Today's journeys & tasks

1. Picked up Fred, the Ford Taurus, at the repair shop. He is once again certified road-safe.

2. Completed the paperwork to claim many thousands of dollars for a replacement for Adam, our totalled Subaru. Sigh.

3. Went into the city for my usual Wednesday routine: comics shopping; dinner with agrumer, drcpunk, et alia; NYRSF meeting; picking up nellorat after her Wednesday evening client; driving home. It left me completely wiped out. Part of this is because I was overdressed; when I left the house, it was pouring rain, so I wore a raincoat in the expectation that I would need it; this left me overheated in the supermoist superheated air of the subway. But mostly it was the combination of still being woozy and depleted from the surgery and the cold (both of which are improving steadily but not fast enough dammit). I was so zonked at one point that I thoughtlessly wandered in front of moving traffic, but it was far enough away that this didn't cuase either me or the driver too much of a problem.

Must sleep. Must sleep much.

A good old-fashioned pastiche rant

Dennis Miller circa 1988 kicks the ass of Dennis Miller circa 2003:

We were all scared when those planes swan-dived into the towers, OK? But what separates real Americans from the faux variety is that real Americans don't turn in their spines to the hatcheck lady in times of stress. People in this country today hear the word terrorist and immediately snap into action -- which means locking themselves in the loo, defecating on the Constitution and using the Bill of Rights to wipe their ass. We're made of better stuff than that, and all the shrieking Rush Limbaughs in the world are not worth one brave man who will stand up and say, "hey, the emperor is starkers, and besides that, he wants all of Yemen's oil." I wasn't around, but I'm pretty sure the guys at Valley Forge weren't eating sautéed rat three times a day so that a future president could attempt a three-point landing on an aircraft carrier moored three miles off the coast of Catalina Island. We have to respond to terrorism, but the problem is that we're running around like the lynch mob in The Ox-Bow Incident, and when Hank Fonda stands up and says we got the wrong guy, Jane Darwell whacks him on the head with a gun butt and the next thing you know you wake up behind barbed wire at Guantanamo. All I'm saying is that it's time to scrap the Merle Haggard diplomacy, OK? Oh, and the reason we haven't found any weapons of mass destruction is that they're all in a warehouse in Topeka waiting for the next right-wing militia asshat to work his hatred of the federal government to a sufficient boiling point due to the fact that the local TV station has once again cancelled Dukes of Hazzard. While we're running around the world like Barney Fife at a jaywalkers convention, it's good to know that our schools are shit, our economy is floundering, and they'll have universal health care in Kabul before we have it here. The only good thing to come out of this is that Ari Fleischer took the honorable way out before Bush made him put on the jaunty Iraqi Minister of Information beret and tell us the moon is made of Sonoma Dry Jack. Ah fuck it, where's my propeller beanie?

(by Rick Chandler, on TheBlackTable.)

I was never as in love with Dennis Miller as he was with himself, but he used to be, well, wry, insightful, and passionate. Now he's just passionate.