Charlie's Stir Fry

poetry, humor and stuff

[charliegd]

Freeze Your Ass Off!

One of the worst things about weather like we’re having is that people tend to freeze their asses off and forget them.  The asses tend to wander off and congregate in odd places, looking like a gaggle of geese or a Republican party meeting with the usual amount of gas. 

Moral of the story?  Dress warmly so you don’t freeze your ass off.  If you do, be sure to grab your ass and take  it home with you so you can stick it back on…..assuming you want it.  I’ve heard super glue or peanut butter work well.

Don’t forget, this is a good opportunity to pose your ass nicely and take a decent photograph of it for a change.  Such photos are called “sassies” rather than selfies.  Check out the “sassie” group on FB.  They don’t have a tweet account yet, but when they do, they’ll be tweet and sassie.

[charliegd]

Molecular Harmony

This kind of cold, snowy weather puts me in the mood for some Bull kelp relish...now if I could only find some bull Kelp! It doesn't seem to grow here in the country, we have bulls but what the hell is kelp?

That's what happens when your molecular harmony gets messed up. I've got to check my medication or maybe its time to put on my stretch monkey suit and sculpt famous people from wonder bread??? Oh well, its only Wednesday!

[charliegd]

Object of Wonder

Looked up and saw my dog watching me, this time standing in the doorway with a bone in his mouth. We looked at each other for a minute and I thought perhaps I was an object of wonder and mystery in his doggy brain, just beyond his understanding?

Or was he standing there wondering, "How did you get to be such a big dumb ass?" Probably, I'll never know. Oh well, on to Monday.

[charliegd]

Thought it was Tomorrow

Thought I'd share this week's Saturday safari.  I didn't realize today was today at first.  I thought it was yesterday while hoping it was tomorrow.  Some days are like that!  I've decided to wait until tomorrow to decide!

[charliegd]

Purple Potato Party

I called you all here to announce that I’m running for political office.  In the following order, I will run for Michigan Governor, US Senator, US Representative, Presidential Dog Walker or White House pop corn vendor.  If none of those work out, I’ll run for President in 2016.  My slogan for any of these will be “Put a NEW nut in office! The old ones had their chance!”  Donations are cheerfully accepted!

When I run for office, I will be a member of the Purple Potato Party, whose goal is to encourage growing and using of these colorful, nutritious spuds in the US.  Other goals will be equality for vegans, tofu in every pot, Yoga in the morning, and the roasting of Tofurkeys for Christmas instead of ham.  We will also fight dumpster diving as that is a very unhealthy practice.  You can pick up diseases from those used pizza boxes. Besides all that, I need a better pension!!

In getting ready to run for political office, I decided I should have my excuses in order.  So here’s a list of all purpose political excuses for whatever situation may arise.

 I’m not a crook.

I’ve never had relations with that woman.

What bridge?

I was disoriented because of my medication.

I did it one one of my drunken stupors.  (Rob Ford)

I didn’t grope anyone.  That was a tickle fight!

I have a wide stance when going to the bathroom.  It only looked like an invitation.(Larry Craig)

I was hacked.  (Anthony Weiner)

That bitch set me up.  (Marion Barry)

I was entrapped by the Government.

I was hiking the Appalatian Trail.  (Mark Sandford)

I felt like it!! Na na nah na!

[charliegd]

Rebob

Rebob (son of Bob) was heavily into drugs back in the sixties.  After one particularly strong and trying mescaline and beer fueled night of hallucination, he decided he had to repay it all and go to work for God.

He became a street preacher and began to seriously annoy people for God!  Unfortunately, part of his ability to annoy, and he certainly had that, was his breath reminding those who experienced it of smelly feet and bananas. 

Despite that, he always said he was hoping to prevent his and our afterlives from being beige.  Rebob also said this work often made him so happy,  he was like “doo, do doo do doo, do do doo!”  He would break into a little dance and sing an old Lou Reed song, channeling Lou Reed right in downtown Hastings.  Everyone who passed him on the street, giving him a lot of space, could see he was happy if weird as a frog in a blizzard. 

He eventually gave that up, except for occasional returns, and went to work on his dad’s farm.  He also gained some notoriety by introducing, if not very successfully, kiteboarding to Coats Grove.  There aren’t any oceans around here, but we do have a few lakes and streams.  People lost interest after watching several adventurers sail into barns and silos.  One boarder landed in a pig pen and barely escaped with his life.

