Unfunkked Eleven is melting.

Testing, testing, is this thing on? I didn't die over vacation, if you were wondering. But I feel like I'm pretty well blogged out, and I've enjoyed not having to clean spam comments off the site, so I'm leaving them off until I figure out what, if anything, I'm going to do with this site. I suppose I'll still toss things up here from time to time, like these here 80 minutes of funk and soul, in case you're into that sort of thing. And you should be, you philistines. It even comes with a theme! Sort of vaguely, anyhow.

August in North Carolina is hot and wet, and not in the good buttsex way. Mosquitoes prosper, the air gets relentlessly heavy, people start staying indoors, and even flies can't be bothered to move quickly. If you have free time and available funds, you instinctively head toward the water. I put this together thinking of high school and college weekend trips to the coast. It was the mid-1980s and I drove a seldom-washed diesel VW Rabbit just big enough to seat three people with duffel bags and a cooler full of beer. The odometer was nearing 200,000 miles but it just kept chugging smokily along the same routes I'd been driven down as a kid, before the big highways got finished and took at least an hour and a half off the trip. Old US routes and state roads running through the center of little town after little town. The speed limit would drop from 55 to 30, then a series of stoplights, a turn or two for good measure (follow the signs!), and back up to speed coming out the other side. In between was mostly miles of corn, tobacco, cows, pigs, and swamp. At most of the gas stations, you could also get an impressive variety of live bait in styrofoam containers. The cycle of speeds felt as natural as the mild sunburn everybody got on just their one window arm. Shirts sweat-stuck to our chests because the AC hadn't worked since the previous summer, and the windows were down anyhow because everybody smoked.

Vacation time.

I'm heading down to Hilton Head Island for a week and a few days, so I've shut off comments for the time being, as the site is under a relentless spam deluge. I may or may not resurface during that time, depending on whether I'm able to piggyback onto the neighbors' unprotected wireless network like last year.

In the meantime, ROBOGEISHA!

C.H.U.D., Tar Heel Edition.

There are older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world. Also in Raleigh, as a sewer snake camera discovered under Cameron Village.

ZOMG. Thanks for the nightmares, Carin.

I'll take Door #3, Bob.

I wasn't actually shopping for mosquito traps, but mostly by random, I ended up at the Amazon page for SpringStar Mosquito Traps with Pheromones. Because, you know, that sort of thing happens to me a lot. At that page was perhaps the most useful product review ever written. And surprisingly compelling reading, to boot. Almost like a Raymond Carver short story. Once I finished, I went back to the top and noticed that the Amazon username of the poster is ChurchOfJesusChrist.Net, with the location of Southern Republik of California, USA.

Huh.

So, ChurchOfJesusChrist.Net is of course my next stop, and they do not like circumcision. Or fluoride, aluminum, or chlorine. Also a bunch of stuff about Mormons that I'm guessing makes sense to other Mormons. Pleasant about it all, though, and he's one of the world's biggest Fat Boys fans. And I don't have any real point except that I sure do love the unfathomable randomness of the internet.

Publish or perish.

As part of my job, I spend a lot of time checking references in PubMed—a LOT of time—and so I'm probably more amused by NCBI ROFL than the average bear, but it sure is amusing. SCIENCE!

Headline of the day.

BBC: 'Stoned wallabies make crop circles'

Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said. [...] Australia supplies about 50% of the world's legally-grown opium used to make morphine and other painkillers.

"The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Lara Giddings told the hearing. "Then they crash," she added.

The comments on the article are even funnier.

Sanctity of something or other.

Argentinian mistress? Booo-ring.

I will note for the record, though, that when Mark Sanford was a member of the SC House delegation, he voted for 3 of the 4 articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton.

Oh, just shut the fox up already.

Unprecedented! Unprecedented, I tell you! Journalism is dead!

Everything has to breathe.

If only I'd thought as quickly as this guy, maybe I could still drop my kids off in front of the school instead of two blocks away.

The witness told the officers the man was sitting on a park bench with his penis out and was masturbating. Police say 41-year-old Augustus Hudgins was arrested for indecent exposure. Hudgins told the officers that there was a misunderstanding. He said he was just giving his penis some air, according to the court document.

Really, it's the humane thing to do.

Petard.

I'm very forgiving of extramarital affairs in politicians, because it's really the most common, mundane sort of transgression and honestly doesn't tell you one thing about what kind of job they'll do as an officeholder.

However, I throw that shit out the window when it's somebody who has spent their political career banging their Bible on a desk and pontificating about morality and how they are well-placed to pass judgment on other people's relationships. You know where this is headed. To that great Mecca of traditional-marriage morality, Nevada.

Exhibit A:

In 2004, he published a release titled "ENSIGN DEFENDS SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE ON SENATE FLOOR," where he "took to the floor of the United States Senate today to defend the sanctity of marriage and urge passage of the Federal Marriage Amendment Act." He told fellow senators, "Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation. Marriage, as a social institution, predates every other institution on which ordered society in America has relied. [...] It is not right to mold marriage to fit the desires of a few, against the wishes of so many, and to ignore the important role of marriage."

Exhibit B:

"I came to that conclusion recently, and frankly it's because of what he put his whole Cabinet through and what he has put the country through," Ensign said Thursday, becoming the first member of the Nevada delegation to call for Clinton to quit. "He has no credibility left."

And I could go on, but you get the picture. Also, boning the wife of your trusted aide? Classy.