FunctionalAmbivalent

Liveblogging Halloween

A little girl dressed as a bunny. A little boy in cowboy garb, with patterned chaps. I slightly older girl in some kind of Red Riding Hood outfit that's too sexy for how young she is. A spider, presumably female but hard to tell.

UPDATE: Neighbor with shot glass.

UPDATE: Wife with wine glass. Told her to come back in costume. She helps herself to a drink.

UPDATE: Spiderman. Some kind of goblin.

UPDATE: Offer to help wife chose costume rejected.

UPDATE: Ghost and first Sarah Palin of the evening, an apparently 9-year old girl who has a better grasp of foreign policy than the real one.

UPDATE: MILF. A couple of kids, too, I think.

UPDATE: Skeleton and what looks like last year's hand-me-down Spiderman costume.

UPDATE: Demon with green horns stuck to his forehead. Wife's lurking around with her glass. I hid the bottle of wine. "Costume?" I ask. She goes down into the basement and gets her own bottle.

UPDATE: Apparently dead girl, with realistic blood.

UPDATE: Princess in green satin, Grim Reaper, dog in pirate garb.

UPDATE: Neighbor comes back with empty shot glass. "It spilled," he says, his voice slightly slurred.

UPDATE: Hannah Montana, pirate, hippie and cheerleader. "Look honey," I say, "a cheerleader costume! That's a great idea!" Long pause, then she shakes her head and walks away.

UPDATE: Ax murderer and vampire.

UPDATE: Tinkerbell. Dogs go apeshit, knock down music stand with 80 year old photo of Golden Gate Bridge on it, cracking frame. Tinkerbell takes candy and goes away. Dogs strut in triumph.

UPDATE: Group of older kids, one dressed as a bag of Cheetos. One talking on cell phone with no bag, simply holds out his hand. Wife into third glass of wine. "Costume?" I ask. She smiles. Sign of progress?

UPDATE: Tiny Supergirl, Centurion, bleeding mask guy, fairy, hippie. I think the hippie costumes are coming right out of mom and dad's closets.

UPDATE: Son home early from football game. So much for costumes.

Proof That Torture Makes the Victim Say What He Thinks You Want Him To Say, Whether It's the Truth or Not

Republican Lawrence Eagleburger, who said yesterday he didn't think Sarah Palin was qualified to be Vice President, comes out of the Republican re-education camp with his balls in a vice. Watch him squirm.

Another World Leader On the Brink

Castro still lives, but North Korean dictator/nutcase Kim Jong Il has just missed another significant state event, leading to speculation that he may be seriously ill or even dead.

With a whole lot of concern and very little credible information, pundits, media and foreign governments have tried to interpret the limited circumstantial evidence available. This points to Kim still being alive, analysts said, given the lack of unusual military or government activity and the fact that the North hasn't been canceling visits or reeling in its delegations.

"But given the seriousness of a stroke, this brings to fore the issue of stability in the North Korean regime," said L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation in Washington. "In the end, we can probably conclude this is the beginning of the final chapter."

"The final chapter" can mean only one thing: Another Dead Pool!

That's right, regular reader: Per F/A tradition, entirely for our own entertainment, we're going to bet on the impending death of someone we don't like. As a Christian, I'm ashamed of myself. But what the hell. If one can't be disrespectful to mentally defective autocrats who live too far away to do anything about it, who can one be disrespectful to?

So: I'll see if I can figure out a set of rules that won't drag the contest on for a hundred years. Maybe some kind of combination deal with Castro, who has to be seriously close to death. (A good pool on Castro, if medical reports were a little more detailed, would be "name that complication." I'd pick a debilitating rash in March.) Maybe we can, if you'll pardon the phrase, kill two birds with one stone.

I'll get back to you.

To read about Kim Jong Il's astounding golf game, click here.

To read about the original Fidel Castro Dead Pool, click here.

To survey the official government life expectancy tables in order to help formulate your bet, click here.

Stiff the Staff

While the modern media tend to spend a lot of time assuming we're all the kind of people who buy designer handbags to travel to five star resorts, here's a sign of the times: MSNBC reports on a Consumer Reports article about how to save on tipping.

In its December issue, which hits the stands Nov. 4, Consumer Reports suggests focusing on giving cash to those who may need it most or giving smaller gifts, such as candles or soaps.

Having worked for five years as a bartender, let me tell you: it's not the thought that counts. It's the money. That's how I got paid. If someone left me a candle or bar of soap, I'd make sure it took them a half-hour to get a drink next time they bellied up to the bar.

Another Reason To Love Election Day

On election day, this place is giving a free lunch of buffalo chicken fingers, fries and a soft drink to anyone with an "I Voted" sticker on.

Savoring the Moment

Philadelphia won the World Series last night. MSNBC is running a poll asking if they can repeat.

