Big Ugly Man Doll

Grab your hockey masks, it’s Friday the 13th!   If you live through the day, this will be another chance to catch up with your own personal astrological future. Your upcoming week will be poor, nasty, brutish, and short – but don’t let it get you down! Read on!

Aries (The Ram):  This is a great week to start that diet, but you won’t, will you?  You’re just going to sit there with that box of Oreo cookies and that blank look on your face, staring at the goddamn clock on the wall as you eat that whole box, one. By. One.  You can’t control the anger by eating, but you’ll never learn that.   Your high-risk disease this week:  Leaf & Stripe Rusts.

Taurus (The Bull): You refuse to be categorized the way Jell-O refuses to be nailed to a wall, but this week that will come back to haunt you.  If you can’t be included in the demographic data, Ed McMahon will never know where to send your check.  Move along, opportunity, move along.

Gemini (The Twins): . Your week will include long bouts of self evaluation and require large quantities of adult beverages.  You will coin a new phrase, “the old wire-up-the-nose trick.”  Your high-risk disease this week: Legionellosis.

Cancer (The Crab):  This is a great week to start the next chapter in the steamy fanfic of your life.  Your true calling will reveal itself as you tell an old story from a new perspective, brilliantly executed except that no one’s paying you.   You know, yet.

Leo (The Lion):    This week will be a filbert in a bowl of peanuts, a sour note in the bath, the off-tone you can’t identify as your fax machines dials again and again, never to connect.  Stay away from pushpins and thumbtacks on Wednesday.  Your high-risk disease this week: Lumpy Skin Disease.

Virgo (The Virgin):  All around the world, statues are crumbling.  For you.  You bastard.  Stay away from Facebook this week, that shit’ll kill ya.

Libra (The Scale):  On Tuesday, you will eat a potato and you will be happy about it.  Wednesday, realize that was the french fried potato of your soul, and despair.  Your high-risk disease this week: Measles.

Scorpio (The Scorpion):  Try to fart less this week, it’s not as attractive as you think.  Your escape lies in education, but your education is never complete.  Your lucky number this week is 57,005. 

Sagittarius (The Archer):   This week, you are an ice queen Hello Kitty, nice to look at and deadly to touch.  The throngs will worship at your five-inch spike heels in vain.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Turtle Ranavirus.

Capricorn (The Sea-Goat):  You will be held directly responsible this week for North Korea’s botched rocket launch, the recent series of earthquakes, and the disappearance of 90% of the honeybees in the world.  Nice going, asshole. 

Aquarius (The Water Bearer):   It wasn’t a dream, no matter how much you wish it was.  Start updating your resume and honing your interview techniques, because practicing your pickup lines on your supervisor’s underage daughter will prove to be a career limiting move.  Your high-risk disease this week: Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus.

Pisces (The Fish):   Nobody can be trusted with their finger on the button, nobody puts Baby in the corner, and nobody thinks that tie goes with that shirt.  You are a fashion nightmare and this week, you will prove it!

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Another Friday, and Good Friday to you!  Here’s another chance to catch up with your own personal astrological future. Your upcoming Easter and Passover week will be poor, nasty, brutish, and short – but don’t let it get you down!  Read on!

Aries (The Ram):  This week you will celebrate passing the tests to get your commercial realtor’s license by going out and buying a shiny new pair of bright red shoes.  This will prove all the more ironic when that house falls on you afterward, leaving only your feet sticking out. 

Taurus (The Bull):  All your best guesses will be wrong this week, your aim will be off, and your cakes and souffles will fall.  Tuesday looks good for a low carb snack.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Hantavirus.

Gemini (The Twins):  You should consider surgery, therapy, and astrology, not necessarily in that order.  Pisces will play a big role in your sex life this week. 

Cancer (The Crab):  You will get a new job offer soon.  This week, you will need to bone up on your interviewing skills.  For instance, telling your interviewer “Any time, any day, my snipers can drop you,” might have had a negative impact on your last interview.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Hepatitis.

Leo (The Lion):  This week will be an emotional desert, a wasteland.  You will be at the bottom of your own personal org chart, the nadir, the lowest rung.  Think about self-promotion, and despair.   

Virgo (The Virgin):  Consider your collections this week.  Do you really need another small stuffed plush toy of one of the Powerpuff Girls?  Maybe you do – only you can say.  Blossom may be smart, but Buttercup is Hard. Core. Bitch.   Your high-risk disease this week:  Anthrax.

