Summers in the Great White North are pretty short, so we tend to cram as much into them as we can. Oh, not the kind of stuff you hoity-toity city folks have, with your tea parties, debutant balls, charity galas, and cotillions. No, up here in real America, summers are filled with good clean fun, like Field Days and ethnic festivals where folks can get out there and expose as much of their doughy, pasty-white winter skin as is legally allowed to the sun, while drinking overpriced beer in plastic cups (which tends to lead to nasty hangovers exacerbated by second-degree sun poisoning and odd tan lines).

Two weeks ago, it was Memorial Day, with folks paradin’ about in pert near every town in the county (including Navarino, home of the world’s shortest parade; one guy drives his tractor across Route 20, and then everybody gets drunk). Last weekend we had out town’s field days (aka, the “Olde Home Days,” whose origins go back at least to the 1800s), which made it a real pain in the ass to drive through the village, what with all the damn people parading, milling back and forth between chicken barbeques, crap craft booths, riding on the rides, and, of course participating in the Duck Race (which, much to my sister’s disappointment, does not use real ducks). Oh, and plenty of fireworks to terrorize the dogs.

And this weekend, well, this is one of the bigguns in the area (perhaps second only to the Great NY State Fair week), as we have the Polish Festival, the Greek Festival, and the Balloon Festival all taking place in just three short days (or four; I think the Greeks get it going a day ahead of time).

At the Polish festival, you can eat sausage and pierogis, dance polkas, drink beer, and check out the Polish chicks (just take a moment to review the old polish ladies, ‘cuz that’s what they grow up to look like).

At the Greek festival, you can eat Gyros, dance the Syrtaki, drink ouzo (if you drink enough and squint, you can actually make sense of that goofy Greek alphabet), and check out the Greek chicks (same caveat as the Polish babes – and, yes, for the Greek dudes, too; they may start out looking like Adonis, but sooner or later they turn into fat bald guys wearing old man t-shirts with suspenders and leather sandals with white socks – like that famous Greek guy, Anthony Quinn, who was actually an Irish Mexican – go figure. Actually, sooner or later, I think that’s what all you ladies have to look forward to from us old guys – if we live long enough – but you love us anyway, don’t you?). :nod:

At the Balloon Festival, you can listen to has-been rock bands (this year’s headliners, .38 Special, plus the inexplicably popular in CNY has-been that never was, Benny Mardones), drink beer, and go for a balloon ride (or just watch them all take off and fly around, which is pretty cool, especially when you’ve been drinking beer out in the sun all day – and, yes, I know this from experience).

Much as Memorial Day marks the beginning of summer and Labor Day marks the end of summer, this weekend marks the end of the beginning of summer.

And right now, it’s the beginning of the end of the work week. Let’s get this over with already, for tonight, we party.

Na zdrowie!

The wildfires in Arizona remain out of control. If you’re like me, you’re kinda surprised to hear that there’s stuff that can burn in Arizona. I thought it was all sand and cacti. Well, and citrus groves, I guess. Good luck to everybody out there. Maybe if you lighten up on the Mexicans and cast Sheriff Joe out (send him to Texas – he’ll fit right in), God will turn down the heat and quit turning you all into a bunch of shriveled brown prunes.

It’s starting to look as though the Democrats will soon be Weiner-less, which I guess is appropriate, ‘cuz most of them haven’t got any balls, either.

Personally, I don’t care about his electronic exhibitionism, but he should resign based on the stupid factor. It’s one thing to be a pervert, but when you’re a sitting congresscritter who loves to get your face on the teevee as frequently as possible, you really should know better than to wave your weenie using your real name and, um, “face.” And photos? C’mon, dude. In this day and age, photos are forever. Is that how you want to be remembered?

Plus, he f*cking cried. I hate that. Don’t cry because you’re sad you got caught. Eliot Spitzer sets the standard there. He stood up and took it like a man (except he kept his socks on, but, hey, maybe he’s got poor circulation).

Worst, though, is that he gave some sort of legitimacy to Breitbart, that smug piece of shit.

So, time to go away, Anthony. Get yourself a few weeks of rehab and there’ll be a teevee show on the Oprah Winfrey Network waiting for you. You coulda had it all (assuming “all” is mayor of NYC – which would put you in the company of people like Guidi Ruliani, Ed “Gingham Dress” Koch, and the guy who would have made a great spokesman for a certain national doughnut chain – ” this is David Dinkins for Dunkin’ Donuts”), but now you’re just another celebrity loser who makes Jerry Springer look like a genius for paying by check.

I woke up late, and now I feel like I’m starting the day in a hole. Plus, it’s hot. It never really cooled off last night, but it’ll supposed to get cooler today (after it gets hotter). That means t-storms, but hopefully no tornadoes.

