JonLowder.com

Arlington

Although I grew up all over Northern Virginia (the joke in my family is that we moved every few years because my Mom hated redecorating) the place I think of when I think of my childhood is Arlington.  We moved there when I was in 7th grade and stayed through the end of 10th grade and those were some formative years for me.  The Arlington of the late 70s and early 80s that I remember was a little rough around the edges, with neighborhoods like Ballston and Clarendon epitomized by retail strips that had seen better days and some neighborhoods that were teetering on the edge of going to seed.  Well in the 80s the Orange line of the Metro system was finished and the stops in Arlington attracted all kinds of development and there isn't much of Arlington, the smallest county in Virginia and located right across the Potomac from DC, that hasn't be redeveloped. Heck, it's downright upscale these days. That's what makes this video, Arlington: The Rap so funny.  Thanks to my buddy Rich for sending me the link.

All the Aged News That's Fit to Print

The Daily Show does the gray lady:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

Snotsville

What do you get when you combine a tree pollen count of, like, 80-quadzillion and combine it with a weekend soccer tournament that requires sitting at Sara Lee Park for something like 15 hours in 90 degree heat?  A really hot, sunburned and smelly middle aged guy who can't breathe.  Welcome to my hell, otherwise known as "Snotsville".

Oh, BTW Erin was a guest player for one of her club's sister teams (there are three U-15 girls "Challenge" teams in her club) and they came in second in the U-18 bracket of the Beat the Heat tournament. Okay, there were only three teams in the bracket so they played the other two teams twice, but one of the teams was a very strong U-18 team from West Virginia (they won all four of their games) and our girls managed to hang with them for three out of four halves of soccer that they played.  The other team was a strong U-15 team from Statesville that's given all of our club's U-15 team fits for the last couple of years and our girls managed to win both those games.  Four games in two days in 90+ degree heat is no easy thing and the girls did so and managed to play some great soccer in the process.  I enjoyed watching it despite my massive mucus problems.

In One Word

The Sunlight Foundation has released a funny yet meaningless report about CongressCritters' favorite words.  Their Capitol Words project takes speeches recorded in the Congressional Record to calculate the frequency of specific words used by each member of Congress.  When I clicked on North Carolina on their interactive map I found out the following:

• Over the last year (April 22, 2008 - April 21, 2009) Rep. Virginia Foxx was the biggest chatter box from NC.  She uttered 6,021 words.  Sen. Richard Burr came in second with 3,083 so you can see that Rep. Foxx took the talking title by a mile.  
• Rep. Foxx's favorite word was "democrats" which she uttered 428 times, followed by "energy" at 373 times, "country" at 316 times and "oil" at 229 times. 
• Sen. Kay Hagan apparently lost her voice with each only uttering 242 words over the last year.  Well, since she's only been there since January I guess we can cut her some slack.  Or maybe she's just a "walk softly and carry a big stick" kind of gal.

H/T to Ed Cone for the link. 

Related Criminal Stories?

Some times stories just tell themselves.  Here are the two headlines that were at the top of my WXII12 news feed in Google Reader when I opened it up:

• Short Bandit Robs Greensboro BB&T
• Police: Armed Pregnant Woman Tried to Rob Bank 

Put those two together and you have quite the crime family. 

Another Great WXII Headline

The folks at WXII continue to wow me with their headline writing prowess.  In today's example they give a car on I-77 remarkable powers: Speeding Car Shoots at 3 Tractor-Trailers.

So How'd You Spend Your Easter?

I'm willing to bet your Easter Sunday was a tad more relaxing than mine.  To begin with my Easter-eve didn't end until well after 4 a.m. because, well, just because.  And it wasn't a good "because." Then we overslept and didn't make it to Easter service, which is saying something since the service didn't start until 11.  After that I decided to take care of all the bushes that had been torn out of our front yard and made into two big piles when our new septic field was installed last week.  I lost count, but I think it was something like ten mature bushes and one small tree that were all piled together, and since bushes are bushy they weren't easy to get apart, and trimmed down and moved to our rather large brush pile in the woods behind the house.  Even with the kids' help it took the better part of five hours and let me tell you those root balls weren't light. The fact that my chainsaw broke down midway through and I had to start sawing by hand didn't help matters, and of course the fact that I'm not exactly in fighting trim hurt my cause too.

Why am I sharing this with you?  Well, because my 42-year-old body is very unhappy with me today.  About every other sentence I type prompts spasms and cramps in my forearms.  My lower back feels like a really ticked off elephant ran over it at least 10 times.  My arms look like a deranged cat used them as scratching poles.  My shoulders are so sore I can't really lift my arms above my head.  But the worst part truly is the realization that I'm getting freakin' old.  Ten years ago, heck even five years ago, I'd have shrugged this off like it was nothing but today I can't even shrug.  I was going to ask the question "If I feel like this at 42 then what am I going to feel like at 52?", but I already know the answer.  At 52 I'll be just fine because I'm damn well going to pay somebody to do the job for me.  That, my friends, is what they call hard earned wisdom.

