What's your name kid?

The man below used to be pretty familiar to fans of wrestling. Here he is at a recent movie premiere. Any guesses on who he is?

It shakes me! It quakes me! It makes me feel goose-pimply all over!

One of the things I like about antique stores is that they sometimes have piles of old Life magazines. I love to pour through the articles and ads but have really always been impressed with the pictures. So you can imagine how excited I was to find out Life had reached a deal with Google to post all their pictures on line. You can search through them here.

Some of the ones I'm partial to so far...

Last night was last night, and it's all there was, and it's all there is. There isn't going to be anything more between us.

Life is pretty good (though busy.) There are only three things making me bang my head on my desk today: politics, religion and sports. Other than those small things I haven't a care in the world.

With regards to politics the Lieberman vote yesterday by Senate Democrats has me seeing red. There are tons of theories as to the thinking of Reid and company to why they let Lieberman keep his chair. Many are willing to write it off simply to Senate collegiality. Others point to Ted Stevens' loss and the growing probability of hitting the magic 60 senators number (although the idea that Lieberman, not to mention Blue Dog Democratic senators, will vote the right way when is counts is beyond absurd.)

Personally, I subscribe to Jane Hamsher's opinion that the Democratic Senate just gave the base of the party the middle finger. Putting the base in our place after we all worked so tirelessly and donated so much to seeing Democrats increase numbers in the Senate and House and win the White House was the entire point of the Lieberman exercise. We can't let the moonbat rabble thing we're beholding to them or anything. They're sending us the message to not expect ANYTHING out of them even with Obama in the White House.

Yeah, well fuck you too Senator Reid.

While I'm on the subject of messages; many Catholic bishops are sending their flock the same message in light of the election results. 54% of Catholic voters went for Obama and these bishops are not happy.

Chicago Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is preparing a statement during the bishops' fall meeting that will press Obama on abortion.

The bishops suggested that the final document include the message that "aggressively pro-abortion policies" would be viewed "as an attack on the church."

Between the direct involvement of the church of LDS in the passage of Proposition 8 in California and the growing direct involvement of big churches in endorsing similar measures and candidates around the country I'm starting to feel a little victimized here myself.

We subsidize these churches through their tax-exempt status. I don't have a problem with that and consider it wholly constitutional. But when churches are engaging in the types of political advocacy we've seen lately, they're crossing a church-state line. Essentially they're taking my money and using it for something that, as in the case of Proposition 8, I violently disagree with.

Church leaders- take your tax-exempt status and shove it up your ass.

College football sent president-elect Obama and fans of the sport a message yesterday when the BCS signed a deal to move the broadcast of the bowl games from Fox to ESPN for the years 2011-2014. Besides the fact that this is a giant rasberry aimed at fans who don't subscribe to cable the real news here is this effectively locks in the stupid BCS system until that contract expires six years from now.

The end of the ESPN deal coincides with the date — 2014 — through which the B.C.S. commissioners have agreed to keep their current championship system in place. The commissioners met last April and considered a playoff proposal by Mike Slive, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, but voted against it and put off considering any changes until the end of the next television deal.

I can't think of any other sport where fans consistently root for the thing to go FUBAR so we can get rid of it as they do in college football with the BCS.

Dear BCS- message recieved. Now kiss my ass.

I think that's enough outrage for today.

There's only one thing you love, Danny: that's danger. Cliffhanging. You could never love a woman like you love danger.

We're all cyber criminals now.

Now, no prejudice intended, but I always check with the Bible on these here things.

Business owners who were supporters of Proposition 8 in California are whining that their support of the measure has led to a boycott.

"I'm frustrated by what's going on," said Dave Leatherby, owner of the Leatherby Family Creamery in Sacramento, commenting on the protests and court battles.

"Let's move on. I always told my children that once a rule was made, you have to abide by it. I think it should be the same in this circumstance."

Leatherby and his family donated about $20,000 for the passage of Proposition 8. A devout Catholic and father of 10, Leatherby supported the measure for religious reasons. He said his business has been targeted by bloggers as a result, and that he is particularly confused because his business has participated in the annual gay pride Rainbow Festival.

The fact that Dave's confused should go without comment. Dave apparently believes that gay people should be proud of who they are, while believing at the same time that they shouldn't enjoy the same rights as other American citizens. Your hypocrisy, Dave. It's showing.