A college football coach by the name of Steve Spurrier says that coaches should pay their players $300 a game out of their own pockets. I think he said that because he know it’ll never happen, and he can sound all “pro student-athlete” and shit. Of course, not all coaches make the big bucks, and not all schools have big-time football programs that can afford to pay off the kids (and never mind other sports, where kids work just as hard to balance school and extra-curricular activities). Now, I have no sympathy for schools that make a ton of money on the backs of kids who play sports in exchange for a free ride through school, but then again free tuition plus room and board isn’t exactly a bad deal, either – and better than most kids get. Our coach here at Syracuse – Doug Marrone – agrees.

“…we’re already paying our guys,” Marrone, the Orange coach, declared the other day. “A lot of people put a lot of emphasis on student-athletes and compensation. ‘We should give them this.’ ‘They don’t get paid for that.’ ‘Their time is tough because they have to practice and they have to go to class.’ There’s a lot of ‘Woe is me. Woe is me.’

“But it is very difficult for me to sit here and say, ‘Woe, woe, woe is the student-athlete.’ The student-athlete has a great opportunity to better his entire life, to change his family tree, to do a lot of good things. The fact is, at the end of the day scholarship athletes don’t have the kinds of financial difficulties that other students incur.”
[…]
“I think the focus is so wrong when it’s put on the student-athletes,” Marrone said. “It should be put on those people who can’t afford to go to school. Or on those people whose parents are working two and three jobs to send them to college. Or on those people who work and go to school part-time or full-time or through the summer. Or on those students behind the counter who are serving food to their peers or washing their peers’ dishes to pay for their education.

“The question should be: How do we get them an opportunity? Those are the people we should be trying to help. Not the student-athletes because when you think about it, they have pretty good lives.”

So maybe Steve Spurrier can take some of that $1.75 million he earns a year (to coach the South Carolina Gamecocks, fer chrissakes – who really ought to give Anthony Weiner an honorary degree) to lower the tuition for poor kids or something.

It’s gonna be hot here today. 95, they say. It would be a good day to be off, but, sadly, I’m not. It’s an early day for me, though, so that’s good.

In order to stave off my desire to spend money and buy an Android tablet (and to avoid – to the extent possible – listening about Anthony’s Weiner or looking at that smug POS Breitbart), I managed to cobble together a computer and install Linux Mint on it. It appears to be a pretty nice distro – a pretty painless (and brainless) install that has everything I need, pretty much. The only hassle I had with it was that it somehow managed to lose my password. Honest. I was using it to install shit, and then suddenly it wouldn’t authenticate me. Now, I swear I didn’t change it, and it’s the one I use for pretty much everything on my internal network, so I don’t know what happened. Worse, it refused to allow me to boot to a passwordless shell. So I just reinstalled it (only takes 15 minutes or so – and that’s on some fairly old hardware) and started over again. So that was nice. Except it’s a desktop – making three working ones in my office – and I rarely sit down to use them these days.

Otherwise, it appears that this is gonna be a really bad allergy year for me this year. I’m not only dealing with a runny, snot-filled nose, but also a sore throat and an itchy eye (just one eye at the moment, for some reason). Last night, my eye was so swollen up, I thought about tweeting a picture of it to some young girl half my age. Then I realized that would be really pathetic.

Yes, it turns out our champion of single-payer healthcare is a pathetic loser. I had my first doubts about him when he took an “Israel can do no wrong stance,” and, far from assuaging any doubts, the explanation that he was only a staunch Israel supporter so he good get elected in his district only heightened them.

And his “hacked weiner” story sounded like bullshit to me from the start, but I was willing to ignore it because he usually says things I agree with, and because I really don’t care (except, not to be judgmental or anything, but there’s something wrong with you there, Anthony; I foresee some rabbinical counseling in your future for the next few months until you get your mind right, or the media finds something else to obsess on – whichever comes first).

Too bad Weiner isn’t a Mormon. Those magic underpants might have saved him a lot of embarrassment. You’ll never see Mitt Romney get in this kind of trouble (though that’s most likely because he’s a “Ken” doll – no genitalia).

Well, our cool and pleasant weather appears to be nearly at an end, as it’s supposed to turn hot and steamy today. Sounds good. I’m trying to justify the pool expense by not having to use the air conditioning, so the hotter the better. But I think I need to buy a waterproof Android tablet.

Do they make those?

Central New York is losing one of its more famous residents today, as NY Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress is being released from the Oneida Correctional Facility in Rome, NY (in case you didn’t know, we’re kind of a reverse farm team for the dregs of NYC society). He got a few months shaved off his two-year sentence thanks to good behavior. You may recall that the hapless Burress tucked a gun into his sweat pants and managed to shoot himself in the leg. Since the dummy only managed to hurt himself (and given the shit that people do and never see the inside of a jail cell), I was always kind of surprised that they sent him up the river (a euphemism – for those who don’t know – that refers to sending NYC criminals up the Hudson River to “Sing-Sing” prison in Ossining, NY).

