la chupacabra

"I'm going to ask you to do something for me."

I'm driving my Grandmother to lunch in her Mercury Medicaid. She's already told me to slow down a couple of times, despite the other cars on the highway whizzing past us as if we were standing still. Fortunately she can't see well enough anymore to read the spedometer, so I just say "Okay, Grandma," and speed up a little.

"I know you do this for your dogs, so I figure you can do it for me." I can't imagine what she's about to say. Take her for a walk? Does she need to go to the vet? Throw a stick?

"I want you to cut my toenails for me."

You might remember that this is exactly what I was afraid of back when my Grandmother and I celebrated Mother's Day with a very special wart-freezing ceremony. Sure enough, the catheter has turned.

I said, "Okay, as long as you don't growl and try to bite me like Tolstoy does." What else is there to say? She can't see her own feet well enough to do it for herself. I'd feel pretty guilty if she lopped off a digit trying to do it on her own.

So later, after lunch, I did the deed. Bless her heart, she was like the chupacabra down there.

who are you calling a cracker?

I saw a couple of stories today that caught my jaundiced eye. First of all, did you watch Kerry's acceptance speech last night? If you didn't, you're in good company. The president didn't either.

Was he bravely tackling some world crisis? Was he busy finding the missing WMD's? Was he clearing brush at his Crawford ranch? Um, no. He was sleeping.

According to this article from Reuters, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush did not see the speech. "He went to sleep last night. That was a late speech," McClellan told reporters, but he said Bush had "read some of the coverage." Oh, well, at least he read some of the coverage, which is apparently more than he did for some of the intelligence reports that came across his desk before 9/11.

One of the common criticisms of President Bush is that he isn't intellectually curious. I've always found that kind of unfair; there are plenty of things I'm not curious about either. For instance, I'm not interested in how air conditioning works. As long as it works, I'm cool (ha!). Likewise, I'm not especially curious about Al-Qaeda's motivations; I just want our government to kill them before they kill any more of us.

On the other hand, there are some things a person just ought to be interested in. For example, if the guy who wants to replace you is giving the most important speech of his life about why you should be fired, it seems like you would want to pay attention.

If you were on trial, and your defense attorney fell asleep during the district attorney's opening argument, would you be concerned? I know I would.

I imagine that this may just be a political pissing contest. What I mean is that it may not be true; his handlers may be trying to convey the image of a president so relaxed and confident about his policies and election chances that he sleeps like a baby. Maybe he really did watch it, or at least Tivo'd it for later. But if he didn't, if he really did sleep through it, then this crosses the line from incurious to inexcusably fucking lazy.

The other article comes from ZDnet about a Florida couple who made the mistake of talking on their cellphone during a movie. St. Petersburg police records detail the weekend encounter of one officer with Warronica Harris and Terrell "K.C." Tolson. The couple was preparing to enjoy a screening of "Catwoman" at the Baywalk Plaza cinema in St. Pete but had some phone business to finish while the opening credits were rolling.

Officers asked the couple to cease the conversation...Harris' precise reply, according to police, was to tell the officer she planned to "hit the cracker in his head." Tolson made a similar pledge targeting another part of the officer's anatomy, according to the report.

"Suspects got hostile and were pepper sprayed," the report continues, noting that the couple were taken into custody and charged with disorderly conduct. "The arrest served the purpose for the night," the report cryptically concludes.

You can read the police report here. I'm sorry, I know that the police probably overreacted, but that is freaking hilarious. Anyway, anyone paying good money to see Catwoman needed to be maced at the ticket booth:

"Two tickets for Catwoman, please. AAAAUGH! MY EYES! MY EYES!"

crazy line

Check out this movie from the artist Anthony Gaddis. It's called Crazy Line. Cool!

hen pen

Deep in the hen pen, I’m listening to two women who sit on my row complain for the fortieth fucking time this week. Very little escapes their wrath:

• This morning they were bitching about their husband’s failure to dress their children in the right way. “He didn’t even put on the hat!” “You’re kidding. Well, my Ward forgot the matching socks for little Johnny!” “Oh, of course he did.”
  
