is it wrong to mock my dog?

many of you have met and gotten to know my dog, jessie, who has subpar intelligence. ok...as far as i know, she isn't actually "stupid", but i like to tell her that she is every day. while dave and i find this type of mocking and ribbing endlessly funny and amusing, louise, playing the part of jessie's overprotective mother, is very much against this type of activity.

part of the reason i do this is, as described, it is funny to me, but it also partly because jessie is so babied and spoiled by louise, i figure this kind of evens things out. let's face it...i like to keep things real.
jessie is a dog, and due to this fact, she is not as smart as me and she cannot comprehend what i am saying, unless it's something like "i wish you were never born." so if i say something making fun of her intelligence, laziness, overall lack of fitness, bad licking habits or poor hygiene, she just thinks i am talking about what i am going to feed her next.
obviously i love my dog...more than i ever thought i would when we first got her 3 years ago. she is the perfect dog for me and people living in my house. she is very sweet-natured, always chillin and very low-maintenance. she does things that make me laugh all of the time. she can sense when i am sick and will try to make me feel better. i know if it ever came down to it, jessie would selflessly jump in to protect me. i really could not imagine a better dog than jessie.
with all of that in mind, i still like to explain to jessie that we could make another dog out of her excessive neck skin. i still call her dumb-dumb. i like to detail our plans of replacing her with a "good" dog. even though she doesn't smell (most of the time) i like to tell her that her odor is making people feel ill. i obviosly could go on.

i assume that this is harmless fun, but who knows? i assume she knows i love her and i also assume she doesn't understand what i am saying. beyond it being absurdly juvenille, are there any reasons i should take it down a notch? or squash it cold turkey?

messed up but true

back to black was one of my favorite albums of last year. nobody can deny winehouse's ridiculous, soulful voice. her songs are produced with slickness and polish. i'm not sure if she writes her own songs or not, but that aspect is also strong. honestly, i could listen to her sing anything, no matter how poorly crafted.

so it is with great sadness that i, along with the rest of the world, witness her awe-inspiring self-destruction and downfall. dave claims she was hot back in the day. i did a little internet research and while i wouldn't consider her "hot", she was definitely cute at one point in time. the visual contrast of how she looked a few years ago compared to now is jarring. for everyone's sake, i will refrain from posting any close-ups of her face while it appears to be melting. with her newly formed hunchback, she looks kind of like gargamel with a beehive hairdo. she has been to the hospital numerous times and was told that she will die soon if she does not change her ways. she responds by giving everyone a big f you and drinking/smoking/at levels that would give gary busey pause. either way...things are not looking up for amy winehouse.

her family has been trying to get her into rehab, slow her constant drinking, crack-smoking, etc. but to clearly no avail. she will not listen to reason and is basically like a wild animal. while there is a certain appeal to the don't-give-a-fuck, i do what i want to the point where it gets silly attitude that she exudes, it is an obvious detriment to her health and well...living.

so it is with that in mind that i plead for those involved, please get amy in the studio to record her follow-up to back in black. seriously...time is running out. it's pretty messed up, and while i would normally advocate that they stay strong and keep pushing the rehab angle, let's be honest here...the person below may have reached the point of no return.
so while she may not be long for this world, having a second album would be a great gift to those who appreciate her musical talents. imagine if biggie had not been gunned down, but instead had been diagnosed with some terminal disease? i believe he would have spent some time in the studio laying down as many tracks as he could. amy's descent has been going on for a while now, so it's time for those around her to be responsible, do the world a favor and get skinny in the studio to capture one more classic album to be treasured forever before the inevitable happens. it might seem greedy now, but society will thank you in the end.

what does mace stand for?

...it stands for boobies in my face! don't get that annoyingly random and obscure reference? well then you my friend need to view safehouse starring patrick "and then her pants just fall down" stewart. and yes, the bachelor party/birthday weekend was fun and exhausting. the strip club was weird as there were a lot of strippers there, who would come up and flirt with you to try to get you to buy a lapdance. i found this very uncomfortable. i instead watched the "free" show on stage, later advancing up front to give a few dollars and get boobies in my face from my favorite girl of the night, who looked a lot like the coach's daughter in friday night lights.


other highlights include:

• getting tipsy before we got to a.c.
• telling jim to bet on black, thus winning him $100
• learning that dan has that "titty club look"
• waving goodbye to sean's dignity
• knowing that unlike others, i am not done
• falling asleep playing video poker with nam at 3 am

chris' 30th was also fun. a decent number of people showed, but a lot of chris' full keg remained undrank. there was a lot of chatting, drinking, video games and mma watching. this also gave me and dave the opportunity to finally make our own salsa using his new food processor. ingredients included tomatoes, cilantro, red onion, garlic, lime zest and juice, habanero pepper, tomatillos, bell pepper, white wine vinegar, salt and pepper. thus the first batch of the salsa bros salsa was born and it turned out better than i had hoped. in my opinion, it was definitely better than any jarred salsa i have had and is on par with the best salsas i have had in restaurants. our next batch should be made any day now as we have been putting it on a lot of our food and are almost out. we picked up some new ingredients to play around with...so that should be fun. salsa.

coming up, louise and i have all the crazy wedding events to attend. i'm hoping they are fun and go by quickly. also, sean and brigitte will be getting married on saturday. i wish i could go and i hope that everyone there has a fun time as well. on sunday dave and i will be going to volunteer at the pgaspca. i have been meaning to get involved in some volunteer work for a long time, but i have been lazy. i am looking forward to helping out and i hope that nothing upsets me too bad while i am there.

one more thing to note is that our annual friends fantasy football league has been started back up by phil. i am already in too many leagues...but oh well. let the campaign for more bench spots begin...

just poker and liquor

this weekend seems to be filled with more activities than usual and by more i mean 2. coming up, we are headed to atlantic city for sean's bachelor party. who knows how drunk i will be? it's a mystery i am excited to solve. luckily my perma-sober friend nam will be chauffeuring us to and from as well as around the city of atlantic.
i have gone through various stages of gambling...often times foolishly feeling as though i could win money on a regular basis. i am now at a stage of gambling where i really couldn't be more conservative. gone are the days of blowing through $100 in 10 minutes playing 3 card poker. these are the days of slowly losing 25 cents at a time playing video poker...making sure to take as many money-saving breaks between hands as i possibly can, while still getting free drinks. i reflected upon this new state of mind as i played video poker at lunch on my new ipod touch (new love of my life...sorry louise...but that's another entry for another time...) and noticed that i was doing the same thing i do in the casino. i was taking long breaks and playing with only the minimum. mind you, this is all involving fake money. now if i am feeling brave (drunk) enough, i might venture into the poker rooms, where i have actually done ok in (broke even), but i know that a majority of my gambling will be done pressing buttons on a touch screen, while desperately looking for the cocktail waitress.
i also realize that with most other bachelor parties, there will be a strong push to go to a strip club or four. i have only been to two strip clubs...both from nam's bachelor party...and honestly, i am not really into them. the whole experience just feels weird to me. yes looking at hot (although usually fake-looking) girls sounds fun, but something about it seems creepy. who knows...maybe the girls in new jersey know what it do...or maybe i will be too drunk or excited about my huge winnings to care.

also up this weekend is chris' 30th birthday party. wow...my liver will not be happy with me this weekend. i know chris had hopes for a keg...although i don't know if we will have enough people to warrant this. also...most of our friends tend to not drink in excess...wusses. either way, it should be a fun time with some possible basketball, drinking games, videogames and a free mma broadcast. now we just need to figure who will drive...virtual finger on nose!




er...close enough

can you touch it?

well i came across a deal for refurbished ipods and thought long and hard about what to do. i am very intrigued by the ipod touch and all the touching that is involved. it seems like an iphone without the phone, which is fine since i have a good cell phone that i never use anyways. the problem is, they are expensive compared to the old boring ipods and they have much less storage capacity. initially this seemed like a problem for me as i have accumulated roughly 5o gigs of music, with about 30 gigs of stuff on my current busted ipod. the touch comes in 8, 16 and 32 gig varieties. i knew 8 would never cut it, so that option went out the window. i figured 32 would work, but the idea of spending $430 + tax on it seemed just a little out of price range. the 16 gig for $299 seemed like the best fit like i was an ipod goldilocks.
so i started to go through my massive music collection and began to remove things from itunes that i never listen to. well there was a lot of stuff that i had just collected cause it was free, but never listened to (oneida, menomena, etc). there were a lot of downloads where i shrugged my shoulders and thought "why not?"(dr. aliemento, iron & wine). there was a lot of music that i held onto because it was music that was made by groups/musicians that i know are good, but never really did anything for me (grizzly bear, the national, victor vaughn, etc.) there was also a lot of full albums i got where i realized i only really liked one or two songs (yael naim, bats for lashes, etc.)

