The Laziest Saturday Ever

You guys, I have to be walking out this door in an hour and a half (and back across the scary bridge, but we won’t dwell on that) and I haven’t even gotten in the shower yet.

I’ve done nothing with my afternoon except found a sunny spot in the front room to lay in with the dog. I was too lazy to even nap. I just laid there, listening to her snore and counting the big black spots on the top of her nose.

For all my bitching about having nothing to do and no purpose in life, and for all my feeling trapped and desperate and gloomy, yes, still. No not as bad as last week, but only by sheer determination, not actual better feeling.

Ugh, let’s not dwell on it. Where were we?

Yes.

For all my complaining, I actually have been invited to do something very cool, which I will tell y’all about when I’m convinced they’re not going to uninvite me once they realize how nerdy I am.

Hey, I think this is the first time I’ve ever tried to build up some suspense on Tiny Cat Pants. It’s kind of exciting.

My Spirit Guide

Last night, as I was sitting around working on Shug’s afghan, I watched “Most Haunted” on the Travel Channel. If you’ve seen this, you know that there’s this crazy psychic guy who wanders through the haunted places talking to the dead folks and getting information from them.

He has a spirit guide named “Sam” who helps facilitate such communications.

Which got me thinking, I need a spirit guide.

So, I pulled out the candles and the incense and sat quietly in the dark waiting for my spirit guide to contact me.

Oddly enough, it turns out that my spirit guide is local celebrity and blogger Rex L. Camino.

Shouldn’t my spirit guide be dead?

Shouldn’t you get your own gimmicks and stop ripping me off?

I’m not ripping you off. It’s an homage.

Don’t use those fancy words on me, Frenchie.

How did you know about my stint in Grease?

I’m Rex L. Camino, Spirit Guide. I know all.

Great, then, put it on me.

And here’s what he told me:

• Fritz, from TV on the Fritz, though he’ll deny it, secretly longs to make his living as a George Jones impersonator. The only thing preventing this is Fritz’s disturbing “yabba dabba doo, the king is dead and so are you.” It’s George Jones, Fritzy, not Eminem.
• The reason Kleinheider won’t appear in public is that he has two heads. An even lesser-known fact? One of these heads is Al Sharpton.
• Sarcastro is actually an elaborate parody of a “divorced white male in his late thirties. Just like every other asshole with a weblog.” perpetrated by two obnoxious Nashville feminists. He doesn’t actually exist. The man in the photos and at the public appearances is really the infamous leftist, Church Secretary.
• The Super Genius chews tobacco, but only on national holidays.
• I have my grandpa’s tooth and a raccoon penis bone in a bag by my bed.

Sadly, after these pronouncements, it appears that Camino’s wife demanded he stop talking to himself or at least talk to himself in another room where she didn’t have to hear it and I lost contact with him.

Still, I’m sure that these must all be true.

Why would my spirit guide lie?

If You Go Outside Now, You Can Feel Okay About Spending the Afternoon Drinking Beer

It’s so beautiful out. Mrs. Wigglebottom and I walked over to Centennial Park, looking to see if any old men were using the free wifi in the park.

They were not.

But we did see a number of exciting things.

1. There is this enormous black dog who lives up on the hill by the park. Have any of y’all seen this dog? I swear, it could step over the fence if it wanted. It looks like a terrier in the face and has those kind of ears, but it’s a giant. If you’ve seen it, Mrs. Wigglebottom and I welcome speculation about what kinds of dogs went into its makeup.

2. A tiny girl came around a bush and snuck a picture of Mrs. Wigglebottom peeing. This is the first paparazzi I’ve noticed stalking Mrs. Wigglebottom, but I doubt it will be the last. She asked us one probing question–“Is she eating goose poop?” And yes, it turns out that she was.

3. Mrs. Wigglebottom was complimented twice for being “a good looking dog.”

4. We saw two bassett hounds pulling a lady behind them. Think about that, if you’re familiar with bassett hounds, and revel in the funny.

