Halloween Potty

Something else that forktine sent along that made this Halloween my scariest in a while: an extended discussion of the shelf toilet. We encountered this not in Poland or Germany but while visiting forktine in Vienna a few years ago. While I see it can have advantages of no splashback, the shelf itself holds things far too long and close for my, uh, taste. I don't remember it from our many travels in Germany and Poland but it will certainly keep me from placing Austria high on my 'countries to revisit' list. And if you would like to see overeducated folk talk potty, there's a good forum at the Chronicle for you. I suppose I shouldn't be so harsh, as we've been very interested in the composting toilet brochure we got from Sun-Mar; at least the shelf-toilet gets rid of the stuff.

The Comedy Store

During a recent visit to LA we spent an evening at The Comedy Store to see some stand-ups do their thing. That night they had a lot going up for about 15-20 minutes each so there was a lot of variety. It didn't start well: the first guy (whose name we didn't catch) was making jokes about Kato Kaelin and the second guy started with a Rodney Dangerfield impersonation. He made a joke about being out of material for the last 10 minutes and I was tempted to suggest that it was actually 10 years. A 'no heckling' sign gave me restraint.

The evening was saved by Bobby Lee, who we had seen back at Rutgers many years ago but here he could do a greater variety of material. Al Madrigal, who followed him, was also good but from there it was downhill for me. I won't name the rest of them but I have to say how lame and pathetic Charles Fleisher was up there, doing some quasi-Robin Williams thing without actual jokes. I actually began to doze off but knew that one of the lame-os on stage w/o material would just make fun of me if I put my head down. I understand where a 'no heckling' sign can keep the jerks in the audience from ruining everybody's night but it does have the downside of not giving the loser on stage more reasons to improve their material. Then again, what should I expect of the place the unleashed Pauly Shore on the world?

Goat report, 10/18/07

Warning: don't invite a rabid goat to your harvest festival!

RIP, MCBF

I was very excited to get another in a series of irregularly mailed envelopes from a Mr. John Marr (no, not Johnny Marr) recently. For many years he's written an excellent zine called Murder Can Be Fun, filled with well written real-life stories of death, murder and some fine book reviews. Alas, this envelope included a note that the latest issue, revisiting and updating the famous Death at Disneyland article, would be the last. In reading the latest issue I was struck at what a good writer Mr. Marr is, which makes me glad to have so many of the back issues. Anybody could write about Zoo Deaths (issue 16) or deaths at sporting events (issue 18) or the Great Boston Molasses Flood (issue 11) and have lots of fun with the morbid possibilities but Marr did it in such a friendly way that it doesn't sound ghoulish, just slightly (but not inappropriately) amused.

Vacation, pt. 3 - New Orleans/Baton Rouge

The next leg of our summer travels took us into Louisiana, where we visited some family near Baton Rouge and babygoat got some playtime with an infant cousin. We also took a couple of days to check out New Orleans and found the main tourist areas to be nice enough, although you get less than one mile away from the river and it begins to look like Katrina was just there yesterday. If they don't do something about it, New Orleans runs the risk of being like Atlantic City but with fun places to go nearby.

On our way out of the state, we stopped at an artist's studio to get a print of one of the unique Louisiana Mud Paintings that goes very well with our bedroom decor.

Bloggoat

Milady Ms Goat has begun to blog her reflections on the media she consumes like so many sandwiches or rocks. Since she's had some schoolin', she's often some good things to say. Check out goatreview.