So Rebob gave that up to and settled for a life on his tractor.  Even after all the drugs and reoccurring paranoia because of a few scrambled synapses, Rebob can plow a pretty straight line.

[charliegd]

Football, Farmers and Frostbite

George, one of our local wheat farms and definitely at old fart at 72, has been hospitalized. He is a serious Green Bay Packers fan (Same color as his John Deere tractor! and he loves wearing his cheesehead!) who just had to go to the Packers game last weekend despite the snow and coldest temperatures ever for a football game in an open air stadium! Not only that, but after seven or eight beers, he showed his loyalty and his ass by streaking the field at half-time.

At 72, this process is a bit slower than for younger folk. He made it as security was shocked into immobility by the sight of his saggy old butt, but it took him so long that he frostbit his ass and had to go to the hospital with it seriously blackened.

As it works out, he didn’t lose his ass (an assectomy??) but did lose several layers of skin and had to remain in the hospital. George has always been kind of a free spirit (Used to moon the Reverend and his wife from the John Deere as he plowed.) and enjoyed leaving it hanging out for the sake of the nurses and others who learned to quickly pass by his room.

Eventually, they talked him into wearing a larger than usual bath robe which he only occasionally, opened to flash whoever might be unwise enough to look in his direction. Last I heard, Doctors were checking into how soon they could release George and his case of blackened, frostbit ass and get him back home to his neighbors. They think someone must miss him.

I don’t think George will do any more sub zero streaking for awhile.

[charliegd]

Forget Snowden and the NSA! Commercial Interests Make Them Look Like Amateurs

            Too late!  The damage is already done and the fuss over Edward Snowden and the data collection activities of the NSA and the Utah ‘data farms” being built to house it are silly.  Even though specialist will “mine” the data for information about us, the damage has already been done by commercial interests and these invasions of our privacy have been going on for a number of years.

            Look at a product on line and go back to Facebook, chances are you’ll see an ad for the product to the side….a result of data collection.  If you go to the doctor or hospital, have one of those electronic cards at the grocery store, use a credit or debit card and so on, someone is collecting and selling information about you.

            Any survey you take, an application you fill out, anything you do online provides more information which is nearly always collected and sold  or give to companies which specialize in the collection, mining and resale of the information they discover.

            Commercial enterprises have the government beat all to hell and have been working on it nearly since computers have been available for household use.  You’ve heard of computer “cookies?”  If you use a computer connected to the Internet, someone is collecting information about your activities.  Like to look at boobs or hot, ripped young firemen?   No secret.

            In addition to the server/data farms being constructed in Utah, a huge number are being built in Iceland.  They’re converting an old NATO air force base into a huge facility, using Iceland’s colder temperatures to help cool the servers for commercial use.  So far, $41 billion has been spent on that project which uses data speeds of five terabytes per second.

            And think of all the data they can collect:  medical including prescriptions, financial, eating habits, how time is spent, programs you like to watch and listen to, books you like to read, the kinds of clothes you wear and cars you drive, hobbies, political and charity activities, favorite colors, travel habits, and much, much more.  Its all already out there!

              More examples…..they track over the counter drug purchases and everything your cell phone carrier knows.  They know your gender, ethnicity, education, hobbies, income levels, if you’re pregnant or have children or have aids or have been raped or nearly any other health condition. They know if you smoke, are selling your home, have trouble sleeping. Further, the data is collected and associated with your ZIP code, so every time someone asks you for it, they are enabling some company to learn more about you.

            The data is sold to data brokerages by retailers, banks, credit card issuers, airliners, hotels, auto sales companies, Facebook and all other social media and so on.  “Data brokers” who work in the companies that have sprung up, compile the information for “predictive analysis or modeling.”  Companies come back to them for information, up to 800 separate attributes about each of us and the groups we are in

            The largest of these companies is Acxiom which had, as of several years ago, information about 190 million people.  Verizon started a branch of their company called “Precision Marketing Insights” and combined information they had with demographic data compiled by Experian.  They claim to be able to provide data about specific groups which will give a 35% lift to sales.

           Think about the vast electronic seas of information, all digital, 0s and 1s, electrons and protons swirling around.  One can only wonder when some technologic spark will enable some sort of living, sentient, independent creature(s) to merge from the electronic swamp, come to life and haunt us from inside our computers or something.