• Later, they started railing about one of their co-workers. They’ve been talking about this guy all week. I don’t know anything about him except that his mane is Kevin. “Kevin hasn’t done anything about this for a month!” “I’m so sick of Kevin not returning my calls!” “Kevin is such a typical man, waiting for the women to do his work for him!”
  
• They’ve also gone into their daily routine about how unappreciated, underpaid, and under-titled they are.
  
• Finally they pissed and moaned for a while about all the fires they have to put out because their customers are so stupid and lazy.
  

Today’s maternal madness was a little worse than usual, but only a little. I imagine myself stuffing Kotex into my ears to block out the clucking, just to see if they’d notice.

Or maybe, I could try telling them that they might get more recognition, not to mention be more productive, if they would get off their asses, step away from the chocolate, put the cap back on the Midol, take half the time they spend whining and spend it instead:

• Doing something about it,
  
• Doing something about it,
  
• Doing something about it, and
  
• Doing something about it.

drag

As usual, our recent trip to Austin was a steady diet of Maudie's, Shiners, and Marlboros, with a little rock & roll for roughage. I swear, if I lived in that town I would shortly look like Keith Richards. And yet, every time I leave I think about how I can't wait to come back.

The Old 97s shows were good. They have a new album out today called Drag It Up, which incidentally sounds like it could have also been the name of Rupaul's last album (side note: did you know that if you Google "Drag It Up" you get a funny mix of Old 97s and gay pride results? Well, you do).

The new record is pretty good although I don't think it's their best. There are a few standouts: Won’t Be Home, Adelaide, and especially Smokers, which is good on the record and electrifying live. On the other hand, there a lot of ballads that are among the worst things they've ever done: This is the Moonlight, Blinding Sheets of Rain, and the revolting No Mother. Also, Coahuila belongs on a Jimmy Buffet album; let us never speak of it again. I don't know; I'm all about the Old 97s being loud and fast, like Timebomb, or Paris Hilton.

The shows were a good mix of new and old, mostly old. The Austin crowd seemed to be having a better time than then one in Dallas, for some reason, but in both cases there was plenty of cult-like intensity. Watching the crowd was like watching two thousand Nancy Reagans stare, laser-like, at the four Ronnies on stage.

Rhett Miller seems to be the special focus of most of the audience (the girls, especially). He's cute, but lately he's turned into the Breck Girl of the alt-country genre; his hair is a little too long and too pretty; his teeth are a little too white and too straight. I can picture him on a shampoo bottle. I liked him better when he was a geek.

Later, when I watched the first night of the Democratic National Convention, I had a strange sense of doubling when Hillary & Bill came on the stage: there was the same culty adoration, the same sense of the crowd hanging on their every word. Kate O'Beirne noted that "the look of rapture on the faces of the women delegates when they gaze upon Hillary is remarkable." Tell me about it, Kate, I saw the same exact thing at the Gypsy Tea Room the other day. Come to think of it, the Dems have their own Breck Girl: John Edwards. Come to think of it again, the Old 97's have the perfect campaign song for Edwards: Weightless. And one for Kerry: Indefinitely. Heck, let's throw one in for the president too: Let the Idiot Speak.

hiss

Hello from Austin. Today before I fully woke up, X walked over to Jo's and came back with two giant iced coffees and two newspapers, one from Dallas and one from Austin. Being Friday, both papers had the movie review section. Both gave terrible reviews to the new Halle Berry/Sharon Stone Catwoman vehicle. I wasn't surprised since AICN has been hot with bad buzz for months over it. But what I noticed right away was that both of the reviews were full of cat metaphors: purrrfectly awful, meow-ouch!, critics have their claws out, here's one for the litter box, all used to describe how truly bad it is.