(Must be nice to have 20k to donate to a political campaign. Add this to the whining and the world's smallest violin just got a little smaller.)

"Protesting is a time-honored American tradition," said Ned Dolejsi, executive director of the California Catholic Conference. Catholic leaders were active in the Yes on 8 campaign. "But it's unfortunate when it steps over into religious bigotry or harassment."

How dare you show prejudice against our bigotry!

Some Proposition 8 supporters say a minority of protesters have gone too far by targeting individuals. Opponents of the measure have called for a boycott of the California Musical Theatre after revelations that artistic director Scott Eckern, a Mormon, donated $1,000 to the Yes on 8 Campaign. Members of his church played a significant role in the campaign.

Artistic director for California Musical Theatre? Scott's lucky he is isn't dragged out of his office, thrown into the stocks and pelted with CDs of "Cats."

"It's disheartening that he is being singled out," said Lisa West, spokeswoman for the church in the Sacramento area. "We had hoped there would be more tolerance for different viewpoints."

See, it's just a matter of different points of view. Just because Lisa thinks that gay people are inhuman sinners going against God's will who will certainly be condemned to an eternity in hell screaming in agony and demons rend the boiling flesh from their bodies doesn't mean she isn't willing to sit down for coffee with them and hear what they have to say.

Although supporters of gay marriage believe the courts will come through for them and ultimately overturn this initiative on equal protection grounds, the supporters of Proposition 8 still seem defiant.

For now, Leatherby said, Proposition 8 should stand. "If they want to win me over," he said, "that's not how to do it."

Because appealling to your sense of humanity and Christian goodwill has gone so far up to this point, jerk. It's not our problem that you're a homophobic bigot. Deal.

Keith says it better than me:

I'm gone, man. Solid gone.

This may be a morbid post but what the hell. I've been working on a list of songs that I'd like played at my funeral. I'm still young and (hopefully) that day is far, far away but I think it's a good idea to do something like that while one is young and lucid. Or as lucid as I can get.

At one point this list grew to over a hundred songs. Unless the funeral turns out to be an all day affair that's obviously way too many tunes. I think 20 is a nice number. That's roughly an hour of music.

One way of thinking that really helped narrow it down was to pull out songs that I had on the list because I simply liked and keep the songs that more told a story about me. In that sense the songs run from my childhood until now. This is sort of the soundtrack of my life.

I would love to see you guys take a stab at your own soundtrack. Let me know if you do.

1) "The Bear Necessities," Phil Harris - The earliest song I remember loving. I had a toy record player and this on a 45 and I would play this, sing along and dance around my room for hours. My parents must of loved that.

2) "I Don't Want To Be The Lone Ranger", unknown - I have no idea where we got this song but my mom dressed my brother and me up like the Lone Ranger and Tonto and we lip-synced this tune for a talent show.

3) "Star Wars," John Williams - My folks rented a van and took me and my friends to wait an hour and a half in line to see the first Star Wars movie. From the moment this theme started and the title march scrolled it was an out-of-body experience that led to a lifetime love of film.

4) "Star Trek," Alexander Courage - I would watch reruns of this show when I got home from school. It burned into my psyche.

5) "Every Little Thing She Do Is Magic," The Police - In my grade school class everybody had a favorite band. Mine was The Police. I liked the reggae/ punk fusion and Sting's raspy voice.

6) "Great Balls of Fire," Jerry Lee Lewis - I started to appreciate that there was cool older music. This song stuck out because I remember loving to sing the part that goes "kiss me baby, Mmmmmmm, feels good."

7) "The Last Time," The Rolling Stones - So many great Stones tunes but this older one is one of my favorites.

8) "Goonies R' Good Enough," Cindy Lauper - I'm not going to apologize for this song. This movie has a soft spot in my heart then and now.

9) "Raider's March," John Williams - Friends dragged me to see this film. It looked way to commercial for me. I wound up loving it.

10) "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me," Culture Club - I don't even like this song but when I hear it I have flashbacks to making out with some pretty girl in my old VW Rabbit.

11) "El Shaddai," Amy Grant - Laugh if you want but for a time I had serious intentions of being a priest. I think being in love with Amy Grant might have had something to do with it. Teenagers aren't known for their clarity of thought.