Of course NYC has more criminals than Sing-Sing has cells, so they just kept sending them farther and farther up the river. Now poor Plaxico goes from lockdown to lockout, as NFL owners continue to not understand that there are billions of dollars to be lost in not having a football season this year (and beyond; the more the fans get used to not having the NFL, the more we’ll realize we can live without it – especially since there’s always college football to watch). To be honest, I find professional sports less and less interesting. Players come and go, and it’s very hard to care about any of these steroid-infested two-legged cattle.

Fortunately, if we want to see some real football played by non-prima donnas we have the Syracuse Shock of the vaunted Empire Football League, 2010 NAFL Empire Division and East Region Champs (and, I might add, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization) and off to 2-0 start this season, having licked the Lackawana Dynasty 38-18 and foiled the Finger Lakes Impact 51-6.

Hey, Plaxico, there’s a roster spot waiting here for you if you want to turn your life around. Hell, you can probably even play QB if you want (or pretty much any other position).

Oh well, today’s my early day, so I guess I better get going so I can get gone and then get back.

They promised us a warm(ish) sunny(ish) day yesterday. They lied. Or, they had it bass-ackwards, ‘cuz they said it was gonna be nice early, then get increasingly cloudy, then have some scattered showers. Instead it started out cloudy, got cloudier, rained, and then kinda cleared up. But it never got all that warm. At least it wasn’t a total loss, as I managed to get the oil changed in the tractor and some weed-whacking with the grass blade (which always kinda scares me ever since I hit a rock with one a couple years back and the guards kinda exploded. So now I’ve got no guard). Today they say it’ll be sunny, so we’ll see what happens. Since we’re back to a stinkin’ two-day weekend, today is laundry, shopping, and grass-cutting day. Not necessarily in that order.

I’ll also be trying to restrain myself from ordering an Android tablet that I’ve been coveting from afar for a while now. Stupid Tiger Direct e-mails.

It’s back to the MacBook this morning, as the touchpad seems to be cooperating again. It seems to work for a week or two, and then I have to shut the thing down and let it sit for a couple of weeks before it’ll play nice again. I guess it’s some sort of a feature.

If you ask me, Apple needs a lot less Jobs, and a whole lot more Woz.

Damn, only 7:00? How early are you allowed to start making noise on a Sunday?

As I was struggling to get home yesterday, I saw some sorta thing or another going on at a little triangle plot of land where two fairly big (and very busy) roads intersect. It’s not unusual to see people there hootin’ and hollarin’ and waving signs – usually it’s the “peace” people, but this time it was something else (presumably their diligent actions have finally brought peace – if not joy – to the world), and traffic was really heavy so it took me several lights to get up there and see what it was all about. Looked like a bunch of clean-cut kids (boys, in fact) in jackets and ties holding signs, and flying some sort of olde-tyme flag (you know, pennant-style I guess you’d call it with the fish tail kinda thing) that I couldn’t read. To tell you the truth, I was thinking it was the gay choir from the nearby Universalist Church trying to drum up business for their next concert or something.

Kind of ironic, in that as I got closer, I could read the signs, which said “Honk for Traditional Marriage 1 Man + 1 Woman” (I guess they felt the need to explain “traditional,” which is good ‘cuz I always think of traditional marriage as Ward and June Cleaver or Donna and Alex Stone or Jim and Margaret Anderson – god, how I despised Kathy – though I much preferred “non-traditional” marriage, which of course would be Sam and Darrin Stevens or Tony and Jeannie Nelson – once they quit living in sin, of course – and maybe even Oliver and Lisa Douglas).

This isn’t exactly a bastion of gay hatred, so this little demonstration took me quite by surprise. Everybody else, too, ‘cuz there wasn’t a whole lot of honking going on. I tried to give them a look that would express both my pity for them, and the hope that one day they’d be able to live happy lives out of the closet so they wouldn’t need to spend all their time looking for love in public mens rooms.

But then the light turned green and I finally got through the f*cking intersection.

Speaking of anti-gay zealots, in looking around on the google, I was rather surprised to learn that the American Family Association (AFA) is urging people to boycott Home Depot.

“For several years, The Home Depot has given its financial and corporate support to open displays of homosexual activism on main streets in America’s towns,” said the AFA, in a statement. “The Home Depot has chosen to sponsor and participate in numerous gay pride parades and festivals. Most grievous is The Home Depot’s deliberately exposing small children to lascivious displays of sexual conduct by homosexuals and cross-dressers, which are a common occurrence at these events.”

