The Bosque

I have no real excuse for where I've been...I just haven't felt like posting. But I figured that I better post soon, otherwise Monken would get pissed off at me for not giving him something to break up the monotony of his day.

Monken and I went to a big rock show Sunday night at the Family Arena in nearby St. Charles: Heaven & Hell (Black Sabbath with Dio on vocals) with opening acts Queensryche and Alice Cooper. Doesn't that sound ridiculous? One of the greatest rock bands of all time with their second vocalist (and an iconic frontman in his own right) with support from a great prog rock band and the king of shock rock. We gleefully slapped down $55 to see this spectacle.

St. Charles is...interesting. It's been the fastest growing area in the state of Missouri for the past 20 years...sprawling suburban wasteland, a la Chester County, PA or Fairfax County, VA. But there are still a lot of good ol' boys out there that haven't been forced out yet. Not to mention, a large contingent of them drove 20 miles from St. Louis and gleefully slapped down $55-85 to see the rock spectacle. We saw some serious characters starting the minute we parked.

The doors were supposed to open at 6:30, and we walked in right at that time...but Queensryche was already playing. Not sure what the fuck happened there, but by the time we got to our seats on the upper level (Family Arena seats 8000 for end-stage shows), we got to see 3/4 of their 45-minute or so set. They were great...played their hits along with a cover of Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine" that will be on a CD of covers they're releasing later in the fall.

Then Alice came on. I've never seen him live before, but he puts on a good show...good backing band, too. Most of the people at the show were probably there to see him. By the time Heaven & Hell were into their set, the place was probably half-empty, though the arena was probably at least 1/3 empty to begin with. That's a shame...I suspect that the ticket prices and the new name of the Dio incarnation of Sabbath contributed to so many empty seats.

Heaven & Hell came on around 9:20...and boy did they kick some serious ass! Dio still sounds awesome, Tony Iommi is still a guitar god, Geezer Butler is a seriously underrated bassist and Vinny Appice was whaling on the skins. I was disappointed that they played a seemingly short set (1:30) and didn't play any of the 3 new songs they recorded late last year. In addition, there were some sound issues (vocals and guitar), starting towards the end of Alice's set and continuing into Heaven & Hell's. But as a whole, the show was great...a good time was had.

Now I just need to see Sabbath with Ozzy and my life will be complete. OK, not really...but it would be awesome to see that show.

I've been reading about the Jena 6 this morning, as they've been in the news recently and there is a large rally taking place in Jena, LA today.

Based on what I've read, there have been some serious injustices against blacks in Jena recently. But 6 black kids beat the snot out of a white kid that in and of itself could be a hate crime. And they could have killed the kid. Why shouldn't they be charged with a serious crime?

And please...no snarky-ass typical conservative or liberal comments. I am trying to understand why many people (black and white) think that these kids are getting a raw deal.

I already knew that I share my birthday with a few famous people, notably Pavarotti, Hugh Jackman and Kirk Cameron.

But today, I learned that Takeshi Kaga also shares my birthday. Who is Takeshi Kaga? Only the fucking Chairman on the original Iron Chef! That fucking rules!

I also share a birthday with astronaut Sally Ride and comedian (and native St. Louisan) Dick Gregory. Cool stuff!

I went to deliver a pizza last night to a customer that lives in this large senior apartment complex in our delivery area. Of all the senior buildings in our delivery area, this is probably the one we go to the most...it's about a 5-minute drive from the shop.

I take the elevator up to the 2nd floor and she meets me out in the hallway, in front of her apartment.

Syc: "Hi, how are you today?"

Customer: "Oh, I'm okay. I'm trying to organize some papers, but I can't see too well."

Syc: "Ah, okay. That'll be (whatever the amount of the order was)."

Customer: "And it looks like you've been eating all the pizzas."

Maybe she was trying to be funny...maybe she was concerned about my weight. I dunno...remember this?

What I should have said is, "Actually, you stroked-out looking bitch, I can't stand the shit. I rarely eat it. I let fuckers like you eat it, so that you'll die sooner than I will while filling my wallet."

What I did was laugh. What else could I do, ya know?

From the BBC: French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner says the world should prepare for war over Iran's nuclear programme.

"We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war," Mr Kouchner said in an interview on French TV and radio.

I'm sorry...am I reading this right?

The French? Threatening war? Against Iran?

Wolf, would you please use your awesome Hello Kitty cuff to take my BP? I must be strokin'.

...but this is a bit much...from the BBC: Australia's opposition Labor Party has questioned the need for female sailors to be given breast enlargements paid for with public money.

An armed forces spokesman defended the operations, saying they were carried out for psychological reasons, not to make sailors "look sexy".

If sailors need boob jobs to help them psychologically, they probably shouldn't be in the armed forces.

This has been bothering me for a couple of weeks now, but I think it came to a head today, and so I have to rant about it for a bit.