12) "Pachabel's Canon," Pachabel - If there's a more perfect piece of music I haven't heard it.

13) "We Got The Beat," Go Gos - Loved the Go Gos and loved dancing to the Go Gos.

14) "Mighty Oregon," unknown - University of Oregon was probably the best time of my life.

15) "Otis Redding Live At Montrey Pops Festival," Otis Redding - Technically more than one song so sue me. I vividly remember listening to this in a college dorm room the first time I smoked a blunt.

16) "No Woman, No Cry," Bob Marley - The first time I heard this song I took it to mean if you don't have a woman in your life you won't be shedding any tears. Only later did I realize he was trying to comfort his wife in the song. I like my interpretation better.

17) "Groovy Kind Of Love," Phil Collins - Our song so shut up. :-)

18) "La Valse D'Amelie," Yann Tiersen - This movie is too wonderful to describe. You either live your life alone or you share your life with others.

19) "Mosh," Eminem - I really thought we the kids would save us from Bush in 2004. They did. Just a couple of years later is all.

20) "Everlong," Foo Fighters - The acoustic version of this song gets to what it means to love someone. "Breathe out, so I can breathe you in. Hold you in."

Many wars and feuds did Conan fight. Honor and fear were heaped upon his name and, in time, he became a king by his own hand.

The very cool West Coast Walker was kind enough to tag me with the Superior Scribbler Award.. It means a lot coming from Matt because between you, me and the wall, I harbor no doubt he's quite a bit smarter than me. But let's keep that on the QT.

Superior Scribbler Rules and Responsibilities:*The Rules: Every Superior Scribbler will name 5 other Super Scribblers.If you are named you must link to the author & the name of the blog that gave you the award. Then you must display the adorable award and link to THIS POST, which explains the award. The same post also allows you to add your link. Then they will have a record of all the people who are Super Scribblers!

My Nominees:

Pissed Off Patricia who hasn't seemed so pissed off lately but actually happy and hopeful. Maybe she should change her name to "Joyful Patricia."

Ubermilf who with great consistency makes me laugh with her unique take on the crazy world of parenting, being a milf and shirtless ranting.

Swinebread who doesn't blog as much as he used to because of the whole having a newborn at home thing but still provides my regular fix of comic book news.

Lockwood who has a wonderful dry sense of humor that I assume comes from the fact he resides in the rainiest state in the union.

Enigma who live-blogs all the important political events. An achievement dwarfed by the fact that she seems to be sober when doing so.

You do not *vote* pirates off the seas. You engage them, rake, and scuttle them.

On this Veteran's Day my thoughts are of my wonderful father and his service in the U.S. Navy. He had a story that he loved to tell and I loved to hear of his time in the service. I want to share that story.

Unlike his own father who had served in the Navy during World War 2, my father had the fortune of serving at a relatively peaceful time in our nation's history. Shortly after Naval Boot Camp he was assigned to a destroyer escort where he spent a lot of time peeling potatoes, painting stuff, etc. You get the picture.

The Crossing the Line ceremony has been around as long as their have ships sailing the seas. Essentially it's a ceremony in which seasoned sailors (Shellbacks) initiate those sailors who are crossing the equator for the first time (Polly-wogs.)

The whole thing actually takes a couple of days and is fairly structured. On the evening before the ceremony the Shellback enlisted servicemen "take over" the ship from the officers, who essentially step aside for a couple of days. That evening the Wogs are allowed a sort of mild uprising before they are hazed during the ceremony the next day.

The ceremony itself varies but it usually involves things like beatings, crawling through tubes of rotten garbage, dips in the ocean, kissing the fattest guy on the ship's belly when it's covered in grease, etc. It ends with King Neptune bestowing the title of "Shellback" on the Polly-wogs and a beauty contest involving sailors dressed as women.

On my father's crossing he was part of a particularly large class of Wogs totalling over 60 sailors. They were blessed with a group of Shellbacks who were real son's of bitches. These guys spent the days as the ship approached the equator telling the Wogs in excruciating detail how this Crossing the Line ceremony was going to be the most notorious ever. The beatings were going to be especially brutal and the garbage especially gross.