after many trips through my music collection i took out all of the non-essentials and stuff that deep down inside i knew that i would never listen to and widdled everything down to under 13 gigs (of all lil wayne mix tapes, just kidding...but he does take up more than his fair share of space in my itunes). looking through it now, my collection is now a lot tighter with all music i know well and love. this will end the days of someone picking some random song on my ipod while i am driving and me having to embarassingly ask, "who is this?"

i realize now that i held on to all of that old music like a musical packrat. in the same way cleaning out old, useless junk from your basement (which i would like to do sometime in the near future), cleaning out a lot of old music i would never listen to felt surprisingly good.

so i will hopefully be touching sometime tomorrow, while retiring my old and loved ipod boring to my bedroom where it can still function perfectly well in my ipod stereo dock.

in other random news, i learned that one of my faves, amy poehler will be starring in the new office spinoff, which also includes the ridiculous aziz ansari. i don't see how this could fail. it would be nice to round out the cast with another snl alum, rachel dratch, who is equally hilarious, if not quite as nice to look at (i am referring to poehler by the way). it could make up for her getting the shaft from 30 rock.

other stuff

there are a few more things that i wanted to blog about as i have not been very active in that department for a while.

the input on my ipod is broken. when i told this to louise and dave i received two very different reactions. dave gave me a look of sympathy and was like, "aw man..i'm sorry, that sucks..." louise flashed a joker-esque smile and pretty much was like "told you so..." her hatred of apple is so strong that it actually made her visibly happy when something bad happened to me, just because it involved apple. this led to discussions with dave on turning our house into an apple household, which was actually helped by his purchasing of an ipod nano. i had this ipod for over 2 and a half years and used it constantly, while often treating it pretty roughly, so overall i am not surprised with it's current problems and feel like considering those factors, it performed pretty well. i am not sure what i am going to do next, because i could send it away and get it "fixed" for like $100. i could go and buy some new non-ipod mp3 player and make louise happy. or i could just bite the bullet and get a new 80 gig ipod for $250. i am leaning towards the 80 gig...but we'll see.

my roommate nicki is off to honduras today to do volunteer work, working with iguanas. she will be gone for a month and i admire her ability to just jump into something like that without any experience. i have a feeling she will do good work and really enjoy her time down there. i know she has thoughts of singing up for the peace corp, and i think that this is probably a good way for her to realize whether being away from home for a long time in some foreign country is right for her.

my brother's wife's sister is having a gigantic indian wedding in a few weeks. they are all very nice people and i think that this wedding will be quite spectacular in every sense. safely assuming that nobody reads this, specifically not my brother, his wife or her relatives, i can complain that they are having way too many events...at least for my liking...for this wedding. there's like 3 other seperate party/event things prior to the wedding. the wedding day itself starts early in the morning, breaks at noon and then reconvenes for various other events later in the afternoon. this will go for who knows how long. i will know like 5 people there. i will have to wear a suit. i am very happy for the couple, but it will be a long day. also i should note that i will be missing my friend sean's wedding, which is also that day. oh well...i know i will at least be getting my fill of delicious indian food, instead of the steak or fish options provided by sean. also, the groom will enter the ceremony on a white horse while carrying a giant sword...

for once i am excited enough about some new movies that i will probably see them in the theater. these include the new batman movie, pineapple express and stepbrothers. movies that i will not see and that actually cause a bad physical reaction whenever i hear about them or see their previews...love guru and that eddie murphy movie. you can add mike meyers to that list of people that i do not find funny...he's seriously awful.

i don't think i had blogged about it before, but i have developed an interest in foraging. something about going out into nature and taking plants to eat for free is very alluring to me. i purchased a book on foraging and have discussed going out into the woods with dave to retrieve some edible plants and fungi. i still want to do this, but it is the middle of the summer and thusly too hot for me to be outside for long. also, the story about that family that started going crazy and having convulsions after mistakenly eating some weed instead of mint leaves me a little wary.

there are a lot of 30th birthdays on the horizon, including mine. it sort of sucks leaving my 20's, but i tend not to dwell on it...as i've stated to my friends many times, 30 is the new 12. chris' birthday is coming up soon and he is having a party, which i am looking forward to and hoping that there is a lot of drunken stupidity.

90210 is coming back this fall...and i am especially excited about this...why? you ask? the wonderful lori loughlin will be in it...sigh...