I don't even know where to start with this...

55 gallons of goat semen found in forest preserve outside Chicago.

Best lines:

"We get calls about illegal dumping all the time, but never anything like this," Albrecht said.

The police department "properly disposed" of the semen, but declined to say how.

Good thing, because I really don't want to know how.

"Dude, I can't feel, like, the left half of my hand..."

Tonight was the A&O Ball, the annual big spring concert that my college puts on someplace downtown. This year it was Wilco and Elliott Smith. I'm a pretty big fan of both, since both feature highly excellent songwriting and kickass production on record. Smith opened and Wilco was the main act. Wilco fucking rocked, but Smith...Suffice it to say that I have been to around 75 concerts and this was the single weirdest concert experience I have ever had.

Smith came out, solo, looking immensely stoned, and immediately mumbled something about the fact that he couldn't feel half of his left hand. He said that he had been sleeping on it on the airplane and when he woke up, he couldn't feel his ring or pinky fingers, or that half of the rest of his hand, and hadn't been able to do so for at least a few hours.

For non-guitarists, allow me to explain what a problem this is: the left hand is used by right handed guitarists to place the fingers on the strings, thus creating the notes that you hear from the guitar. If you cannot feel (and thus have difficulty controlling) your fingers, then you have a serious problem. The ring and index finger going numb is a particular impediment for someone with Smith's style, since so much of what he does relies on complicated finger movements, mostly of the ring and index fingers to create harmonies.

So he attempted to play many songs. He actually managed to get through about five. He kept apologizing and retelling the story of how he couldn't feel his hand. He also kept drinking a great deal of whiskey, as if this would make it easier for him to feel his hand, as opposed to a great deal more difficult.

At one point, a member of the audience asked to bum a smoke and Smith threw a pack of cigarrettes out into the crowd, on the condition that the guy give them back (which he eventually did, after taking like half the pack). Eventually, someone told him to wrap it up and they'd take him to the hospital to get his arm looked at. He managed to get off one final song, Fond Farewell. The lyrics seemed oddly appropriate:

It's just a fond farewell to a friend

It's not what I'm like

It's just a fond farewell to a friend

Who couldn't get things right

I felt really bad, mostly because he really seemed to feel shitty about the fact that he couldn't do anything, but partly because I felt like he may have turned off some people who would otherwise like him. He really is a damn good musician when he's not stoned and having serious physical problems...really!

Further descents into utter stupidity

I'm getting dumber as I get older. This is an incontrovertible fact.

Further evidence was presented to me today when I took my car to the shop. I had been having some problems getting the windshield wiper fluid to come out the front thingies, which is a pain in the ass when you have bug splat on your windshield and can't get rid of it. So I mentioned it to the guy, and he sits down in the car and immediately gets it to work. How, you may ask? Because he is not too stupid to figure out how windshield wiper fluid dispensers work.

I had been under the impression that since the windshield wiper arm said "pull mist," this meant that in order to get it to squirt, you had to pull it towards you, and I vaguely remember getting this to work once or twice, which is why I felt sure the windshield wiper fluid was broken. Of course, I could have been hallucinating, but you never know.

The real way to get the wiper fluid to work is to push on the button at the end of the arm that has the little windshield wiper fluid logo (a big squirt of water going up over a silhouette of a windshield, then miraculously coming down evenly on either side) on it.

I, of course, had thought that this was something involving the back windshield, though looking at my logic I see that I was totally full of shit, since I knew the way to operate the back windshield wiper fluid, and that was definitely not it. It was in the same general vicinity, but it wasn't it.

The guy at the shop said that a lot of people didn't realize that's how it's supposed to work. "And I bet a lot of them feel like fucking idiots when they find out, too," I told him, deciding that I may just get a lobotomy and call it a day, since I apparently have no working brain cells anymore anyway.

God damn, that's cool

New pictures from the Hubble telescope, which they just put a reeeeeeeeeally expensive new camera on. These are worth it and then some.

Just make sure to turn off the new agey music the Washington Post's Camera Works guys put on there for no apparent reason. You just click on the little thing next to the word audio and it'll turn off.

The art of the sudden realization

You know the signs. You've had a nice, big meal, a lot of tasty drinks, and you're sitting around doing something. You could be driving, you could be watching television, you could be doing your homework, you could be staring at the wall, but you're more than likely talking on the phone. And then it hits you.

Oh shit, I have to pee right now.

"Sudden realization" is a term my friend Joanna and I came up with in high school for this phenomenon: When you get terribly distracted by something, only to realize shortly before your bladder is about to explode that you may need to use the bathroom sometime soon. In our cases, the distraction was having animated phone conversations, most of the time about about who we'd fuck (and how much we'd pay or have to be paid to do so) at my high school.

I find it kind of sad that my sudden realizations are now precipitated by getting heavily involved in work, especially web design. When I was redesigning my main site, this would happen at least once or twice a night. While that's not technically work, since I actually like my site, the same thing happens when I get heavily involved in my News and New Media Classwork, which, because I'm being graded on it, is officially work.

I've (luckily) never had one hit me on stage. I generally manage to be too nervous about fucking up the lyrics to one of my songs to even bother paying attention to that. Though I have had a couple of moments when I'm talking to someone after the show and the little alarm bells start to go off in the back of my mind.

So if you're talking to me after a show, and I get an odd look on my face and then excuse myself and sprint in the general direction of the bathroom, believe me when I say:

It's not you, it's me.

I-away

I went to Iowa for about six hours yesterday. It took longer to drive there and back than I actually spent in the damn state.

I went because I promised Mark I'd take him to Independence, Iowa. He's working on this project for a Writing Nonfiction Books class about concepts of patriotism and how they've changed in small towns named after American values.

Or something like that.

So we left at 6am after getting about three nanoseconds of sleep apiece (him due to late-night Twister, me due to the fact that I couldn't sleep because my feet were blocks of ice), and drove to Iowa. We passed such fantastic towns as Rockford, IL, home of the Peaches of A League Of Their Own fame; Dubuque, IA, of...no fame whatsoever; and Dyersville, IA, where the Field Of Dreams is located.

We finally got to Independence at about 11 in the morning, where we proceeded to a bake sale that the First United Methodist Church had posted about on its website. We had been intending to stay the night so he could talk to people for his project, but we ran into several problems.

1. It was Saturday, so large numbers of people were not around.
2. People in small towns don't like to talk to people from big towns.
3. It was raining and disgusting, and the place just became that much more depressing.
4. It's spring quarter of his senior year, and I'm graduating one quarter later, so we were both suffering from bad cases of senioritis, and hence didn't feel like dealing with it all.

You could really tell how bad the kids working as soda jerks at the local A&W wanted to get out of town. It basically was how much I wanted out of DC times how much Mark wanted out of Salt Lake. Or at least to get rid of the politicians and Mormons, respectively.

To sum up: Our motto at 6am was "Iowa or Bust!" Our motto by 3pm was "Fuck Iowa, Let's Get The Hell Out Of Here."

Reading fun

From my Gender and Society reading:

"...Probably a whole continuum of sexual desire exists, with some people no more able to sexualize same-sex people than they can a bowling ball and some people no more able to sexualize other-sex people than they can a basketball. Still others can be turned on to either--and even to bowling balls and basketballs, depending on the circumstances."

Oh baby, let's play some basketball...