Dad and his fellow Wogs did what any rational sailors would do under these circumstances: they revolted. On the evening before ceremony they attacked the Shellbacks and locked them up. My dad was part of a group of five guys that took on a radio operator that was a real bear of a man. As dad described the fight their were guys getting thrown around the room as they all tried to hold this giant down.

Eventually they took the ship. They through the giant tube of garbage overboard, elected their own "officers" and partied in their skivvies. As the ship crossed the equator it wasn't under the flag of the United States but instead under a hastily painted Polly-wog flag. My dad was a pirate.

Of course they had to let the Shellbacks out and the hazing took place anyway, under conditions twice as brutal as promised. As my father would tell this story some forty years after it had taken place his eyes would light up at the memory. In his eyes it was worth it.

Upon completion of the ceremony my father was given a certificate that looked exactly like the one below. This certificate hung in his office above his degree in electrical engineering which tells you the importance to which dad held this event. Because while service and duty are important, sometimes we have to be pirates. Even if it's only for a day.

Mr. Magee, don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

I assume everybody is up to speed on the Harry Reid/ Joe Lieberman melodrama of last week. It won't come as any surprise that I come down on the side of those that want to have Holy Joe lose his chairmanships, be expeled from the party and then summarily tomatoed to his knees in the public square. But that doesn't even come close to expressing how I really feel.

When I think about the possibility that the slimy traitorous little weasel Lieberman might retain those chairmanships when loyal, true-blue Democrat Hillary Clinton doesn't chair any committees of her own, I'm filled with a Hulkian rage giving me the strength to tear a toaster in two with my bare hands.

Seniority be damned. Give his committees to Hillary. She's more than earned them and she won't be stabbing us in the back.

Permit me to introduce myself. My name is Coyote. Wile E. Coyote, genius.

There's an almost surreal quality to the outgoing Bush administration publicly warning president-elect Obama that terrorists see transitions between governments as a good time to attack.

This is after all the administration that ignored multiple warnings about the 9/11 attacks from Clinton administration officials like Sandy Berger, Richard Clarke or George Tenet in order to focus on the important issues like renewing Star Wars missile defense program. Berger warned Condoleeza Rice months before the attacks that terrorism would "consume far more of her time than she would have imagined."

“For the next 75 days, all of us must ensure that the next president and his team can hit the ground running,” Mr. Bush said in an emotional speech to hundreds of employees of the executive branch on the South Lawn of the White House.

Dude, the next president isn't going to just hit the ground running. He's going to leave your worthless team in the dust. You're about to see what he feels like to be the Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner.

I did find this a bit annoying:

Mr. Bush has said he is determined to conduct an orderly transition. The White House wants to avoid a repeat of the kind of news reports that plagued President Bill Clinton when he left office amid questions about whether members of his staff, irked at having to turn their offices over to Republicans, removed the letter W from some computer keyboards.

How nice of the author of this article to underplay what exploded into a major vandalism scandal only a few days after Bush took office. It included accusations that the outgoing Clinton administration cut telephone wires, wrecked computers, left graffiti on the walls, stole presidential seals and even towels off of Air Force One. A General Accounting Office investigation found most of the accusations to be bunk.

"Certainly people inside the [Bush] administration fed this story," says an angry John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff. "At least they got what they wanted out of it."

A close look at the way the scandal mushroomed bolsters Podesta's view: The Bush administration helped the vandal scandal along, publicly appearing to try to douse the flames, while privately fanning them with detailed, off-the-record allegations of damage. On Tuesday, after the GAO's review was made public, Fleischer was left trying to spin himself out of a very deep hole, insisting he had tried to "knock down" the vandal story when it first emerged.

But a transcript of Fleischer's Jan. 25 briefing on the issue contradicts him. It shows the Bush spokesman coyly encouraging reporters' suspicions about the vandal scandal, while refusing to confirm or deny the reports of damage. According to one leading White House reporter, the story was also nudged along by two unnamed Bush aides.

Yesterday, Bush was referring to this "scandal" when he told his staff without any sense of irony to “conduct yourselves with the decency and professionalism that you have shown throughout my time in office.”

After 8 years of this administration we've seen decency and professionalism as something that are in short supply at this White House. Lying about their opponents and bare-knuckled politics are the way they conduct business. They have been from the start.