The Museum of Bad Art does a brilliant job of showcasing the works of those who...just don't quite have...it. Oh, the mediocrity!

Fans of Trading Spaces can now get a decent look at Paige Davis' bare ass. Oh, those crazy charity events!

Last Friday, CNN had one of their better days of story picking. I was told nothing about any celebrities, but I was told that doctors grew a jaw in a man's back. You read that correctly. A jawless man grew a clone of his former jaw under his shoulder blade. The Brave New World of stem cell therapy: So it begins. Oh, the...jaws...in backs...!

I've always wondered about Absinthe ever since I learned that practically every author whose works occupied my college life had used it to stimulate creativity. Poe, Rimbaud, Wilde, Hemingway and London, to name a few. I've never tried it for the obvious reason that you can't really find it anywhere. I don't even know if it's legal. Of absinthe, Oscar Wilde said:

"After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world."

Intriguing, no? Anyway, it has come up no less than eight times in conversation and emails in the past two weeks, so I'd like to know...if you've ever tried it, and I mean the real thing—with the wormwood extract—not the juice bar variety, please tell me what you think of it. I smell a revivalist trend around the corner. Oh, the forced thematic continuity!

I stumbled on this story earlier this month. I still can't believe it, so here it is: a 480-pound woman had to be surgically removed from her couch. Her family, if you can call them that, called 911. When they arrived, they had to leave immediately to get their Haz-mat suits. The woman hadn't moved off the couch in *six years*. There she sat, in her own 6-year collection of festering excrement. And they didn't even have any incense burning. Oh, the inhumanity...!

I tend to romanticize everything in my past. But there's no period in my life that feels as purely appealing in hindsight as my years at St. Bonaventure University. Maybe it's because everything was so new to me then and that sense of wonderment sticks with you, but I think there's more to it than that—I'm just not sure what it is. Maybe it's that the undergrad years comprise the first real period of self-discovery. Or maybe it's the keggers. Or maybe those days weren't really that great at all, but my memory works like an anthology machine. Yea, I think that's most likely it.

Either way, I woke up this morning thinking about my alma mater. Not just the life and times, but specific buildings, specific conversations and moments, the stunning Enchanted Mountains, the annual pilgrimage to the Ellicottville Autumn Fest, and of course, the people. It's hard to describe the emotions that run through me when I simply look at pictures of certain things, such as Francis Hall, below, where I lived for two years. It's evocative in the same way that certain songs take you back to a specific time and place—usually the time and place that you first heard the song, or the time and place that you played it to death. I know you understand....

It would take a long time to even try to describe the nostalgic state brought on by these images and the thoughts that flow from them. It's like Proust biting into that fruit—suddenly out came thousands and thousands of pages now known as Remembrance of Things Past. We all have these little corners of the mind, don't we? Little corners that, when activated, become vast universes.

One picture in particular—of Devereux Hall, below—reminded me that there's a lot of forgotten lore at St. Bonaventure. Paranormal lore. The 5th floor of Dev Hall has been closed for decades. The story I had heard is that 5th Dev is haunted because of a Black Mass that some students performed up there in the early sixties—a Mass that involved a student "sacrifice". So not only was a death involved, but as the story goes, everyone involved in the Mass soon lost their marbles—clinically speaking.

Naturally, the story is passed through class after class, year after year, generation after generation. I'm sure what I heard isn't what happened, at least not precisely what happened. Perhaps the one man who knows most about it is Fr. Alphonsus Trabold, who must be in his mid-nineties by now. Fr. Trabold is one of the most interesting people I've ever met—as meek and gentle as humanity gets, yet smart as a whip, and possessing a vast knowledge of history, the arts, and the paranormal. Everyone wanted to take his course, titled "Physical Research and Nature", but more commonly referred to as "Spooks". Spooks was, and remains, the best course I've ever taken. I still have my notebooks. Regarding the alleged Black Mass, Fr. Trabold is on record as saying:

"Some form of a Black Mass was indeed performed by three students on Fifth Dev...The students had stolen several unconsecrated hosts from the chapel in Devereux Hall for use in the Black Mass. Again, as far as what was actually done with (the hosts) is uncertain."