            OK, a bit fanciful, but my point is that you might as well stop worrying about it.  Everything has already been done and the NSA looks like an amateur next to the commercial interests doing it.  Everything is already out there.  So get so much data out there, get your name in so many places as you can and hope that mining the data becomes more and more difficult,

             If you want proof, check out  aboutthedata.com or search the terms “data brokers” and so on.  You’ll find lots of information from reputable sources.

[charliegd]

As As the Sentate begins considering an unemployment extension

“We often forget that the divine is so often concealed in the common,” another thought that comes from a Nadia Bolz-Weber sermon. Our federal government would do well to remember this as they cut unemployment and various programs that feed the poor, including many hungry children, refuse to increase the minimum wage, try to cut Social Security and Medicare, and so on.

Perhaps God, in whatever form, is lurking in the midst of these poor people, watching how well we take care of them, and saddened by our many failures. We are told to take care of the weakest in our society as well as each other, no matter how drug addicted or ill, no matter what race, gender or religion, and its clear that we need to do a better job.

[charliegd]

Playing in the Mud of Daily Life

Three days after New Years, with more storms approaching, and I remain tethered to normalcy by a single fraying thread.  It is still true that worlds don’t begin and end in this steady mud of daily life but that’s OK.   Despite the mud,  however mundane daily life might be at times, I like being a person.  I like getting up in the morning, talking to my wife, being harassed by my kids, fussing at the cats, petting the dog,  reading my books, playing/ working with the computer, hearing bits of your lives, listening to the birds and looking at the sunshine or snow, writing a bit and so on….playing in the mud of daily life.  I resolve to try and keep doing it this year. The prospects for living at least another year are good according to a recent check up.  The doctor did comment that I had some unusual activity in my temporal lobe, not knowing that any activity was unusual and that when my brain cells were active, they frequently refused to work together.    Whatever, I’ll keep going trapped in arrested development though I may be.  Here, we should have a good year at least, another brief and sun kissed second of life, muddy though it will probably be, still glorious.   I wish you one too.

[chandragarbha-deactivated201302]

[charliegd]

Failed Resolutions

      I’m reminded of a nearly yearly failed resolution.  I thought of trying the “belly fat diet” but decided to try the “fat ass diet” instead, which was developed by the same people who bring us the “I hate my butt” infomercial, but not the same people who do the "Brazilian Butt Lift" infomercial. Anne Lamont has some helpful advice along these lines.  She urges us to buy “forgiving pants” that won’t make us feel like Jabba the Hut and which remember that we don’t want to hear their opinion of how our diet is going. She also comments that she never buys a scale because that is like “asking Dick Cheney to give you a sense of your own self-worth.”  Good advice although I don’t know if I’ll have any more luck than usual with diet resolutions and will probably end up trying to mind my own biscuits.  Good luck with yours this year.

[charliegd]

Country Condiments

   My sister (Thanks Tillie) gave me some excellent mustard called “Mrs. Dog’s Disappearing Mustard (Sweet, Hot & Spicy.)”  It was so good that I decided to try making my own, so we’ve started a small company here in the country to make and market five condiments with recipes we’ve gathered from our country ancestors.  They are: 1.     Super Chunky Charlie (Our lumpiest hot salsa) 2.    On the Edge (Green salsa so good, it’ll make you jump!) 3.    Mr. Cat’s Superior Hot Coarse Ground Mustard (So course, it looks like kitty liter on your hot dog.) 4.    Froggy Bottom Mustard (Ground till it’s green as a frog’s bottom) 5.    Squeek’s Chucksup – (MADE FROM TOMATOES!) Help us out and pick up a jar when you see it on your grocery shelf, soon available by mail order.

[charliegd]

Claude & Christmas Mistletoe

            Some of the old guys out here in the country get awful lonesome this time of year.  Claude, who lived across the road used to carry a metal coin with off-color images on it that he would try to show my wife and any other woman he ran across.  I don’t know if he thought the sight of that would make women fall in love or be overcome with lust, but too my knowledge, it never worked.

In his early eighties, he got lonesome enough he tried to show it to me once.  He claimed once side had a picture of his bare ass, but it looked like a walnut half, wrinkly and saggy. Frankly and not meaning to be unkind, I never found it very appealing.

            He got into trouble one year because he kept asking nearly every woman he met, regardless of age, if they’d had a Brazilian wax job and could he see it.  That got a little ugly when dementia set in and he forgot who his daughters were.

            He used to carry a can of spray mistletoe and a stencil around with him.  He’d spray paint a mistletoe sprig on the forehead of any woman who didn’t look too much like his hog, Helowiese, then try to kiss her.  Most of the women weren’t that slow, so it didn’t work too often.   There was a farmer’s wife in a wheel chair?

