Local nuisance

Me and Maw had gone to bed, our bodies drained and weary,
I felt a hand upon my head, I opened one eye, bleary,
'twas tiny little Tommy, his young eyes all wide with fright,
He looked from me to Mommy, then he peered into the night

"Why, Tom, my funny little lad, what's with this late-night waking?
Have you seen something bad?" He had, he said, his hands a-shaking.
His little voice began to rise, he blurted out with feeling,
"A gargoyle that has light-up eyes is pooping on the ceiling!"

I was taken quite aback, did not know what to say.
That's not the kind of fact you're used to hearing every day.
And then, I guess, it dawned on me, that Tommy still was waiting,
I guess I'd have to go and see this ghastly defecating.

So through the door and down the stair, outside to see this proof
And sure enough, a gargoyle's there a-poopin' on the roof.
He looked at me with light-up eyes, his manner grand and haughty
And squeezing out one last surprise, completed his foul potty.

And then he stood against the sky and gave us one last glare
He spread his wings, began to fly, and vanished in the air.
Me and Tommy rarely speak, the subject gives us tingles.
But once in a while we have to peek at the pile up on the shingles...

Default mode...

Brought some friends with me

Tell Michelle that I like my monstrous potholders so much I brought them with me.  ROWR!

Liberals hate oil

Sure, I'm in Massachusetts, notorious democratic stronghold, cradle of the Kennedys --who got rich the good liberal way, not by selling you legal oil to pour into your car, but by being drug dealers: selling you illegal booze you could pour down your throat-- home to the arty-farty Berkshires, wherein I am currently located.  A place that probably has more mimes than plumbers.  So if your toilet breaks, a mime will come to your house and teach you how to pretend to poop, instead.

And liberals hate oil. Oil reeks of Bush and things Bushy and Texas and killing A-rabs to keep our lawn tractors full and Bush and fat-cat businessmen with cigars and giant oily bags of loot with dollar signs on them and Bush and oligarchs and Bush. Unfortunately, as with so many things we deprecate and fulminate against --our parents, our jobs, cable television, Barry Manilow-- part of the hatred is wrapped up intimately with the undeniable fact that we need these things desperately and even secretly like and admire them.  But oil isn't like our jobs --grumbling like an underground cancer bothers oil not a whit-- nor is it like our parents --we can stomp off to our rooms all night long and oil isn't going to give a shit. 

Massachusetts realizes this, surrounded and filled as she is with giant petrol tanks to warm the rural houses and lots full of huge, thirsty plows to deal with the narrow wintry highways that wind through gentle hills, punctuated by the kind of fire hydrants that have long golf-hole-style flags on them to indicate where they are in deep, deep snow.  Massachusetts needs her oil.  And judging from the proudly gleaming (and occasionally even decorated) oil tanks everywhere, Massachusetts LOVES her oil.  But oil is bad. Oil is a slut. Massachusetts loves her oil, but only call it by dirty, dirty names. You naughty, naughty, oil.  I wasn't able to get pictures of the trucks for Gross Oil or Throw Up-y Hideous Turd Squeezings Oil, but you get the drift.

Hard to stop once you hit your stride...

Clouds and thunderstorms boiled out of nowhere, sending the blue skies retreating northward, fleeing the fat-dropped deluge in their wake.  We all dashed off the driving tees and into the little hut where you get the buckets of balls, hoping it would blow over. Except this one kid.  "She just figured out how to hit the ball and is worried she'll lose it again," her dad said.  She stayed out there hitting balls in a heavy downpour at least until I gave up and left 15 minutes later.  Man. I remember being a kid and saying, 'Screw it, I'll just stay out in the hurricane.'  Sigh. I miss having that attitude.

A mystery!

Al Gore (portrayed here by TW) has lost his Oscar and can't find it anywhere! Can you help him?!

Rainy, so....

One things this area has in abundance is...

...your house.  And not just your house: your mall.

These are the offending trousers

My pants DID call you the other day, sorry. They've been calling everyone.  They called a Taiwanese sex-chat-line last friday evening and talked for 2 hours. Those darn pants!  Now it seems they are engaged to a young woman named Suling Something-or-the-other. She's quite pushy. She keeps calling and screaming, "I AM THE MRS. PANTS! YOU SEND CHECK! YOU SEND CHECK NOW!"

I may have to lose the pants.