Part of the story you hear as a new student is that Fr. Trabold backs it up—after all, he was there. And the school certainly fanned the flames. Fifth Dev has been boarded up ever since. There are makeshift walls blocking access to the fifth floor staircase, and all doors have redundant locks. There are no notices to "keep out", but there is an official rule that any student found attempting to break through said barriers will be expelled without delay or review. Now that's the sort of gratuitously severe policy that gets kids talking and keeps lore alive.

Before I take it any further, I think the official explanation for the 5th floor closure is the most likely one: Ludicrously high insurance costs related to the way the building was constructed.

My former roommates Tim and Pete and I have a (tentative) plan to return there this fall. None of us have been back since we graduated, a fact we all regret. I'm going to need a hefty notebook.

...and you were talking about football, right?...

My new Weekly NFL Picks site is up, 2 weeks ahead of schedule. (!) Depending on injuries or other...stuff, I might have to change a few of these Week 1 picks. This is always the hardest week to pick 'em for obvious reasons. The predictions will show up every Wednesday during the NFL season. Actual scores will show up when all the games are done, and starting with week 2, accuracy stats will be posted conspicuously. If I don't pick 'em well, it could be embarrassing. But I will. Pick 'em well. Enjoy.

My sister Lee and her husband Ted are in town from San Diego to introduce Exhibit A and spend some time with the F unit. Looking around our house, Ted tells me and Nik that in their neighborhood in San Diego, it would be worth 6 times its value in Rochester. I knew it would be significantly more, but *six times*...

Crazy.

Nik has been mildly pissed at me this week for a series of little things not worth mentioning. I think I'll post this image as a reminder of my week in the doghouse.

Finally, in the continuing saga of CNN's obsession with the irrelevant: This story was passed over, while this one was deemed important.

I hadn't driven my car for a couple days. So I get in, and the unmistakable stench of rot hits me like the hot air from an oven door. Fortunately, it wasn't an old steak I forgot to toss. It was an old banana peel that had tumbled under the seat to decompose in the company of loose change, golf tees, and the odd gum wrapper. I knew it had to be fruit before I found it, because the car was swarming with fruit flies, those creepy red-eyed buggers that appear like apparitions out of nowhere. The car windows were closed, there are no gaping rust holes, yet an entire division of Drosophila melanogaster had found its way in—somehow.

Maybe dormant larvae comes standard in this Volkswagen. I looked up some info, figuring that maybe, just maybe, their tiny larvae are already part of the deal when you bite in to that peach or whatever. You know, I figured hey—maybe they came in with the damn banana itself.

But nah. They're apparently just really good at breaking in. I'm glad they didn't steal any CDs. Figure they smell the fermentation from who knows how far away, they land on the car, nose around for a strong draft point, and follow the air. Pretty amazing little bastards, they.

At some point I remembered that my dad had spent a lot of his early thirties studying fruit flies for his doctorate in genetics. Fruit flies were the ultimate test subject because they have about a 10-day life span, perfect for studying heredity. They're also simple creatures that "took well" to genetic manipulation in the early days. They engineered wingless fruit flies, orange-eyed fruit flies, albino fruit flies, fruit flies with tiny, vestigial wings, etc. So anyway I hit the book shelf and found his thesis. It's a dull read, that Ph.D., but I'm glad I finally took a real look at it.

On a sort of related note, this article sounds pretty encouraging. Stem cells are clearly the answer to humanity's most horrible diseases. There are many people standing in the way of this corner of progress, but you can't hold back a wave this strong. Other countries will do it, and we'll have to follow suit. Good for you, good for me.

Labels: ponderage

I've been away from all things not work for a while. Works sucks. Blogstacle. The advent of football season keeps hope alive.

The more I'm forced to pay attention to politics because it's a political season, the more I realize I can't stand politics. Or, modern politics perhaps. Man, we really botch the concept. Boil it down and it's 20% party-line cliche, 20% stubbornness and dogma, 59% misdirected venom, and 1% philosophy.

