Chicago: The few. The proud. The egg donors.

Also, I was just reading the thread via my housemate's Wii. I considered posting but it would have taken too long.

All they want me to do is answer the phones and laminate things. Righty-o. . . . I re-laminated my driver's license yesterday and now it looks fake.

This low chair is made of fake leather and makes my ass sweat like fucking day old cheese sitting on a table in the sun at a lower Delaware fire hall wedding reception. Also I have to pee.

That's one of the jobs I need dates for, too.

This is very funny.

It was cold when I went to bed last night
but today it's 72.
I've got a nice front porch and a case of beer
but I can't stop thinking of you.
You said you never meant to hurt me
but I don't believe that's true.
It's a nice day for an all day drunk
and that's what I'm gonna do.

I bought new shoes.

Here is the Allstate commercial filmed right here in Chicago, USA, and right across from my work. http://youtube.com/watch?v=2yYMbljXD8M

It's amazing to me how flattened the car was from hitting the water. They had that car sitting out in front of Catch for a while this summer, I hear.

I have laid the couch back into bed mode, gathered my pillows, grabbed the very warm blanket that belongs to Jesse but that he simply won't stop by and pick up (thanks, Jesse!), and ordered a pizza. I am right here for tonight, blanket, laptop, pizza, and all. I still feel sick, but I feel a certain sense of victory over the crap that is life.

Your symptoms will include massively increased beard growth and massively increased propensity to be an asshole online.

I hate people.

xp name something that you've done that's more impressive

That's way more difficult.

having a baby is no better or worse than not having a baby. the annoying pricks are the people that think they're doing everyone else a favor by doing either one. right now, you're an annoying prick.

I agree with this.

"What a nice place."

"Yeah, the tree makes it nice."

"And the flowers. Let's not pick 'em."

The story was written in the 1930s by James M. Cain, the hard-boiled author of The Postman Always Rings Twice. A screenplay kicked around Hollywood, but the Hays Office nixed it for "hardening audience attitudes toward crime.'' By 1944, Wilder thought he could film it. Cain wasn't available, so he hired Raymond Chandler to do the screenplay. Chandler, whose novel The Big Sleep Wilder loved, turned up drunk, smoked a smelly pipe, didn't know anything about screenplay construction, but could put a nasty spin on dialogue.

Could he ever. God, I love this movie.

You're excited because you reproduced, great, but why the fuck do you assume that I might care and want to hear about the progress of your spawn or see photos of it, look at, or even hold it?

More to the point, though I didn't see the interview Kenan refers to, I doubt his kids are important enough to be a subject in an interview, except becasue the cult of the child makes this a selling point for a politician.

The Germans have a big scary word for it: Kinderfeindlichkeit. It means being unfriendly to children, and it is very serious and real. When my kids take the bus to school, they are regularly shoved, squashed and denied seats by older Germans; if they laugh or joke aloud, threatening scowls reduce them - or try to reduce them - to silence. Being Americans and having lived for six years in fun-loving, children-friendly Spain, the kids now regard this sour behavior as simply aberrant. That it also happens to be a majority sentiment does not trouble them overly.

Children who visit Germany may not have the time or experience to come to this dialectical conclusion, so they and their parents are best warned in advance. ''The Germans are crazy about their cats and dogs,'' Liselotte Funcke, a Social Democratic politician told the Children's Protective Association in Hamburg awhile back, ''but their kids get on their nerves.'' German children respond accordingly, holding their heads in dutiful silence as they sit in restaurants, developing a numbed, wordless lack of spontaneity that an outsider can mistake for insolence.

The only way for a tourist with children to handle the prevailing Kinderfeindlichkeit is to ignore the natives. If old men try to glare your kids into silence, just glare back. Behave the way you always do and let the Germans regard you as subversive anarchists. As my kids say, they're the strange ones, not us.

Germans are fond of sticking on their cars a little red heart that says ''A Heart for Children,'' but their aggressive driving habits result in frightful child fatalities on the streets and highways. Children have to be careful crossing streets and should, like the Germans, respect the stoplights and only use pedestrian crossings.