All Quiet on the Western Front...A Little Too Quiet

I'm reporting to you today from the solitude of my mother's office. You see, since I am unemployed, my Mom thought it would be good for me to get out of the house and do some work. OK. She is out of town for a work-related convention in San Francisco, her office manager is on vacation, and the rest of the staff is remarkably nowhere to be found. Works for me. All I'm doing is answering phones and taking messages. I went to college, so it is not exactly taxing work mentally. Except for the fact that it is very boring with no one around, I'm having a good day. I brought in my new computer and immediately found someone's unprotected wireless internet signal and got online. My Mom's office is, of course, wired for the internet, but I don't want to put personal stuff on someone's work computer. And since some of her employees access their work computer from home, I didn't think I should disconnect one of them from the internet and hook up my computer. So, I have an empty office with Air America playing and I can blog in peace. The office is pretty dead, except for one lone hottie in an office across the hall. She looks pretty young, and I'd imagine she is the daughter of someone that works here. Don't get the wrong idea, she's at least college age....

Yesterday, I went and saw a shrink. Don't get all freaked out, my Dad is one. Getting analyzed is not exactly foreign territory for me. I went because I am just completely listless and unexcited about anything. I'm 34, and I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life. I have already owned my own business, worked in fields as diverse as entertainment and real estate, and have lived in most regions of the country. It is hard to get motivated to go out and find my "dream job" when I don't have one. Though I hate sitting around doing nothing, right now there is no place I'd rather go every morning than to my living room. I'm like that guy in Office Space. I just want to do nothing.

Since I'm a college graduate, a pretty smart guy, somewhat creative, I should have no problem finding a good job, right? Wrong. It turns out that my experience is looked at as a negative in the corporate world, and I will never get a job with the Fortune 500 set. Fuck them. I never wanted to work in that world anyway. But what the hell am I going to do then? Omaha is not overflowing with start-ups, or entertainment agencies, or anyplace where I might be a good fit. I guess I have just gotten so frustrated and discouraged that I don't really want to keep looking. This, of course, is not realistic. I have a pretty decent sized savings, but I can't live off of that forever. It was suggested to me that I may be depressed and that depression is clouding my outlook on things, and making me see my situation only in negative terms. I don't know. Maybe. Since I can't really refute the "diagnosis," I figured I'd lay down on the couch and get shrunk for a little while.

What did I learn? Well, it was only one session, so I didn't learn too much. I was honest with the guy, and I told him plenty of details about the last few years of my life. He doesn't think I have any type of serious depression or anything. Maybe a mild case. I basically need to change the way I view my situation and myself, because I am trapped in this negative cycle (or some other psychobabble-like term). Oh, and I shouldn't smoke pot anymore because it is contributing to my generally blase outlook. He's probably right about that, but I am a cynical person by nature. I don't think quitting pot smoking will all of a sudden turn me into some raging optimist. Bottom line is, if you cheap fuckers would just give me a bunch of money then I could turn this blog into a full-time job. I'm sure that would put a smile on my face.

The Wide World of Politics

• (AP) Bush: Intelligent Design Should be Taught. In another shameless display of pandering to the religious right, our glorious leader has endorsed the teaching of creationism in school. You know, because our schools aren't bad enough already, and our students aren't already lagging behind nearly every other industrialized nation in math and science, so let's go ahead and teach kids the bible in school. How far do you think a kid is going to get in engineering, for example, if he believes that the earth is only 6,000 years old, carbon dating is a fraud, the earth was "created" in six days, Adam (of Adam and Eve fame) lived over 900 years, and that NASA has "proven" that the bible is factually accurate. These are just a few things taught in creationism. Intelligent design is nothing more than creationism under a more palatable name. If you believe those things, good for you. Teach them to your family on your own time. Do not clutter our nation's schools with a bunch of fairy tales that have no scientific basis, and call it "intelligent" anything.
  
• (AP) Ohioans Cast Votes for U.S. House Seat. Today could be the day that the first veteran of the Iraq War gets elected to Congress -- and he's a Democrat. Paul Hackett is running for the seat in a heavily GOP district against some Bush toadie and anti-choice activist named Jean Schmidt (president of Ohio Right to Life). In a just world, Hackett would win easily. He is a veteran, and is a critic of the war, but the district tends to vote heavily GOP. Though Hackett has refused to go negative against his opponent, the Republican party has publicly vowed to "bury" Hackett ("...the only burial of an Iraq war veteran the GOP wants you to see." -- Randi Rhodes). Way to support the troops, guys!
  
• (Wonkette) Wanna see what happens when we have one-party rule in America? Some douchebag creates a ridiculous, futuristic comic book about conservative super heroes. It is so silly, I hate re-printing it, but here is the description for the new volume: "It is 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11 It is up to an underground group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North to thwart Ambassador Usama Bin Laden's plans to nuke New York City...And wake the world from an Orwellian nightmare of United Nations dominated ultra-liberalism." Who the fuck would actually want to read this comic? Whatever happened to alternative comics like 'American Splendor'?
  
• Iraqis Accuse Kuwait of Stealing Oil. I guess it wasn't just Saddam Hussein who thought Kuwait was after the Iraqi oil. It is an Iraqi national delusion shared by th new "democratically elected" government. The apple doesn't fall far from the Iraqi tree.
  

THE REST OF THE DARK STUFF
Don't torch that McDonald's just yet! A new study by the American Heart Association has just been published links belly fat to tobacco smoke in teenagers. The stats are little underwhelming, so I don't think I'd go changing your behavior just yet...Queens of the Stone Age will be performing on Jimmy Kimmel Live this Friday, August 5th according to Audio Aggression. The show's website says the guest will be 311 that night. I'll guess you'll have to tune in to find out...Green Day have pulled their first two albums out of the Lookout! Records catalog claiming they have not been paid proper royalties for sales of the CDs. Lookout! had the rights to the first two GD albums, 1,039/ Smoothed Out Happy Hours and Kerplunk, since they were first released back in the early 90s. The label has taken the news pretty hard, as they had to lay off six of its nine employees due to the loss of revenue. This will no doubt cause some type of backlash against Green Day for "hurting" an independent label. However, if the label was not paying royalties, the backlash should be directed at Lookout!...A new report finds that a new blog is created every second of the day. The number of blogs doubles every five months! There are now over 14 million online today. No wonder it's so fucking hard to find an audience!...This is great! An Israeli playwrite has written a response to 'The Vagina Monologues' called 'The Holy Phallus.' It is written in Hebrew, and has been getting "mixed" reviews. Personally, I don't want to see a play about a guy's penis no matter how well written it is...

SONG OF THE DAY: "Ohio" by Devo
Yes, it's that "Ohio!" The one by Crosby, Stills, Nash & (most importantly) Young. Devo does a very "Devo-esque" (I don't know how else to describe it) version of the 60s anti-war anthem. The songs comes from a bizarre compilation on Xemu Records that has artists doing very strange covers (i.e. Don Ho doing "Shock the Monkey" by Peter Gabriel!). The disc is called When Pigs Fly: Songs You Thought You'd Never Hear, and you can pick it up here.

Today on 'The Factor' we have a favorite of mine, Ms. Sky Lopez. Yes, Sky is a porn star (or she was at one point). These photos must be a few years old because she has no tattoos in them (or they were airbrushed). Either way, she looks quite good in them. Click here to see the whole set (NSFW).