It's been a week of blogging of no great depth. Entries of rain-puddle shallowness with wit as damp. I am no Lileks, and I'll have to live with it. I never really claimed to be, actually, but read The Bleat this week alongside the TMST and the disparity between gifted talent and ho-hum, callow suburban scribbling is glaring. It's back to shucking aluminum for you, boy! Thanks for stopping by for half-baked creative writing anyway, friends!

Lileks was in San Diego this week, of all places. I must've missed him. Recording with Mike Nelson for MST 3000, of which I've long been a fan -though I haven't seen it for years. Nowadays it's called Rifftrax, and it's funny enough. Anyway, if there's anyone qualified to pull off an episode of MST 3000, it's Lileks. I've tried it a few times to varying degrees of failure and it's harder than it looks. (A script would help.) You find yourself fumbling around a lot, talking over everybody, and making vague references no one gets -like a dinner party. Watched the Desperate Housewives with my wife last night, but only out of desperation. There was a tornado (on the show) so I stopped flipping channels and watched. Anyway, if a show could benefit from an MST audio track, it's Desperate Housewives. I'd watch that every week!

It would be a great idea for a network, to just release alternate versions of their programs on those off-channels. I imagine whole departments at the studios dedicated to mocking the rest of the company. Now there's job satisfaction.

Got the tome from the tax preparer yesterday, and boy is she appreciated! Considering that the summation of my labors at tax time is asking "where do I sign?", I am very grateful. In the line that asks for the occupation of the spouse, our tax preparer always puts "DOMESTIC GODDESS" -which cracks me up every year. You'd think Mrs. Ditchman would have been promoted by now, but I suspect she has already attained ultimate job satisfaction. Besides, where do you go from there? On to destroying all the other gods, I guess. I always wonder if this little joke makes the IRS folks chuckle, but I doubt it. Everyone knows IRS employees to be cheerless, hardened Dementors of the sorriest kind. I'm sure they see the silly typed line entry and shake their fists in the air, bellowing into the hall, SURLY CITIZENS OF AMERICA! HOW DARE THEY MOCK US!

My phone number has been wrong on our IRS forms for a few years now, so if they tried to call and request we desist in the joking around, it falls on the wrong ears. A few other things are off in the forms, but no one has ever seemed to mind. The checks are always cashed, of course, and it makes me wonder if there are government employees sitting in a warehouse just opening envelopes and looking for the checks, like rich kids in college tossing the well-wishes from the parents. If there's no check, I imagine the bundle gets tossed to a different pile attended to by angry, disapproving gnomes steeped in hostility. These vile creatures are the ones that come after you, breathing heavily in dark alleys, looking for blood. And receipts.

So that's behind us. They say the guvmint will send us a refund check! Doubt it. These things are usually cross-referenced through the Dept. of Education which employs a whole different menagerie of loathsome creatures, expatriates of Weta. They have it out for me over there, and I'm sure my name is on the Big Board. (Again, I should never have spent all that time at USC. All I gained from it was that oblique Kubrick reference.)

It was a full week! Looking back, I notice that I got in a Kubrick reference, a Lord of the Rings reference, a Star Wars reference, and a Kafka reference -to round it out. Please comment if you caught them all. There may even have been a few unconscious references in there. I'd appreciate it if they were pointed out as well. It's good to know your audience and yourself, as I am sure Lileks is aware. Some days I just quote myself. (Then again, that's just about every day.)

The weekend will arrive if I can make it through this day. Barely made it through yesterday, actually, but I did. We always do, one way or the other. Keep your head up, and as they say around here in local SoCal-speak "Have a good one!"

Never sure what they mean, there. Have a good what, exactly? Time?


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