Sweet little pussycat

http://io9.com/5071319/when-ligers-attack



"Ligers are the offspring of a male lion mating with a tigress, and they are known to be enormous (see picture) and tremendously fierce. It's unclear why combining male lion DNA with female tiger DNA results in a creature who is much bigger than either species. "

We ever get a cat, I want one of these. And a big shed full of guys like Fred Phelps, Lew Dobbs, Jerry Falwell and the entire new crew from Fox News to feed to them.
They do profess to be Christians, so why not be a fan of tradition and let them be martyrs?
Four days to go, I hope the country moves beyond the fear and smear mindset we've been having shoved down our throats.

Jesus, Chrysler

The German automaker has depreciated its stake in Chrysler to zero from $268 million at the end of June, the company said Thursday. A little over a year ago, the company valued its 19.9% stake in Chrysler at $2.2 billion

http://www.freep.com/article/20081024/BUSINESS01/810240321/1014/business01

Wow, think about that. From a bogus two billion and change to ZERO in a little over a year. The death of cars as we know them is on the way.

Not only that, the morons at GM are buying them. The same morons who refused to consider building anything but gas hog SUV's for the last two decades and now want bailout money to build slightly more efficent death machines so people can get fat driving in our stupidly built cities where nobody walks or bikes out of fear of becoming roadkill.

A few well placed bombs in the Suez canal and one or two tankers being blown up by not very determined assholes would make our oil supply clog up faster than a regular diner at Burger King's arteries.

All those people who thought a house in Black Earth or Verona or Scum Prarie are gonna be sorry when gas becomes an overpriced luxury again.

We're a nation of morons. If I wasn't a bottom feeder who is going to feel the pain of the oncoming new great depression, I'd be laughing at the massive failure of our economy and shitbrained greedy system of money grubbing jerks.

Add in the TRILLIONS of dollars the Fed is making appear out of thin air and your dollar isn't going to even the heat bills, let alone the gas for your commute.

And of course, all the folks who vote down light rail or mass transit because their SUV was so much more pleasant and you could avoid actually rubbing shoulders with the rest of the human tribe will be bitching about being screwed by their votes.

Better start riding bikes now, folks. It's gonna get ugly. You'll have a leg up if you do. Or a leg over, anyway.

Rutabagggies!

The forecast called for frost

I thought tonight

the remains of the garden

would be lost

but once again it's not too cold

I love having a garden. I started gardening in Oshkosh back in the early eighties when I lived in the octagon shaped house on Pleasant street.

I grew tomatoes next to the garage, got addicted.

This year we planted rutabagas for the first time, and they were happy.

Freakin' huge, but very happy as this pile of pixels shows.

I still don't understand people who don't plant gardens, because it's real food for next to nothing, and you get to plant all sorts of freaky stuff like castor beans, giant sunflowers and rainbow chard.

After a few seasons of watching stuff go from dirt high to frozen dead, growing as tall as 15 feet, then dying, you start to get an sense that these solar cycles we're taking for granted are a gift.

Plus, it feels good to have a basement full of salsa, tomato sauce, squash, jam and grape juice you made yourself, and a freezer stuffed with bags of hops to make beer with.

Quote of the Day: Common Sense

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices aquired by age 18"

Einstein

Costco Moment

My pal J. needed some things from Costco. I got a membership, so I said, sure, let's go to a giant big box store filled with corn syrup loaded crap and huge piles of semi-quality shit.

So we hopped in her little car with her two freakishly smart kids, a three year old and a one and half year old.

Halfway through this child ridden expedition, I noticed her older boy hanging off the back of the shopping cart, and I said to him "careful there, kid, you might fall off and hit your head and become dumb enough that you grow up to be a republican.

Not that it matters what I say to a three year old, but at that point, this older woman (me using that term with some caution, since she was only a decade or so older than the pile of reproduction errors and bad attitudes that comprise me) turns and says "oh, no, we can't have that!".

Not what I expected to hear over in Middleton, home of every ugly freakin' chain restaurant and the source of developer's wet dreams when it comes to building disposable culture and buildings.

Then she looked at me and said, " I even called up the McCain campaign and told them to knock of the negative ads!".

I thought that was pretty damn cool to hear. It gives me some hope that we might start turning things around. I sure would like to think that.

Quote of the Day: Apple Pie

"If you want to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Universe."

Carl Sagan

Actually, I don't go quite that far in my freakish efforts to make stuff from scratch. I stop at making up my own reality from the universe around me, the one my eyeballs and senses have taken in.

Funny, but when I think about it, taste is the sense we have that has caused me the least distress.