And I still can't find much to be excited about in John Kerry. All I see is another ambitious Yale Skull silver spooner riding a wave of anti. Rabid "no blood for oil" placard holder-types have Kerry/Edwards signs stuck 6 inches into their front lawns, and yet Kerry voted Yes on the Iraq Thing. I'm just not seeing a lot of consistency out there. Not sure what to make of any of it, but I'm pretty certain that they're not our nation's finest, these two candidates. Please tell me they're not our nation's finest.

If you say you're disappointed in the anti-Bush sentiment from the left...If you say you think the rhetoric has been predictable and off-putting, you'll see a supercilious expression looking back at you. If you say you've seen and heard enough anti-Bush and not enough pro-whatever, you'll see that face. I can't embrace that. I want to know what this Kerry guy stands for, yet I can't find it anywhere. He won't even tell me. I do know that he sounds like a guy who's trying like hell to sound Presidential.

I thought I wouldn't have to hear any more from Michael Moore, but he keeps popping up everywhere, like the rodent heads in Whack-a-Mole. I'll say no more, but I'll say this: One could use those techniques to put together a scathing and convincing video tirade against Mother Theresa. And remember, he's not a Democrat. He's a socialist, openly. Gotta love how he makes a zillion dollars via the American system that he denounces...and yet continues to live here and not give his money away to the many causes that he criticizes others for "ignoring."

Here I am sounding political again, in the process of explaining why I'm not political. I'll put it this way: Imagine that the issues that we're facing, and that the Libs/Cons think they're "debating", are apples in a grocery store, and the liberal or Democratic "stances", for lack of a better word, are Granny Smiths and the conservative or Republican "stances" are Cortlands. I see and hear many people blindly dumping one kind or the other into their shopping carts. I'm just trying to pick through both kinds, and toss aside the ones I find wormy.

So now we have "The XBox Killings." Tell me, how can people be this terrible? Every day there's a new case study in The Horrors We're Capable Of Committing. I think the news organizations and corporations owe it to us to balance the news with worthwhile stories that show the other end of human capability. I'm sure they're out there. They're out there, right?

I need to know...where has the Muslim leadership been, in this country and worldwide? Why has there been no denouncement of terrorism and Al-Qaeda? They should be shouting their righteous YAWP over the rooftops of the world. But I haven't heard a peep. No major figureheads of Islam coming forth to tell the world, "We distance ourselves from these terrorists. We condemn what they have done, and what the seek to do. They are not righteous. They are mislead, they are the enemy. This is not Islam they are practicing. This is illusion, this is hate, this is wrong from every conceivable angle."

Where have they been, and where are they? Wake up, the clock is ticking.

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate dictionary has added several new words to their latest edition. I have a problem with a few of them. They just don't merit...officialdom. Is that a word? To wit:

body wrap:

“A body treatment involving the application of usually oils or gels followed by a wrapping of the body with a sheet”

Way to soften up the dictionary concept with this waste of space, Merriam...

PMB:

“private mailbox”

Uh...

S Res:

“Senate resolution”

Uh²...this is a dictionary, right?

teensploitation:

“The exploitation of teenagers by producers of teen-oriented films”

Are you ( ! ) kidding me?! Here's where they lose all credibility. If this is a word, then it would have to follow that one could be teensploited. Who the hell is steering that ship? Did they hire their new Editor-in-Chief straight out of high school?

In a word, PFFFFT.

So, the FDA has approved maggots as a medical therapy. This one had me doubting until I was about halfway through the article. All I can say is, wow. Pretty damn cool. I'll bet that eventually, we'll learn that all the best treatments and cures have been right under our noses the whole time.

Gotta give Krispy Kreme a nod for introducing drinkable doughnuts, especially at a time when food makers are scrambling to create products to feed the low-carb craze. I'd say they'll last a month before being pulled, but not if they're really, reeaally good.

Lastly, this doesn't sound good.