A Tiny Ode to Corn

I love my corn; so carbo-sweet,
A variegated, wholesome treat,
As snackery, it can't be beat,
(Except it gets caught in my teet')

Warning: Disgust alert

This is what is left after 90 minutes of tennis on a cloudy day: a few dozen pounds of sweat-soaked clothes and eyebrows.Thank god the sun wasn't out. Ugh.

I've been a fool

OK, how long have I been coming here? Years. Sweating and hitting tennis balls and swimming laps and steamily slogging through buckets of golf balls in 90+ degree weather.  And right next to the courts, I've discovered, is a refreshing spa, filled with showers and jacuzzis and saunas and steam rooms and clean, fluffy towels and bathing sandals and lockers and -when all is done- a dimly-lit,soft-music-infused comfy room with a fireplace, beverages, and bowls of fruit. It certainly makes staggering in off of the courts a  more soothing proposition.

Why the hell didn't I notice this before? All this time I've been using a much crappier locker room next to the pool. Our perq's are few, but they're not that bad, it turns out...

Where the rich folks play

These are the tennis courts we use at the Cranwell resort.  They're nice, covered with this fancy-schmancy granular, faux-clay substrate.   It's like sand: artificial powdered earth that has a nice deadening effect on the bounce of the ball, causing it to hang a bit after it strikes the ground, giving older sinews and bones at least some chance to hustle over to it and give it a whack.  The downside? Well, like anything grainy, running around on it and having speedy tennis ball ricochet off of it deform the surface and after an hour or so, every bounce becomes an adventure.  It does give you a built-in excuse when you screw up, though, so that's nice.

The lifeblood of the Berkshires is ART!

Almost anywhere you drive, you can find examples of the decorative habits of a uselessly artistic populace.  Here we see --gracing the nearby front yard of what I believe is an insurance conglomerate-- a typical example:

Titled* "The Rape of Gaia by the Sun", we see a sundial --I believe representing the artist-- clearly raping the crap out of Gaia, the sphere, representing...I don't know...I suppose the insurance company that purchased the piece. I'm not sure how that representative stuff works, I'm just guessing.

But I think it's a pretty good guess.



*It is almost certainly not titled that. But it should be.

Catch!

Marc and I waxing mannish at the Yankee Suites, photos courtesy Bari.  The first picture is of me about to catch a ball. So is the second one, you just can't see me. I caught them both, by the way; I am far more athletic than I was in my youth.  Scant milliseconds after the second photo was taken my glove insinuated itself to prevent the softball from slamming into Bari's face.  Was I right to do so? Only God can judge me in that.

The inside story of fruits and vegetables...

OK, this relates to nothing in the world, but is just plain cool:  MRI imaging of foodstuffs.  The broccoli is like fireworks; the artichoke is like hyperspace.  The corn is like rushing through an intricately-geared clock. It  makes me want to be fourth-dimensional.  Spatially, that is.  Father, I see your time objection looming ahead.

Missed opportunity

As is - a little funny. However, if I hadn't been so concerned with being surreptitious, I would have successfully captured the giant, 'Active wear!' sign above her head. Then it would have been really funny. Ah well...

3rd Thursday

Went to Pittsfield's acclaimed (by themselves, at least) Third Thursday Celebration.  On the third Thursday of every month in the summer the town closes off the main north-south road through town and people roam the tarmac seeking holistic massages, candy corn, and codpieces crafted from the fines hemp. There is an underage, barely competent teenage band cranking out high-volume suburban pseudo-angst on every corner, and the streets are lined with cool old cars on display, some of them with ludicrous sound systems. They also featured a beach created in the parking lot of a hardware store, a skateboard stunt area, and the saddest, hottest fake H.R. Pufenstuf I have ever seen.  What makes me sad, though, is that -although supposedly in attendance- I never saw these guys.  That would have been ridiculous and great.

Attend the Tale...

And I did, last night. Hard to tell from this dim photo, but this is the preset of the Barrington Stage Company's production of 'Sweeney Todd.' Very well done. The chorus voices were superb; the lady who played Mrs. Lovett could not really sing at all, but I have never seen anyone compensate for a lack so beautifully.  I ended up forgetting she couldn't sing, which is amazing since I'm usually a real jerk about that kind of thing.  She was hilarious --got laughs out of the material that I didn't even know were there, and I've know this show pretty well-- easy to see why she won a Tony for Best Supporting in 'Thoroughly Modern Millie' a couple of years back. 