You can't taste roadkill, John McCain, Richard Nixon or your beloved dead grandmother unless you have a desire to dig up the dead or chew on the zombie corpse of rich bastard politicians selling their souls for a grasp of power.

But here at Hint of Dementia labs, we do make a lot from scratch ingredients already in this reality.

Burritos, guitar amplifiers, musical instruments, kitchen cabinets and countertops, wood carvings and giant castor beans, salsa, computers from parts, bicycles from scavenged parts, pinhole cameras and pie and jam.

And coffee. And now I think I'll go for a walk in the rain and eat pie and coffee somewhere.

Fry's Alchemy Gig Poster

MF7 Gigs

Mikey and Fry and Jonathan played a few gigs last month.

One set at my old bandmate Bob's party in the park called Thurberfest, where we put on a rockin' but drummerless set, and then a truly wild fun gig at the Alchemy, formerly Wonders Pub.

We rocked the house, and Jonathan made it down for the show.

He is a killer drummer, both subtle and driven.

I like playing with these guys. Nobody phones it in, everybody wants to play their asses off, and the ego factor is pretty minimal.

Micheal's songs are funky weird, sort of a cross between Jack Johnson and Tom Waits, but with his own sensibilities and lyrical skills taking front and center.

And Fry, what can I say? He's one bad ass mofo with some serious gravitas.

I love leaning into his big throbbing bass and solid frame.

I have no idea how long this band will stick around, but I hope it's a long time. I get to really grind away with my cheap ass Les Paul copy and the big ass amp my buddy Micheal Bryant gave me.

I am starting to thing guys named Micheal are above average.

Back

Me n' dollface and my Castor Beans in the garden, last week.

It's been a strange month or so, and the sheer weirdness of watching the hyper-capitalist dream grind itself apart while BushCo runs out the clock has left me feeling like doing more thinking about all the strange possibilities to come than blogging.
I've been battening down my mental hatches before the storm, so to speak.
It's also been an ugly season of politics, one that makes me want to shut off my computer and go for a walk. The kind that takes six months and to somewhere where there's a temperate climate beach. Hopefuly after McCain's effort to feed the dogs of hate crashes.
I don't have much hope for Obama being able to do much but manage inherited crisis after crisis, but that cranky old bastard McCain has proved he's about as evil as they come the last few days.

And his running mate is even more of a freak and liar and danger to us all.

Kori and I did our road trip, driving down to Erick and Missy and Gene and Kathleen's hometown of Athens.
We played pinball, worked on guitars, I got to play about a dozen nice Les Pauls of varying age and make, through filthy amps that made my bones rattle and my nipples hard.
Kori spent two days geeking out fixing a Twilight Zone and an Addams Family pinball machines. She loved it.
We left Athens on the day the remains of Hurricane Ike lashed Ohio, Indiana and big parts of the Midwest.
It sucked. Really, really sucked. I wrestled the truck through winds up to sixty miles per hour for nine hours before we stopped in Indianapolis for the night, and it took stopping at three different hotels before we found one with electricity.
The next day we rolled west to the Mississippi, taking what seemed like a thousand years to cross the ugly boring flat fields of Illinois.
We hit the big river and started cruising up the river road. It was pleasant enough driving, but we were amazed by the lack of local joints to find some food at. We found nothing worth stopping at until we hit Galena.
Galena is an old town, filled with well preserved buildings, amazingly well built.
But it's a TOURIST HELL. Really. It's about as fucking overpriced and ugly as I could imagine, and I do not lack imagination. We tried to find a joint for lunch, but all we found was snooty overpriced joints selling nine dollar hamburgers.
There is no hamburger worth nine dollars. For god's sake, it's machine chewed dead cow, not prime steak.
We walked up and down the main street, filled with overpriced knickknacks and six dollar Carmel apples, through a cloud of white people perfume thick enough to kill flying cockroaches. Why do so many middle aged white women feel the need to drench themselves in fake stink?
We both voted with our feet, slogged through the zombie upscale shoppers and hopped back into the truck and headed back along the river road.
About an hour later we saw the first road sign pointing to Madison and both decided we'd had enough driving and blew off the last night of our trip to head for home.
I'll post some photos later of the pinball repair. I didn't even bother taking any in Galena, the whole town is a doomed high end snob shell of it's self.
When the big inflation spiral starts after Bush slinks out of the back door of the White house, that place is going to be emptier than an overflowing porta-potty.
Sure looked good from the second story up, though.
We also descended into the bowels of the earth and took a trip to the big lake they call Gitchee Gumme, but more about that later.