Libra (The Scale):  Your only hope of surviving this week is to get in the fountain, naked, and bath yourself in the cold water of shame.  Doesn’t matter, any fountain.  No, not just your underpants – all of it.  Yes!  Just get in, ya sissy.  Oh, shut up, it’s not that cold.  I don’t care.  Now, do you feel the shame?  Does it burn?  No?  Well, you’re doing it wrong. 

Scorpio (The Scorpion):  This is a good week for getting back to things, like school.  While you might consider stealing your father’s cue and making a living playing pool, this is contraindicated at this time.  Hit the books before you hit the rails. Your high-risk disease this week:  Kyasanur Forest Disease.

Sagittarius (The Archer): Social media and alcohol are your best outlets for the muse that wants to blossom within you.  This is your week for fanfic.  This is your week for chick-lit.  Consider the confluence of Hello Kitty, Scarlett O’Hara, and Internet Rule 34.  Live the dream. 

Capricorn (The Sea-Goat):  You want a pony, but your argument is invalid.  You can’t reproduce your results, and you will not be getting a pony this week.  You’ll be lucky to find a beer.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Late Blight.

Aquarius (The Water Bearer):  This Sunday, find an Easter flower and pluck it.  Monday, think of the meaning of the flower.  It is your desert rose, your late-blooming moonchild, the seawater in your veins, and the tide is coming in.   There, now practice those lines until you can say them well enough to get laid after a good meal at a French restaurant.  You’re welcome. 

Pisces (The Fish):  This week, you will become tangentially and glancingly involving in a police investigation.  For murder.  Your near-complete lack of involvement will not prevent you from becoming obsessed with the idea, the case, and the highly unlikely series of unfortunate events that will lead Officer Olaf back to you.  Keep your movie stubs.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Urogenital Chlamydia.

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Another Friday, another chance to catch up with your own personal astrological future!   Your upcoming week will be poor, nasty, brutish, and short – but don’t let it get you down! Read on!

Aries (The Ram):  You’re not going to win that lottery.  Forget about it.  You couldn’t spend all that money anyway, without doing something crazy like trying to bail out Greece.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Clostridium Perfringes.

Taurus (The Bull):  You’re not going to win either, but wasting $500 on tickets will cause you to study statistics later, and you can call that a consolation prize.  Your parents will still call it stupid.

Gemini (The Twins):  Statistics show that Geminis are more likely to win the lottery than any other sign – you still shouldn’t drop $500 on tickets, but a C-note might be in order.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Corynebacterium.

Cancer (The Crab):   Your past will catch up to you this week, and old chickens that you thought were soup by now will come home to roost for a bit.  Don’t worry, but don’t put the gun down either. 

Leo (The Lion):  Your therapist will ask you about your compulsive need to check your Blackberry for messages this week – you need to tell her about the “ghost vibrations” you feel if no one messages you within 6 minutes of your last e-mail. Your high-risk disease this week:  Cryptosporidiosis.

Virgo (The Virgin):  This is a good week to pick up a book, since you’ve pissed off all the people who ever gave a damn about you.  I suggest War and Peace, Anna Karenina, or possibly the Twilight series. 

Libra (The Scale):  This is a good week for hanging in the sky, finding things to do in Denver, and taking in Aspenglow.  If you get too high, you’ll know you’re in the Rockies.   Your high-risk disease this week:  Dengue Fever.

Scorpio (The Scorpion):  Your week will be a blur of text messages, relatives, and slash fanfic filled with unrelenting narrative leitmotifs involving Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. 

Sagittarius (The Archer):  This week, you are your very own Dale Carnegie.  You will win new friends, influence people, and then dash them to the rocks of your own little world.  Remember:  A friend is not someone you use once and throw away.  A friend is someone you can use again and again and again.  You have more of them than you think.  Your high-risk disease this week:  E. Coli.

Capricorn (The Sea-Goat):  The answer is “a totem pole.”  Only you know the question.  Don’t blow it. 

Aquarius (The Water Bearer):  This is a good week to consider moving, not least of which is because there’s a hired assassin on her way to your flat.  She’s a relentless, unstoppable killer, but she’s bad with paperwork.  A change of address might buy you some time.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Hand, Foot & Mouth Disease.

Pisces (The Fish):  Never mind the above – it’s a good week to win the lottery!  Make sure you have a ticket or 40!