Go figure.

Home Depot (or “Homo Depot” as the Freepers would say) chairman Frank Blake apparently told the AFA – politely – that they could go shit in their hat.

Blake thanked AFA for the petitions but again, as in the past, reiterated the company’s support for “diversity,” which includes same-gender “marriage.”

Atlanta-based Home Depot promotes diversity-oriented organizations, including “Out and Equal Workplace Advocates,” an LGBT advocacy group that supports workplace diversity, marriage equality, and activities such as Transgender Remembrance Day. The Home Depot is also a supporter of the Human Rights Campaign.

Apparently, the AFA doesn’t care for this list of organizations that HD supports.

You know, it’s just getting so darn hard to know who to hate these days.

In the wake of Weinergate, Salon has an article (written by a woman named Tracy Clark-Flory – I’m aways dubious of people with hyphenated names) this morning asking “why do men take crotch shots?” The answer, of course, is “they don’t.” They don’t any more than couples kidnap young girls and hold them hostage for 18 years or “women” don’t wear panties and flash their crotches to the paparazzi while getting out of limousines (or yearn for artificial insemination so they can have octuplets). Are there weirdos and creeps out there? Certainly. Do they get way, way, WAY too much attention? Yes they do. Of course, Tracy doesn’t say all men do – she says many men do, which is the equivalent of the old “some say…” lazy method of interviewing. Of course, she offers no statistics for this phenomenon, but I suppose that, in a world of a few billion people, “many” is a pretty easy threshold to reach.

As for Anthony, who knows what his deal is? He seems to be reluctant to state that the photo isn’t his – only that he didn’t send it to the person in question. So I’ll take him at his word, since he doesn’t seem like a complete moron (though you never know, I guess). Maybe he likes to keep pictures of himself around to send to his wife. Who knows? But it sounds like Breitbart is involved somehow.

Speaking of not keeping your crotch properly restrained, John Edwards is set to get indicted or something today. It really doesn’t sound like he’s done anything “criminal” to me – just dumb. But we’ll see.

Oh well, it’s been a long week, and I’m glad it’s (almost) over with.

I was in the car yesterday with the radio on, and Linda Wertheimer was hawking her upcoming local appearance in support of NPR’s 40th anniversary. I’ve heard this before, but it was the first time that it occurred to me that I’m older than NPR. Not just older, but old enough to clearly remember a time before there was an NPR. Not that I actually do (remember). As far back as I can recall, there’s been a WCNY radio station, though I’m not really sure when they started (and I’m probably older than they are, too). They play Classical music, and I’ve never been terribly interested in that. Yeah, I know, I’m a Philistine. I don’t really recall a time before WAER, either. That’s the SU radio station that’s also an NPR affiliate when they aren’t broadcasting SU games and grooming the next generation of sports broadcasters. I used to listen to them a lot, back in the day, because they played a lot of jazz but also had a lot of alternative types of music as well. These days, when I listen to the radio, I mostly tune into the third NPR alternative, which is WRVO.

Mostly I don’t listen to the radio at all, though, because I find it kind of sucky. Not that there aren’t decent shows, of course. But I prefer to listen to those “on demand.” NPR news has mostly gotten to be your typical corporate “they say the sky is blue, the other side says the sky is green” false equivalence noise machine. That’s why I quit giving them money (though I continue to treasure my Car Talk coffee mug and Guy Noir bobblehead, which I think I are the only surviving pieces of swag I have, though there might be a Nina Totenbag around somewhere). Of course it’s still a lot better than the commercial radio “choices” we have here. I mean, I can only listen to “Free Bird” so many times – even the live version (“play it pretty for Atlanta”). So, happ

Yesterday was a tough day all around. It started out with not being able to find my shoes (they had apparently been stuffed in a plastic bag and hidden in a storage area where I would be sure not to find them – though had they not been stuffed in the bag, I’d have found them), and went downhill from there. I don’t know if it’s allergies, too much sun, 5-day weekend hangover, or I’m just coming down with something, but I felt like crap all day. I’ve been hitting the oil of oregano pretty hard, but I got a late start on it (because that, too, had been hidden and I didn’t get to it until I got home last night), so hopefully that will clear things up.

I really should have taken the whole week off.

Life is all about balance. Today, it’s about balancing being grateful for having a job against my complete and total lack of desire to go to work. Oh, I suppose I could always call in sick or something, but that would just be delaying the inevitable. Today’s my early day, too. Not that I’m not already up, and not that I won’t be glad I went in early when it comes time to go home, but right now I mostly just wanna sit around and vegetate.

But better to just get going and get it over with, I guess.

Happy Birthday to Andy Griffith, who hits 85 today.