We don’t have many murders here in the country, but by he time Claude hit 85, he was such a pain about all this that there was some talk of it…  Didn’t help that Claude drooled like a bull dog!  I always wondered how he got along with the nurses after he had to go to the veteran’s hospital.  Have a great holiday!

[charliegd]

All This Fuss

            I continue to be amazed at why there is such a fuss over the data collection activities of the NSA and the Utah ‘data farms”  being built to house it.  Specialist will “mine” the data for needed information.

            In the meantime, if you look at a product on line and go back to Facebook, chances are you’ll see an ad for the product to the side….a result of data collection.  If you go to the doctor or hospital, have one of those electronic cards at the grocery store, use a credit or debit card and so on, someone is collecting and selling information about you.

            Commercial enterprises have the government beat all to hell for collecting information and have been working on it nearly since computers have been available for household use.  In fact, if you use a computer connected to the Internet, someone is collecting information about your activities.  Like to look at boobs or hot, ripped young firemen?  Your activity is being noted, along with other personal information and probably sold to someone.

            Have you read about the server farms (same as a data farm) being constructed in Iceland?  They’re converting an old NATO airforce base into a huge facility, using Iceland’s colder temperatures to help cool the servers for commercial use.  So far, $41 billion has been spent on the project and they talk about data speeds of five terabytes per second.

            And think of all the data they can collect:  medical including prescriptions, financial, eating habits, how time is spent, programs you like to watch and listen to, books you like to read, the kinds of clothes you wear and cars you drive, hobbies, political and charity activities, favorite colors, travel habits, and much, much more.  Its all already out there!

            Think about the vast electronic seas of information, all digital, 0s and 1s, electrons and protrons swirling around.  One can only wonder when some technologic spark with cause some sort of living, sentient, independent creature(s) to merge from the electronic swamp and walk around or invade our computers or something.

            OK, a bit fanciful, but my point is to get so much data out there, get your name in so many places, that mining the data becomes more and more difficult, because the data farms are so vast.  The point being?? stop worrying and put it out there!

[charliegd]

Brighten the Charlieverse

If I were a bell, I’d be ringing If I were a bird, I’d be singing But since I’m an old fart, I’ll be groaning cheerfully, despite it all, I like being a person I think I’ll keep at it and die only after a much longer battle with consciousness, “striving for more high self-esteem positive thinking BS” trying to brighten the Charlieverse. ---heard the bell line on the Internet,     the source of much ringing these days

[charliegd]

Pack of Chihauhaus

Local Chihauhau Pack Many parts of the country have problems with gangs of roaming animals or insects.  Texas and Michigan have problems with wild pigs and Florida has problems with fire ants and huge snakes taking over the everglades.  New York City has problems with rats and roaches not to mention some of the insects! Australia has problems with huge cane toads But we’ve developed a different problem here in the country in SW Michigan, we have several packs of marauding chihauhaus!  Now, I have to admit that a herd of yappy, bulgy eyed little dogs chasing John down the street was kind of funny, but I draw the line when they tear up my wife's tulips, chase our dog Scraggles or terrorize the cats, Taco and Bell. I mean after all, we have enough shit to deal with without stuff like that!  It all start when an old couple, Hubert and Hilda, passed away on the same night (probably Hilda’s cooking) leaving their three chihauhaus alone in the house.  People who finally opened the front door where knocked down by the dogs energetically running over them.    Chihauhaus breed rapidly and the rest is history.  Bad enough that we have a bunch of the bulgy eyed little freaks running around, but they’re inbred as well.  Of course, that’s kind of the theme of the county anyway.  Lot’s of people around here are bulgy eyed.  Rumor has it, and their children tend to back it up, that George and Gertrude down the street, were brother and sister long before they were married.    Know what has an IQ of 150?  148 chihauhaus and their two owners.  Chihauhaus can be long or short haired and our herd is all short haired, some so short they even look a bit bald.  They go running by like that herd of dogs I remember from when I was a kid, in a cloud of dust with the smallest barking like hell and bringing up the rear.   Various things lead these processions, sometimes a hog, sometimes a farmer.  One of my neighbors swears that every now and then he sees a rat or two running with the pack.  Hard to tell the difference.  We used to have a lot of bigger dogs living in the area but most of them choked on one of the chihauhaus.  Gotta go!  I hear them coming now!