’s probably the wrong adjective, but the difference between a category 4 and a category 5 is the difference between getting hit by an 18 wheeler and a train.
Myers: (hesitating) OK…I’ll buy that. Sure.
Costello: It came from the National Hurricane Center.
Myers: Oh, OK.
(pause)
Costello: We’re gonna take a short break…

I spent this whole weekend trying to catch up on the sleep I didn’t get this week, and now that I at least came close to finally feeling like a human again, I can’t sleep.

But as I hear figures like, “Projections show the area around the Superdome could be under up to 20 feet of water,” I realize that as ridiculous as my life has gotten recently, it could be a whole, whole lot worse.

Edited to add: And now Anderson Cooper has arrived in Baton Rouge. Because while Miles O’Brien lashed to a tree is good, Anderson Cooper lashed to a tree is ratings gold.

When I finished up my last job, they were trying to get rid of as much of the craft service stuff as they possibly could, so I took home a box full of snacks.

One of the things in the box was little one ounce snack packages of mini-marshmallows, with the most ridiculous health claim I’ve ever seen on them:

“A FAT-FREE SNACK!”

Sure enough, 90 calories, 17 grams of sugar, but no fat. Still, the idea of a package of mini-marshmallows being touted for its health benefits? Heh.

I can’t remember how I got here link-jumping, but somehow I ended up hearing about Jimmy Kimmel’s feature “This Week in Unnecessary Censorship.”

The idea is that you can make even the most innocent thing sound really, really dirty if you bleep it so that the viewer allows their imagination to run wild.

Here is the best example, and there’s a couple more scattered about this page.

I’m not normally a Kimmel fan, but that’s flat-out brilliant. And make sure you watch the last bit of that first link…Mister Rogers is surely rolling in his grave.

When I got home tonight, I was greeted, as usual, by Chaplin. However, he didn’t look quite like that picture. He had an additional big black streak on one side of his face.

I couldn’t figure out where it could have come from, and I couldn’t get it off with anything (although Chap’s violent objections to any attempts to clean him off didn’t help).

I was puzzled. There weren’t any uncapped Sharpies or anything black and goopy that I could locate, and I was completely puzzled.

Then, after emptying out the dishwasher, I looked over and Chaplin was stretched out under my bike. And as I went over and pet him, a lightbulb went on.

The black crap was chain grease from my bike. He’d tried to scratch his face on either the gears or the chain of my bike, and ended up with a humongous streak across his face.

And at that point, I decided to stop trying to get the streak off. Because I can barely get the grease off my hands with tons of soap and scrubbing. I can’t imagine trying to get it out of fur.

Looks like kitty’s going to have a bit of extra black for a few days…

I’ve been very, very slowly going through my Europe pictures while preparing them for upload, and I found this one, and had a scary thought:

At the Hofbrau Haus in Munich, Germany

In a little less than three years, this man will be a lawyer. And will be able to sue me for making him pose for this stupid picture.

In Goat World’s continuing series of helpful hints, I present to you, via Dave Barry’s blog, one of the more ridiculous stories I’ve read in a while.

Because when you accidentally vaccum your ponytail so thoroughly that dismantling the vacuum cleaner won’t even free it, it’s beyond time for a haircut.

As one of the commenters put it: “I don’t know too many women who could dismantle a shop vac to begin with. Dismantling one while it’s attached to your head is a whole new degree of difficulty.”

I was on the phone with my mother this evening, and had the following exchange with her:

Mom: Oh, the Christmas Cactus is blooming.
Me: Isn’t it a little early for that?
Mom: Well, it’s been so hot that I’ve been turning the air conditioning up really high…
Me: (uncontrollablle chuckling)
Mom: And apparently I turned it up high enough that it made the cactus bloom.
Me: Perhaps it’s time to turn down your a/c just a little bit.
Mom: Perhaps.

Yes, particularly since according to that link, the ideal temperature to cause buds to form is between 55 and 60 degrees.

It’s a sign I’m growing old that when I saw that, my first thought was, “Damn, I’d hate to see her electric bill…”