Three Completely Unrelated Things, Which Is About Par For The Course For Me These Days

Hello, blogees.

I've got this problem. See, I read something once, and it said this. Well, it said either this or this. It said either smokers were generally smarter than the public at large, or that the public at large were generally smarter than smokers.

I just don't remember which it was. And it doesn't matter, really, because I've already decided. It had to have been that smokers were smarter. Because since I've stopped, I can't remember a damn thing. My head is mush. It's not even good mush. It's just mush. Jumbled thoughts roll around in there, never coming to any sensible conclusion, and I'm really a mess, brainiacally speaking.

Two Saturdays in a row now, I've left for B'burg and Oktoberfest only to get 14 or so miles out of town, realize I've forgotten something too important to continue without, and have had to go all the way back home again. That's quite annoying. Coming home from B'burg Sunday afternoon, I had it in my head that it was May. I'm not sure why, I just did. And it took some concerted effort on my part to remember, driving around there in all the fallen red and yellow leaves, what month it actually was. Last night when paying my bills, I had to tear open not one, but two sealed envelopes when I remembered I hadn't put account numbers on my checks.

Mush.

However, I have big news here at the Poderosa. This afternoon I received my latest bank statement in the mail and decided to have a go at balancing it. And for the first time in approximately five years, it worked. My checkbook is by-God balanced, and to the penny. For those of you who've been around a while, you know that this is in fact a big deal. I've done blogs (try 7/18/06) about my utter hopelessness in the Banking World. I'm up $400, I'm down $150. I'm everything but even.

I decided a few months ago that my Next Big Project was going to be a complete doctoral thesis researching the past three years of my Banking Life, just to see if I could get at the root of the problem. I started that project, and it got very old very quickly (too depressing), and after about 14 months of rehashing (it didn't take 14 months, I made it through 14 months of the bankbook), I quit. I'd already realized from whence the problem was coming, anyway. The old debit card. Apparently my memory wasn't as good as I thought when I was smoking, either, and I wasn't recording enough of those debit card purchases. I finally waited for the next statement to come, balanced it in the area on the back of the page, subtracted the five hundred million dollars I was off, and started anew. Then last month, I did the same thing, and ended up exactly six dollars off. I chalked it up to math error and added myself six dollars to the till.

Then came today, when I was in balance. It was a happy occasion. I wrote on the balance sheet, in pen, "Hats and horns!" and filed it away, though for a few moments I considered framing it.

Now, sometime last week I was playing Text Twist. This is nothing new, and please don't sigh heavily and read ahead, because this bit isn't about Text Twist. It's about the banner ads I have to deal with while playing Text Twist.

The latest ad to pop up at the top of my screen while I'm searching for words is for a new car by Honda. It's called the Fit. The Honda Fit. I have no idea why a car company would want to name their newest automobile the Fit, but that's what they chose, and there's not a thing I can do about it. Maybe they mean "fit" as in, "It's a good fit for you," or, "It's fit and in tip-top shape," but around where I live, a fit is an all-out temper tantrum. It's like naming your car the Honda Epileptic Seizure.

The slogan for the Fit is, "The Fit is go!" They stole that directly from the old puppet TV show "The Thunderbirds." Because the Tunderbirds were go way before the Fit ever dared to be, and it pisses me off a little bit. Not to the point of having my own fit, but to a certain extent. In the banner ad, though I can find it nowhere on the Fit's website, the Fit is placed beside a cartoon drawing of an angry and frowning Tiki head. This confuses me, and kind of makes my head hurt.

For years in the poundsqueeze chat, we've longed for a car to be named the Snit or the Huff, just so it can be said that so-and-so "left in a Huff," or "left in a Snit." This is about as close as we're going to get to our dream, I think. One could actually "leave in a Fit," I guess, and I also guess it might behoove me to consider buying this latest Honda so I myself can be the one who does this.

And although Honda is known for being a very dependable and reliable vehicle, I can see what comes ahead if the Fit turns out to be riddled with mechanical problems. It shall be lovingly dubbed the Honda Shit, or the Honda Shit-Fit. And people who own them will be having fits, so maybe they knew what they were doing when they named it ("Oooh, this car's going to be a piece of shit!"), and the Tiki head is angry for a reason.

I finally did make it up the mountain to Oktoberfest on Saturday, after having to retrace 14 miles of steps, check to make sure I'd turned my oven off (I had, of course - a useless retracing of 14 miles, though it is the same number of miles to Cumberland Gap), and head out one more time. It was a fun night, shots of Jagermeister, Goldschlager, and Baronjager flowed, the weather was nice and cool (unseasonably cool for May, actually), and Mr M drove us back down the mountain and home.

When we got there, the DeepFatFriar was waiting for us, and Mr M suggested they put in the DVD they'd been watching for the past few days. It was some TV treatment of "Dune." "Dune" is not only science fiction, but was one of the worst movies I've ever tried to watch in my life, starring one of the worst actors I've ever tried to watch in my life (Sting).

Needless to say, I wasn't the least bit interested in seeing any of this, but who am I to piss on someone else's Science Fiction Parade, and I'd already washed my face, taken out my contact lenses, and put on my pajamas, so I was very comfortable and still a little buzzed, and I curled up on the couch and half-tried to understand anything that was going on on the screen.

I didn't, much.

Mainly what I didn't understand was this. And it's probably the main thing I don't understand and despise about science fiction shows. Why do the people who make these things goon out the aliens? They're regular humans, only with metallic eyes, or black lips, or (as was the case on Saturday) donning headpieces that look like giant taco shells. They wear long, flowing robes, or biblical-looking burlap bags tied at the waist with a rope. And they always have kings and queens. Wouldn't you think some alien planet of a supposedly higher intelligence would have a braintrust, or a cabinet, or a junta? No, they have some hoo-hah king, and he always has a big stone throne he perches upon, made just so his giant taco shell hat doesn't come off as he sits in it. And they always speak English. And that's just wrong. Shit, half our planet doesn't speak English, but otherworldly aliens speak it.

I see aliens as looking like little moths, flying around, darting here and there, and at their higher echelon junta meetings they say things like, "Neeeep. Ftttt Tffff Eeee eee eepneep."

I might watch science fiction more if it was like that.

My version of "Dune."

[fade in]

"DUNE"

Earth Man: How did I get here? Where am I?

Alien [flitting about]: Neepneep.

Earth Man: What?

Alien [flitting about Earth Man's head]: Neepneep. Ssssssstang ptui!

Earth Man: What??

Alien [landing on quartz wall]: Shurururururururh neepeep puputwan.

Earth Man: Oh, I've had enough of this.

[Earth Man smashes Alien flat with his hand.]

"THE END"

[fade out.]

Betland's Olympic Update:
* Sorry for the lack of blogs, blogees, but time has been short, and the brain is mush. Happy May, though.