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Another Friday, another chance to catch up with your own personal astrological future!   Your upcoming week will be poor, nasty, brutish, and short – but don’t let it get you down!  Read on!   

Aries (The Ram):   By Wednesday, the death of Davy Jones from the Monkees will have finally sunk in – try to get past the crushing sense of hopelessness and despair.  You can still believe in the daydreams!  You can still believe in the daydreams! 

Taurus (The Bull):   When the FBI contacts you on Monday afternoon, remember to tell them you don’t read blogs.  After that, stay cool for 20 hours and I’ll pay you 20 grand.   Your high-risk disease this week:  Angiostrongylus Vasorum.

Gemini (The Twins):   Nice roof, but it would look better with a plum tree in the backyard.  Tuesday will bring you a chance to get your engineering on – jump in with both hands, a foot, and a hammer.  All your dreams this week will be naughty.   

Cancer (The Crab):   There’s a difference between liking things to flow along because you’re a water sign and being willing to drown your troubles in the local creek – that’s illegal.  Just because you’re older than dinosaurs doesn’t mean you can’t change!  When you see change this Sunday, take it.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Israeli Spotted Fever.

Leo (The Lion):    This week, it’s all about the bacon – you may as well change your sign to Wilbur (The Pig) for all the greasy pork sammiches you’re going to eat between now and Thursday!   Sagittarius plays a large part in your week.

Virgo (The Virgin):   Over the weekend, you’re Alice in Wonderland.  By Tuesday, you’re Katniss, and on Thursday you’re that chick from Twilight.  It’s a slippery slope.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Tsutsugamushi Fever.

Libra (The Scale):   This week will solidify your relationship with hamburgers, the front office admin assistant you’ve been hoping to sleep with, the Pampered Chef Catalog, and your mom.  Remember to put your makeup on before you go to bed on Wednesday; you’re in for a hell of a dream!

Scorpio (The Scorpion):   This is a good week for catching up on your sleep.  You won’t, but this would be a good week for it if you did.  Dream in red:  bulls, vines, wines, and blood.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Bunchy Top Banana Disease.

Sagittarius (The Archer):   This week, you will flirt with the idea of changing your name to Hernandez, with a guy pouring drinks, and with two nurses as they sedate you.  Thursday, your lucky numbers are 18 and life.

Capricorn (The Sea-Goat):  Tuesday’s Naked Day!  Good luck will come to you if you wear the least amount of clothes you can this week – and none on Tuesday.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Cercospora Leaf Spot.

Aquarius (The Water Bearer):  Your lucky notebook is Moleskin, but those blisters on your junk aren’t because you’re writing in it every day.  Take this week to work on being the master of your domain, and see a doctor.

Pisces (The Fish):   Those Hawaiian shirts won’t get you laid, but this is a good week for that hot air balloon ride you’ve been thinking about.  It’s the closest you’ll come to getting high all week.  Your high-risk disease this week:  Chikungunya.

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So, it’s been a day in the life of a Big Ugly Man Doll – and what a day. You didn’t really think that I’d let pass an opportunity to talk about my birthday, did you?

Yes, I turned 43 on St. Patrick’s Day.

Bridge over Mist

Up at 0630 and walked a 10K around the local lake; got some halfway decent pictures, by which I mean I took more than 250 and kept maybe 9 of them. I was most pleased by the simple fact of getting to the spot I wanted to be with 2 minutes before sunrise – it took 43 years to master timing like that. Mind you, I got there and a dog ran over and started barking at me. I told him I was just taking pictures, go away. He told me my arm looked a lot like a centerfold pin-up in “Meat Sticks I Have Known.” Luckily, his idiot came along a moment later and we did not have to finish that conversation.