Of the 119 people I invited to the wedding, 37 aren't coming, including 10 that didn't send back the reply card. Of the 131 April invited, 29 aren't coming, including 4 no responses.

Needless to say, we are disappointed. We're at 179, but we have to pay for a minimum of 200. I'd say we're going to wind up eating $220 ($22 a head times 10--the amount I think we'll be short in the end).

I think I'm more disappointed than April though, because I'm kinda taking it personally.

I have no beef with folks outside of St. Louis. I wouldn't expect people to foot a bill to see us get hitched, ya know? And I understand that there may be legitimate reasons as to why local folks aren't coming or haven't RSVP'd.

But you know...this is the biggest day of my life thus far. It was a running joke back in the day that I would never get married. I'm gonna be 32 in just under a month; April is going to be 33 just after the wedding. We were both in long-term relationships in the past that seemed promising, but eventually landed face first onto concrete.

April is a miracle to me. I had absolutely no intention of staying permanently in St. Louis or looking for a wife when I decided to come home in early 2005. But April and I hit it off, and I wound up falling in love with her...and with St. Louis again. April is the only woman that I have ever truly wanted to marry, and I am happy to be back in St. Louis for good.

I've been relatively indifferent to this whole wedding shindig--if I had it my way, April and I would have been married by a justice of the peace around the first of this year. But April wanted this, and I've gone along with it like a good soldier. But now that we got rid of the Catholic bullshit, I'm truly excited about the wedding. Ask April...it's ridiculous.

I'm indifferent to a lot of the people coming--a bunch of relatives that I had to invite if I didn't want to incur the wrath of my mom. But I was really excited about seeing all the friends I invited--some of whom I haven't actually seen in person since moving back home.

Sadly, several of them will not be coming. Even worse, some of them haven't even returned their reply cards...and we contacted all of them except for one couple. And I'm indifferent to them, since they're friends of my parents.

If you live in the St. Louis area and aren't coming to our wedding, I want you to know how disappointed I am, and that it hurts me. I suspect that some of the reasons I have heard for not coming are, quite frankly, bullshit. But it's your loss...you're going to miss a hell of a party.

I made an important decision while driving around making deliveries yesterday. It happens sometimes.

The important decision: I'm publishing a book. Seriously.

My poems rock, and I think it's time to put them into book form. So I did some thinking...I'm gonna publish the poems you see here on the Bosque. They'll probably be arranged in several groups yet-to-be-determined, and I'll write intros to each group/section. And I will put in at least one (but probably two) new poem(s) that are not currently available to the public.

I need to do some number-crunching...I think I can get the books published (nothing too fancy, mind you), sell them for $6 and make a nice profit. And then I would truly be a published author--with my own book, not a page in some poetry book made by some vanity press hacks.

More info to follow...look for it around Xmas.

...otherwise, we might not have known that our home phone was on the fritz.

Our DSL started acting up yesterday before I went to work, but I didn't give it too much thought...it acts up on occasion. But then I tried to call April at home last night...and got a busy signal. This never happens...we're not on the phone that much and have call waiting. After trying to call for a few minutes, I called April on her cell phone. She was at home, and not on the home phone.

At that point, we figured that there was something wrong with the line. We still had no dial tone this morning, so I called AT&T. Sure enough, there was something wrong with our line, and a technician would have to come out and look at it.

Around 5:30 this afternoon, the red light on the DSL modem quit flashing, and there was finally a steady green. I called the home phone from my cell phone and it finally rang. Whoohoo! A few minutes later, an AT&T tech knocked on the door to see if our phone and DSL were working. He didn't go into much detail, but apparently, there was some sort of fault in our line--whatever that is.

And we probably would have never noticed that there was an issue with our phone if the DSL hadn't started fucking up. Modern technology is a crazy thing!

We haven't been doing much housecleaning lately...and it shows.

Living room:






Here are the presents we got from the bridal shower...in the middle of the kitchen:


Here are all the flowers for the wedding...no real flowers...too expensive:


Another kitchen photo:


Bedroom:


The bathroom...the cleanest room in the apartment:


After pictures will be posted...eventually.

St. George is a small suburb just south of the City that is notorious for being a speed trap. Finally...some piece of shit pig out there got his just desserts...but not for a bad speeding bust.





At first, I thought the kid was a smart-ass, but in reviewing the video, I'd say the cop started it with the tone in his initial question. He apparently didn't like the fact that the kid was unwilling to put up with his shit. Then the cop tried to be "nice" to the kid, but the kid was having none of it.

The cop is now suspended without pay.

From yesterday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch: An elementary school teacher wept Wednesday as she told a St. Louis jury how a man who followed her into a downtown parking garage beat her with a Bible and then took her purse last year.