5. Mrs. Wigglebottom sat at every crosswalk and I only had to push on her butt twice. Ha, I love that she sometimes gives the impression that she’s well-trained.

After we cuted everyone at the park half to death, we walked back up the hill, across the scary bridge, and home.

Pieces Fall into Place

Andrew Sullivan has a post today (er, I guess yesterday) about how we’re apparently kidnapping innocent people in Iraq in order to leverage them against their spouses or relatives. ABCNews has the larger story here.

Think with me back to the Abu Ghraib mess. Not the photos we all saw and the things we all heard, but the rumors of worse being kept from us.

Seymour Hersch talked about it in this interview:

SEYMOUR HERSH: I don’t know what it stands for, but out of Virginia. They just got a huge new contract. These are people who do hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business. They provide interpreters, among other things; that’s part of their business. The private companies were all over Abu Ghraib, and they had local — one of the people, one of the men from the private companies was — did have forcible sex with — there’s women in the prisons, which is also a big contentious problem for the Iraqi population. The women are held in a separate unit, but they have children; and one of the children and one of the women was raped by a boy. There are photographs. There is testimony —
AMY GOODMAN: Was raped by —
SEYMOUR HERSH: One of the guards, rather. And witnessed by Americans taking photographs. There is testimony that has not been made public about this. I know that there’s been statements made in various military proceedings. And the government’s been very chary about writing — putting out any information. People witnessed it. They had cameras, and I believe they were video cameras. They could have been still cameras. There were cameras photographing it, and the boy was screaming. But I don’t have a videotape of it. I haven’t seen a videotape of it. I know that such testimony has been given.

Now, there are some allegations that Hersch changed his story, that he claimed to have seen the video tape of the boy’s rape and that now he’s claiming he only heard about it. But I wondered at the time why there were even kids in the prison.

Were we, as a matter of course, kidnapping and detaining innocent family members of people we want to intimidate?

According to the Red Cross and people in the Army, yes.

The Red Cross also delineated eyewitness testimony of the abuse of these children. Provance, who was stationed at Abu Ghraib, told the media that interrogating officers had gotten their hands on a 15-or-16-year-old girl. Military Police apparently only stopped the interrogation when the girl was half-undressed. A separate incident described a 16-year-old boy being soaked with water, driven through the cold, smeared with mud, and then presented before his weeping father, who was also a prisoner.

We couldn’t get this kid’s dad to talk until we threatened his kid (I know some of you might argue that being soaked in water and driven around all muddy is no worse than some kind of college prank. I would argue that the point of the exercise was to show the kid’s dad that we had no moral hesitation about using his kid to force him to talk. It wasn’t what we did to the kid so much as that we did anything at all to him.).

So, I guess the difference between what we knew after Abu Ghraib and what we know now is that now we have official military documents showing that this was a wide-spread practice and not just the word of witnesses.

“It’s very hard, obviously, from some of these documents to determine what, if anything, actually happened,” says the Pentagon spokesman.

Gee, yes, if we just keep looking at each individual bit of information as having no relevance to other bits of information, it is hard to determine “what, if anything, actually happened.”

But if you step back and look at everything together, the picture becomes pretty damn clear. We kidnap and lock up children, putting them in situations where they might be raped by sadistic guards, as a way to intimidate their families.

If we’re going to do terrible things, let’s at least be honest about the terrible things we’re doing.

It’s Only Drinking Alone if You Don’t Count Keith Olbermann

So, I say to the Butcher “Let’s go do something exciting.”

He says “Like what?”

I say, “I don’t know. You’re the one who always has the car. What do you do when you’re not here?”

He says “Sit around at my friends’ house.”

I say “What are you doing tonight?”

He says “Sitting around at Heather’s house.”

I say “I wish I had an exciting life like yours.”

He says “You do. You just bought your ticket to Puerto Rico. That’s exciting. Your life only seems boring because it’s you living it.”

He walks out. And drives off in my car.