Author: Brian

(Sorry for the horrible pun – I couldn’t resist)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7MvXUDrZ0Q&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1]

(h/t John Cole)

Is it breaking a rule to put bacon on a Veggie burger? I do it every time I eat a Veggie burger, but every time it just feels… wrong… like I should be watching out for attacks from vegetarians or something.

Speaking of bacon, how about the maple bar bacon wrapped hot dog:

You take one maple bar donut, split it like a hot dog bun, and add a bacon-wrapped hot dog. The guy who took the photo claims that he topped it with “creme fraiche whisked with a dribble of bacon grease.” That’s taking junk food to a different level. We’re talking Paula Deen-style cooking.

On a personal note, I’m fairly certain that I’m going to wake up any second now and completely forget that this dish could exist.

That’s from Spanno at the Al Dente blog (h/t Cheryl Jones).

Somehow, I was in space, high above the planet Earth. I was dressed in regular street clothes, shorts and a t-shirt and my trusty Chucks, which is to say, I was not dressed for space. And yet, I was fine. Breathing did not seem to be a problem, despite the lack of air.

The planet filled my vision, a blue and green and white and sometimes tan marble. Behind me deep space. In front of me the birthplace and homeworld of my species.

I was fine. Other than the falling. Imperceptibly at first, but with a steady build up of acceleration, I was pulled back to mother Earth.

I brushed past the thin layers of the upper atmosphere, cold. I noted without alarm the fact of my not heating up due to friction. The air simply slowed my fall, gently blowing around me and preventing my combustion. It was completely unlike skydiving – that wind was a onrushing jet engine, 120+ miles per hour, a column of air. This was simply like flying, only in one direction, down.

As the sea and land grew closer and larger in my sight, I realized I had some small control over my descent, and thought that an ocean landing would be better. I angled my body, which was feet-first, to a spot just off the coast of… Myanmar. I was over the Indian Ocean, I could see, above south east Asia, on the other side of the world from Portland.

And suddenly, I plunged into warm blue water, in the middle of a bright warm day. I held my arms above my head, and tilted my head back to prevent the impact from slamming my jaw upward, preventing water from jetting into my sinuses. It was as if I had done this before. And, of course, it all worked perfectly.

Just like in a dream.

I plunged deep, deep enough for the water to turn dark, and then pulled towards the surface. I feared predators, sharks or other beasts. I had to get back to the surface. Again, as at the top of my fall, here I had no fear of suffocating. Just a fear of being eaten. As I neared the mirror of the interface between water and air, I saw a menacing torpedo shape and swam away.

My head popped up above the water, my sight clouded by the salt water. I wiped my eyes, and looked for shore; behind me rose green jungle and hills. And as I gradually regained my senses, I felt, then heard, the rumble of engines, and saw boats of various types, small and large and gianormous. This was a busy port! They all must have seen my fall. I had to get out of sight.

I flagged down a small 15 foot boat, shouting “help!” They turned towards me, approached, and helped me up. I could almost understand them. They were speaking German. There were about six or seven of them, adults and two children, a family. I told them “Ich sprache bitte Deutsche” – pidgin German, forgotten since high school, to communicate that I knew very little of their language. “English?” I asked but they shook their heads.

They consulted, and then turned their outboard motor to angle back to shore. I huddled under a blanket, now cold. Day became evening, faster than I would have guessed. I could smell the salt air and the rich, almost rotting, odor of the jungle.

The boat docked at a long, low, white-washed building with red tile roof. People in casual clothes and flip flops, sunglasses and caps, among other brown-skinned people in white uniforms. A resort of some kind. I realized now that I had no identification on me, and that my first goal would be to find the closest American embassy, where I could attempt to get a passport and return home, perhaps to find answers to my strange journey. I found the front desk, asked the staff (who, strangely, spoke only their native language and Spanish, and very little English). I had the odd feeling that I had a room here, though I did not know how that was possible. After stumbling through the inter-language barrier (my Spanish is not much better than my German, and I have no idea what the native language of Myanmar is), the staff finally directed me to find room A-72.

A-72 was off in a dusty, unused corridor of the resort. A small, tiled waiting room fitted with a burgundy leather couch with no windows before a simple wooden door. Set in the door, a frosted glass window. The waiting room was lit only by the light from the intersection behind me, and the faint gleam of light from behind that little frosted window.

I knocked. No answer. I tried the door. It was locked. I sat down on the couch. Soon enough, the door opened, and a giant dark-haired woman, also in the white linen dress uniform of the resort, ducked under the lintel and stepped out, nearly folding herself in half to do so. I noticed that the ceiling was nearly three stories up, so that once in the waiting room she could stand normally. I looked up at her, her face hidden in the darkness up there, but I could tell she smiled.