Tree Fog Reflections at Dawn

Back from around the lake, SOBUMD made a wonderful breakfast and we opened presents – and by we, of course, I mean me. There was a nice bottle of Tequila, and a church key that looks like a church key, and a book. And another book. And a few more books. All told, there were 22 books, with two showing up in the mail a day or two later. SOBUMD confessed that she’d gotten sick of looking at the books on my Amazon wish list – some of them had been there for 5 years or more – so she bought them all. Luckily, most of them were used and didn’t cost a fortune, but still – I need to be careful what I wish for. Of course the neat part is that many had been on the list for so long, I had completely forgotten about them. Without further ado, my pending reading list:

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
Bowl of Cherries, by Millard Kaufman
Briar Rose, by Jane Yolen
Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats, By Gene DeWeese and Robert Coulson
Da Vinci’s Ghost, by Toby Lester
Old Masters and Young Geniuses, by David Galenson
Pollinator Conservation Handbook, from The Xerces Society
Searoad, by Ursula LeGuin
Shadow & Claw, by Gene Wolfe
Sword & Citadel, by Gene Wolfe
Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean
The Bestiary, by Nicholas Christopher
The Big Switch, by Nicholas Carr
The Book of Jones, by Ralph Steadman
The Egyptologist, by Arthur Phillips,
The Eyes of the Overworld, by Jack Vance
The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen
The Kat Who Walked in Beauty, by George Herriman
The Tin Forest, by Helen Ward
To the Chapel Perilous, by Naomi Mitchison
White as Snow, by Tanith Lee
Wild Nights, by Anne Matthews

To say that I can’t wait would be to court understatement, to say nothing of being inaccurate in tense, since it’s already Wednesday as I write this and I’ve read two of them and started a third. Most of them had been recommended by someone or I’d been hearing about them for a while. I may review some of them – watch this space.

Tequila with breakfast, 22 books, and the day was just getting started! Being as I am a Big, Cheap, Ugly Man Doll, we had conspired to use not one but two Groupons for my birthday – one for cake and ice cream at the local Swiss Bakery, and one for the International Spy Museum downtown. We wrapped up breakfast and headed cakeward to the bakery, acquired same with no fuss, and went down to get our intrigue on.

If you’ve never been to the Spy Museum, I have to tell you – find it on a weekday in winter. Saturdays in spring are evidently the time to go if your body shape leans toward the cumbersome and you tend to read very slowly. If, once you have managed to read a few words, you have a proclivity for yelling “Hey Marge, grab Little Towheaded Billy and come look at this one!” at the top of your lungs, man, Saturdays at the Spy Museum have your name on them. The actual exhibits are interesting, but the traffic flow brings to mind the old spy technique of placing explosives inside a cow with horns – that is to say, abominable.

We exited through the gift shop (it’s the law!) while managing to avoid buying anything, and headed to the Very Clever Grandparent’s house for traditional St. Patrick’s Day fare of corned beef, beer, cabbage, beer, potatoes, beer, and soda bread. There was also some beer. To my immense surprise, there were also presents – mercifully, none of them books. There were wonderful bottles, wonderful food, and friends old and new – we got to meet my sister’s new squeeze, who’s a techie in addition to being a Monty Python fan, so all’s well there, and my parent’s friend Reinhold, who’s a delight. Arriving home again, there were dozens of well wishes on Facebook awaiting before bed.

All in all, a most satisfactory birthday. The next day dawned in time for sleeping in and seeing the largest Disney flop in years – Number One Son and I went to see John Carter. It doesn’t suck. We were, in fact, two of only 10 people in the theater, but I quite enjoyed it. Then again, I was excited about it having read the book – this is the guy who brought you Tarzan. They’re great books – it was always going to be tough to bring this to the big screen. Also, I think it actually suffers as a Disney movie – it would have been more widely watched if they hadn’t shied away from the gore and violence (and there was some, don’t get me wrong) and the sexuality. Mind you, Thuvia isn’t wearing much, but I suspect Peter Jackson would have had her wearing a damn sight less.

Regardless, good movie. Rounding out the weekend was an email from Mindy. If you haven’t heard from Mindy, you might – I think she works for the tooth fairy. She asked that I copy the following link onto my blog so that teachers (and presumably parents) can provide printable, personalized tooth brushing charts to your students and kids from www.LoveYourTeeth.net. I was all set to ignore this completely, since I’m not your Big Ugly Dentist, and then I realized that the lovable loons in my office had gotten me a birthday present as well:

It exists. I don't know why.

The Justin Bieber BrushBuddy Singing Toothbrush. Because that’s what you get for the BUMD who has everything.

Clearly, this is a sign from the Tooth Fairy. So please, go to LoveYourTeeth.net and print your personalized tooth brushing chart.

Let me know if you need to “Get Your Bieber Smile Today” as well – I have one yellow and one purple. Yes, they’re loud.

And so here I am, catching up on the week and wondering if I can make this yummy Scotch last until my next birthday. It doesn’t look good, but I’ll keep you posted!

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