Winter

Baseball is over. Philadelphia is the world champion. I had Pat Burrell in my fantasy league, and he hit .250 with 33 home runs. That's about how my team went. I finished 6th in a 12 team league, a substantial improvement over last year but still well out of the money. I'll get 'em next year.

For 99 years, Cubs fans have been saying, "We'll get 'em next year." This was the year we should've got 'em. This was the year there should have been magic. When Zambrano threw the no-no in the last couple of weeks it was a sign. It should've been a sign. It wasn't a sign. It didn't mean a damned thing.

We had hotel reservations in Chicago for the Series, a hundred feet from Rush Street. We had no illusions about actually going to the games, but we wanted to be there in the city, a city I haven't lived in for decades but still feel a part of. Chicago, your heart still beats in me, but please: stop. I want no part of your long Winters of regret.

Left with time to fill, sports television is again heavy with people playing cards. Imagine: watching people playing cards on television. Playing cards is what you do when you have nothing in the world to do; watching people playing cards is what you do when you have nothing in the world to do and no one in the world to do it with.

For the next five months, we will be subject to hour upon hour of professional basketball. And hockey. I understand that there are already hockey games being played. If they can create a programmable chip that will prevent a television from receiving programming with sex and violence, they should be able to create a chip that will make it possible for me to scan the channels without seeing hockey.

On my list of chores this weekend: take the golf clubs out of the car. I drive around all summer with clubs, shoes and a change of clothes in the trunk, feeling rakish and care-free because at a moment's notice I can be on the course. I'll replace the clubs with a snow shovel and a couple of blankets, pretending that I might need survival gear but knowing my life seldom leaves the well-plowed streets.

Winter again. Darkness both before and after work.  Big fires in the fireplace to try to keep the chill off, but only temporary warmth. Eventually the fires burn down, and someone has to venture out for more wood.

The radio hillbillies who predict the weather based on caterpillars are split in their analysis, some saying cold and long, some saying warm and short. Every year I write down what they say, intending to check their accuracy and taunt them publicly if they're wrong, and every year I lose the paper and can't remember what they said anyway. Winter will be Winter; it will be too cold and too long. It will be made longer by people who live in the south, gloating.

"You should move down here," they write from godforsaken places like Alabama. "We play golf year-round."

I lived in southern California for 10 years, with year-round predictability and Christmases at the beach. I grew to hate it. My life cycle requires change and fallow months, no matter how much I loathe them. Spring is transcendently good only because it follows Winter, and I won't sacrifice Spring just for the sake of avoiding Winter.

Still, one wonders: My wife has booked us a trip to Minnesota for Christmas. There are friends and family there but come on: Minnesota in December? My wife talks of hot cocoa and snowmobile rides. I think only of this: In full Winter garb I look like Cartman.

We'll get 'em next year.

Relevant Definition

so⋅cial⋅ism [soh-shuh-liz-uhm] –noun

1. a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

2. procedure or practice in accordance with this theory.

3. (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.

My New Hero

A breast cancer survivor talks about sex and life. Nothing lewd, just unvarnished humanity and a will not only to survive, but to live. Read it.

Another Measure of the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Today's Republican Party

Here's what I tried to do, the last couple of days:

I tried to give John McCain and his amen chorus the benefit of the doubt and assume that they believe what they're saying. That is, I tried to believe that the cries of "socialist" as they apply to Barack Obama's tax plans are sincere rather than cynical. I tried to believe that Joe the Plumber and his cohort honestly believe that progressive taxation is socialist.

The argument they're making is this: the only non-socialist tax plan would be a flat tax. That is, for income taxes, every dollar earned is taxed at exactly the same rate. There is no progression of rates as income rises -- a progression that everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Andrew Sullivan has called a "punitive" tax on financial success.

My plan was to analyze a real, non-socialist (by the current Republican definition) flat tax proposal and see what it would mean. But there was a problem with my plan: I couldn't find data to support it. I've been looking for a couple of days now, and I can't find anyone who has calculated what the new tax rate would be under that pure, non-socialist scenario. No one, it seems, wants to tax the first dollar of earnings at the same rate they want to tax the millionth dollar of earnings. Every flat tax proponent in the history of the world -- from Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes to Dick Armey and Richard Shelby -- has allowed some kind deduction or tax credit so that poor people don't pay taxes on their poverty-level wages, and so that we don't tax people who are just above the poverty line into poverty.

So my question is: Does this mean that we've broadened the definition of "socialsim" to the point where it no longer has any meaning? Does this mean that all of the Republican yapping and name-calling is nothing but a cynical political ploy? Could it be -- and I know this is far-fetched -- that the whole closing argument of John McCain's Presidential campaign is stupid?

Why, yes. I think that's exactly what it means.