Mia, Mia, Mia

This morning I received the following email from my lovely wife Celeste.  It was sent after she'd already dealt with an outrageous billing issue with our former insurance company and had left our dog Mia to her own devices for two hours this morning.  Luckily Mia was confined to the family room, sun room and kitchen or who knows what she might have done. Here's the text of the email:

Subject: Mia. Mia. Mia.
 
On top of the Blue Cross thing now there's the Mia thing. Or should I say THINGS?
 
1. Pee on the kitchen floor.
2. Notebook paper chewed up like a shredder on the family room floor.
3. An entire bag of tortilla strips in a pile in the sunroom (a rather neat and tidy pile by the way).
4. My knitting. Oh yes this is wonderful. The once neatly wound ball of yarn is now a bird's nest.
5. Did I mention that my knitting needles are now toothpicks and splinters?
6. Who knew a baseball was made of so many little white strings?
7. She obviously doesn't like the taste of the English muffins because they made it from the butcher block in the kitchen to the back door of the sunroom unscathed.
8. Erin's celestial orb (the pretty silver thing with colorful beads that can be made into various shapes) is not in working order any more.
9. And the crowning glory? A big pile of poop.

Celeste

I dare not laugh lest I be forced to live the rest of my life sans one limb or another.

School Pride

Over the years I've not been shy about declaring my pride as an alum of mighty George Mason University.  You know, the school that knocked the Heels out of the 2006 NCAA tournament?  My alma mater was so unaccustomed to the spotlight that they had to scramble to write a fight song for the run to the Final Four. Well, Mason's been busy building its national reputation for years by hiring big name faculty and going on a building spree that has turned it into one of the best campuses in the mid-Atlantic region, if not the east coast.  Now Mason is set to make the national scene again for a reason I don't think anyone could have anticipated: last week the student body elected a drag queen as homecoming queen.  From The Washington Post:

Spend time with George Mason University senior Ryan Allen and it's clear why he's a Big Man on Campus. He wears size 12 pumps.

Allen, who is gay and performs as a popular drag queen at local clubs, assumed the title of Ms. Mason. He was wearing a green-and-gold bow, sewn for him by the theater department costume's shop, that was visible even from the cheap seats, a sequined top, a black skirt and heels. Ricky Malebranche, a junior from Woodbridge, was named Mr. Mason...

Allen said he decided to enter the Ms. Mason contest this year as a joke, a last hurrah for his senior year. Soon he had donned a silver bra and zebra-print pants and was lip-syncing to Britney Spears's "Womanizer" at the qualifying pageant Feb. 9, overseen by Miss Virginia 2009. Competitors included a government and politics major from Chesapeake and a Chi Omega sorority member who told the school newspaper she should win because "I have pride in Mason to the point where my towels are green and gold."

Allen's drag name?  Reann Ballslee. 

Honestly you can't make this stuff up.  Here's a fun thought for you: what would happen if a drag queen tried to run for homecoming queen at Wake?  What would happen if he won?

Random News: W Offered Job as Greeter; Laid Off Wall Streeters Offered Lifeguard Jobs; Mom Assaults Son's Middle School Coach; More Stories

I figured we could all use a little Random News today.  The following items came from various feeds in my Google Reader:

• President Bush (the younger) has been offered a job as a greeter at a Dallas area hardware store.  No word yet on whether he's accepted it. BTW, whoever at the store came up with the idea is a marketing genius. 
• New York City's Parks & Rec officials think that Wall Streeters who have lost their jobs should be lifeguards. 
• Mom arrested for assault on a government official after she slaps the back of the head of her son's middle school basketball coach.  Apparently she was upset that he pulled the kid out of the game.  Middle school! 
• The coach of high school team in Kansas told to stop hynotizing his players.   
• A woman in Des Moines, Iowa was flashed by a man in a wheelchair.  This is a quote from the story: "He allegedly wheeled himself over to her car window, locked his wheelchair, lifted himself up on one leg and exposed himsef to her." Sadly, he did this in reaction to her question of where he was going and her offer of a ride.
• A grandma in South Korea has failed her driver's exam over 770 times and vows to keep trying.  Here's the pun: Man does she have Seoul.  That's horrid.  I can't believe I typed that.   
• FEMA's continuing on its incredible streak of positive PR by announcing that it distributed emergency food kits with tainted peanut butter.    
• Fair warning: Don't smoke on any plane, but especially not a flight to Saudi Arabia.  A man convicted of smoking on a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight has been sentenced to 30 lashes. 

That's it for this edition of Random News.