Didn't care so much for the Sweeney, but I think I'm biased and can give no report not snottily invested with my own insufferable preferences.  Bari swooned over him.  I think having him be a swoonable sort was sort of the problem.  I don't think GQ or James Bond when I think Sweeney.  He looked kinda like Craig Ferguson. With much of that same energy.  And haircut. Ah, but I am cranky and set in my ways...

How delightfully convenient...

Hitting golf balls is free for me here. Fortunately, it actually seems to be good for my sore shoulder parts: it helps 'unfreeze' them. Sweet. It's pretty bad for the cursing and glowering and being pissed-off parts, however.

I was amused at two old duffers hitting balls next to me. One studied the other one's clubs for a minute and said, "Harry, is that a new Ω-iron you've got there? Didn't you just get a new one? What was wrong with it?" The other studied his ball carefully for a minute before hooking it sharply into the woods on the left of the tees, "Couldn't swim," he replied.

Pic-a-nik

Here we are gathered together having our annual CranBash. We have mustered ourselves in the area behind my building, as it is the only open area that affords any shady relief from the battering sun.  Aside from our usual tradition, we are celebrating the fact that Andy is about to go off to Bulgaria on Thursday to film a SyFy channel movie. Quite exciting.  For now it is called 'Black Forest.' Keep your eyes open in the future. He plays a man who becomes a demon. At some point he has to rape his wife, who is in a coma.  (I must add here that Janet asked right after that if he was the hero of the movie.  Andy wasn't sure, but I suggested that in the many job responsibilities of 'hero' I have seen, 'raping someone in a coma' rarely, if ever, appears.

We were going to have games; since Andy's film company has already warned him numerous times about hot, sexy, porno Bulgarian chicks trying anything* to get married to actors who come over there so they can get to America, I tried to create a quick and dirty version of 'Pin the Green Card on Andy', but to no avail.  We settling for staring contests. Here we see Dr. Marc Irwin about to lose a tense match with the hotel grill.


*Presumably including raping someone in a coma

A Sunday get-together on Monday

We are having our Sunday brunch today; I am contributing my usual fruit salad. Being actors, we couldn't be bothered to get the Sunday brunch together on Sunday. Also, your traditional 'brunch' occurs sometimes before the hour of noon. In general, aside from life-support activities, we do not occur before noon.  Some of us barely occur at all.  So our brunch is really a linner or a dunch.

Our 'Green Room'.

Not exactly, heh.  However, we have no room backstage so if you want to talk on the phone or have a quiet place to read, right outside the stage door you go, where we have this lovely view of the Cranwell practice putting green. I'll say this for golf: it's pretty.  And even prettier if you watch the LPGA. When did lady golfers turn from scary lesbians into hot young babes? I'm all for it, whenever it was!

Mini-Golfery

We drove quite a ways to an inferior entertainment complex featuring anemic go-carts, desultory bumper boats halfheartedly trying to thrash it out in a pool about 10' square, grisly snacks, disgruntled attendants, and more-than-usually mentally-deficient-appearing clientele.  And, inexplicably, a great, hard, colorful, and thoroughly ill-maintained miniature golf course. My superior skills led to a victory, but it was close.

WAMC studios, Albany,NY

Did a radio show performance for a public station in New York. They've taken over a bank and the green room is located in the vault. Freakin' neat. Blurry Janet here standing in the blurry vault door. Stay cool, guys. Love you.

Make your own word clouds

This is the picture I get after pointing Wordle at your blog, Mom, and tweaking its parameters.  You can also paste in a bunch of text to make a cloud.  Kinda cool and fun to play with.

Things you may not care about

Well, Johanna and Matt went to the baseball game last night...had the usual cheap seats, way up.  Somehow they ended up being gifted seats right behind home plate -- somewhere I've never been.  Lucky ducks!  Since I am in Massachusetts and there is nothing but a smothering layer of Red Sox crap everywhere, I have to watch Nats' games online via MLB.com's Gameday Animation. Note that while the views Jo and I enjoyed of the game last night are <i>sorta</i> the same, hers is really much better.

Parade, Part VII

So maybe everything we saw was not Red, White, and Blue,
Still, the Tiny Shriners help us bid the Fourth a fond adieu...

Happy Holidays, guys, love you!

Parade, Part VI

And I sort of have to question Harry Potter, teenage Wiz...
And Egypt..and the Sully Van, whatever the hell that is....