Elyse McNett, 27, identified her attacker in St. Louis Circuit Court as the defendant, Shenandoah Gillespie, 39, who is on trial this week on charges of assault and robbery in the Jan. 22 incident.

There was this one time in grade school when I got hit with a Bible. I apparently did something to a friend of mine (Tim, it was the oldest Geldmacher), and it pissed him off. So I said he could hit me with a book...he chose a Bible. The problem was that our teacher saw him do it...he got yelled at. Ha ha!

A two-fer today...all praise to the Whale Penis!

We already lost Wendy's here two years ago when the franchisee went belly up. Now the local Krispy Kreme franchisee has filed for bankruptcy...from yesterday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The franchise operator of five Krispy Kreme doughnut shops in metro St. Louis has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Des Peres-based Sweet Traditions LLC said it decided to reorganize after evaluating all options to restructure its debt, legal liabilities and lease-related issues. It hopes to reorganize while keeping the St. Louis stores running with minimal disruption to approximately 140 local employees.

You better keep 'em open, fuckers! What would I do if I couldn't order combo #4 on an occasional basis?

Rhoda would have turned 38 today.

We rarely had any money to celebrate each other's birthdays. Hell, we rarely had any money period. The problem was...we acted like we had money on occasion, which--among other things--led me down the path to Chapter 7.

*shrugs* You live, you learn...I know better now.

Happy birthday, Rhoda...hopefully this one is better than some of your more recent ones.

I stumbled upon this by accident earlier today...it's from a blog that seems to originate out of Philadelphia. I'm going to put up the entire blog posting (minus links) here to give this post some meat, but the original version is here.

Although pancakes are considered by experts to be the perfect food (see here and here), many are not aware of the vital role pancakes have played in the history of America.

Today I plan to relate one such story, out of the many I could tell.

When Southern states seceded from the Union and the United States went to war against the toothless cretins, many factors weighed against the Confederacy. Certainly the staggering genetic deficiencies of the average Southerner didn’t help, but the North also had a distinct advantage in manufacturing, transport and armaments.

Often overlooked is the most significant factor: pancakes.

IHOP is a distinctly Northern creation and pancakes had been enjoyed there since the first IHOP opened in what was then New Amsterdam in 1648 (the IHOP Rebellion of 1754 is a story all its own and worth telling someday). The South, however, had to make due with Waffle House and its overly larded hash browns and thick, disgusting waffles.

This had multiple effects on the troops---Northerners could carry hundreds of wonderful, fluffy flapjacks, stacked perfectly together to deploy whenever hunger struck. The soldiers of the Confederacy had to arrange thick, bulky waffles in constantly shifting piles and could only carry roughly half as many as the Union troops, leaving them vulnerable on long marches. This led to poor morale and even poorer nutrition. Union troops would sometimes toss a single pancake on the ground and watch as the desperate Confederate soldiers tore each other to threads in an attempt to get it.

The South also faced a perilous shortage of maple syrup. Vermont, a proud free state, quickly embargoed shipments to the South, forcing Confederates to cover their already pathetic waffles with jelly, grits or even powdered sugar, no match for the North’s bountiful syrup, which could also be carried in convenient handled jugs (Southerners used the discarded syrup jugs to bottle their ‘moonshine,’ thus dropping their already dog-like IQ’s into near single digits).

In battle, the well-fed Union army easily bested the lard-filled, waffle eating mouth breathers of the South.

And today you can still see the disparity---IHOPS are nearly everywhere throughout the North, while Southerners still shovel in repulsive, multiply layered hash browns and poorly constructed waffles at filthy stops next to the highway. Sad, really.

Oh, the Mormons; I couldn’t really tell you what’s up with them. Weird people. No coffee, lots of wives. No IHOPS in Utah at all. I don’t get it.

*rofl*

I went to Best Buy Saturday to pick up a couple of CDs and DVDs. In what is becoming a trend lately, they didn't have everything I was looking for...they didn't have the new Recoil CD or the Black Sabbath (with Dio) greatest hits CD. I could maybe see Recoil not being available, but Sabbath surprised me.

I headed to the checkout with what was in stock (the ATHF movie and the Heaven & Hell live CD and DVD). When I got to the cashier, she asked me the same question I hear every time I check out at Best Buy: "Did you find everything you were looking for today?"

Obviously I didn't, so I answered honestly: "Noooo!" I said sadly.

"No?!" the cashier asked, sounding surprised.

"No," I said, again sadly.

"Awww!" she said. Then she rang me out, then April, and we left.

So...what the fuck is the point of asking me if I found everything if you're not going to help me if I say "No"? And trying to find someone in the media department to ask a question...bahahahaha!

I sent an e-mail to Best Buy customer service, though I doubt that will really do any good. It just pisses me off...it's like asking me if I want help, but having no plan to actually help me.

I need to quit shopping there anyway...it's basically worth it to me to pay a little shipping charge to have Amazon deliver directly to my home.