“Brian Moon?” she asked, in a European accent. French? Spanish, again? I could not tell.

I nodded, almost afraid to speak. She took my hand and led me into the room behind the door. I went in first, and she folded herself in behind me.

She hugged me. The skin of her thigh felt warm against my cheek.

She sat behind a desk, reached into a drawer, and pulled out a manila envelope, pushed it across the desk. I opened it and pulled out a passport, and my iPhone. I knew the iPhone was mine because of the dent on the back, and it was full of my own personal information, the numbers and addresses of my friends and family. I would need this to get back home. Who remembers phone numbers anymore? They were all in my phone.

The passport, though it had my picture, was not mine. But the name looked familiar to me. It was… difficult to read. The letters swam and moved, changed shapes, switched positions on me. I was afflicted with a type of dyslexia that only affected this one document. And yet, the name was familiar. It was…

A bell rang. It was my iPhone.

I woke up. The bell was an incoming text from Tracy.

Man, what a weird dream.

Maybe next year I will have worked my miles up to where I could finish a marathon.

Maybe next year I’ll have a training partner to share the moment with.

Maybe next year there will be someone special waiting at the end.

Maybe next year, even if I’m not ready to run it, I’ll have it together enough to volunteer to help.

Maybe next year it won’t be pouring down rain during the Portland Marathon.

Maybe next year.

Good luck to all the participants in today’s marathon, though!

Sen. Joe Biden appeared to avoid the perception of attacking Gov. Sarah Palin by focusing his attacks on the top of the opposition ticket. He continually pushed the differences between Sen. Barack Obama and himself, and Sen. John McCain.

But Gov. Palin kept trotting out her scripted attacks, to the point where it became obvious that Sen. Biden was being forceful about policy, and gentle on motives. And finally, near the end, he spelled it out with an anecdote about Sen. Jesse Helms, a man whom anyone paying attention to politics would consider a fucking racist son of a bitch (including me – yes, Helms is dead, so what?) but Sen. Biden treated publicly with a sense of collegiality.

Biden kept returning to the “kitchen table” topics that regular Americans are dealing with: health care and taxes. He choked up when mentioning his own personal tragedy – Gov. Palin had no reaction to that brief show of emotion; she just launched into her prepared talking points.

Palin’s schtick is easy to see – pivot into the talking points at the earliest possibility. Carri Bugbee pointed out on Twitter during the debate that the only actual policy that Palin pointed out was her stand on gay marriage (no way – duh, she’s playing to the gay-hating Republican base), and… and… nothing else.

I’m sure Palin’s performance tonight will play well to the base. That’s all she seems capable of. Her coded messages of “white flag of surrender!” and “income redistribution” and “maverick, maverick, maverick!” will read loud and clear to the twenty-five-percenters who already love her (to those who don’t have the secret decoder ring, those code phrases mean “coward!”, “Communist!” and “Bush is NOT A REAL REPUBLICAN”, respectively).

C’mon, though. Her connection to the “heartland” of America? When did Alaska become the “heartland”? Oh, neat, she’s got a quirky gay friend, just like on a sitcom! And just try to wrap your head around the concept of “a team of mavericks”. Can one actually join a “team of mavericks”? Isn’t that like joining an anarchists club?

On the merits and the substance, Biden won the debate. On style and class, Biden won the debate.

Gov. Palin’s stock responses may win her merits back in Juneau. My prediction is that she didn’t win many undecided voters.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ&hl=en&fs=1]

Voting is hard.

When someone on Fark.com links to a site and the ensuing traffic overwhelms the servers of the linked-to site, it’s called “being farked”.

There are versions of that for many different sites: “slashdotted“, etc.

What do we call it when American citizens overwhelm the mail servers at the U.S. House of Representatives? Apparently people are up in arms about this whole “$700 billion or the economy dies” thing.

New term needed. Suggestions?

My idea: democratered (from small-d “democracy” – since folks are mad on the Left and the Right, the emails aren’t only from Democrats).

If you’re feeling bad or ill, or wondering if the vague feelings you have are, in fact, symptoms of something, whether serious or not, there are many paths you can take to increase your knowledge and awareness.

But whatever you choose to do, do not Google your symptoms.

Yes, do not do what I did last night.

There’s no freakin’ financial crisis.

How do I know? Well, a spokeswoman for the Treasury just admitted they pulled the numbers out of their asses.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

And thank Invisible Sky Man that Sen. McCain has bowed out and conceded. Now the election will just be a formality and we can get on with repairing the damage 8 years of conservative rule has done to our country.

…what? McCain only suspended his campaign so he wouldn’t have to show up at the debate? I thought he was battle-tested and ready to take command on Day One?

BWAH-HAHahahahaha!

This “crisis” can definitely wait for another couple of months, when we’ll have a president who can walk and chew gum at the same time.