I thought it was lazy writing; I mean, how easy is it to call a terrible version of Catwoman "Halle's Hairball?" So I thought I'd go do a search on Google News to see how many times the word "hairball" appears in a review of Catwoman over the last seven days.

Unfortunately I was too late. The Village Voice has a great piece up now that says everything I was planning to say. Here's the money quote:

 Likening the movie to a regurgitated ball of fur was popular. CBS 4 in Denver, Colorado thought "Catwoman Hacks Furball on Screen." Catholic News Service: "Warner Brothers is left coughing up a $100 million hairball." The Modesto Bee: "Here's Catwoman in a hairball, er, nutshell." The Voice stated "Berry coughs up a hairball." Metromix.com called Catwoman a "vacuous lingerie show posing as feminism . . . the biggest movie hairball this side of Garfield" and Benjamin Bratt "her love interest-cum-scratching post."

Oh, well. That's what I get for cat-napping while the journos get their scoop on.

100.

X and I are going to Austin tomorrow night. The Old 97s are playing a show at Stubb's, which should be fun. Plus we get to hang with the Dark Lady (at Maudie's, I hope). We'll be back Saturday night in time to see another 97s show at the Gypsy Tea Room with Harmony and her date.

I always look forward to meeting one of Harmony's dates. I like to introduce myself by saying, "Hi, my name is Price," and then pointing at X and saying, "and this is my boyfriend, Admission." Then I will twirl my baton and tell Harmony how beautiful and smart she is, and how skinny she looks in those jeans.

X is a big fan of the Old 97s. I like them a lot, though not enough to go see them two nights in a row on my own. This isn't the first time we've seen them two nights in a row in different cities, either. The things we do for love.

make it snow

So I'm trying out a new template, obviously. Comments are welcome.
 
So, on my way to my grandmother's house a couple of weeks ago, I saw a billboard with Pamela Anderson Lee proclaiming that Kentucky Fried Chicken was operating a chicken pogrom and no one should eat there. At the time, I rolled my eyes and thought, "Oh, great. A celebrity with an opinion. How unusual."
 
But then today I saw this New York Times article about an undercover PETA activist who had filmed hundreds of hours of footage showing chickens being abused in really disgusting ways.
 
 An animal rights group involved in a long legal dispute with Kentucky Fried Chicken about the treatment of the 700 million chickens it buys each year is to release a videotape today showing slaughterhouse workers for one supplier jumping up and down on live chickens, drop-kicking them like footballs and slamming them into walls, apparently for fun.
 
It continues:  The undercover investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation and still does undercover work for the group, said in a telephone interview that he saw "hundreds" of acts of cruelty, including workers tearing beaks off, ripping a bird's head off to write graffiti in blood, spitting tobacco juice into birds' mouths, plucking feathers to "make it snow," suffocating a chicken by tying a latex glove over its head, and squeezing birds like water balloons to spray feces over other birds.
 
If you have the stomach for it, there will be a video here.
 
I don't know; on the one hand, chickens are delicious, and I have no intention of raising them myself to ensure that they live happy chicken lives and are slaughtered humanely. On the other hand, I feel the need to avoid KFC from now on. Full disclosure: this is not much of a sacrifice since I prefer Popeye's anyway. I'm a hypocrite, I know. 

can i get rid of one?

Today I read an article in the New York Times Magazine that’s been pinging around my head all morning.

I’ve always been pretty agnostic on the abortion question. What I mean by that is that I can understand both sides of the issue, but it doesn’t affect me personally and it isn’t likely to. It’s none of my business so it isn’t something I’ve ever gotten worked up over.

The essay is by a feminist writer named Amy Richards, who gets pregnant and finds out she’s having triplets. A sonogram reveals that they’re a set of identical twins and one stand-alone who may be about 3 days older. She decides to have what’s called "selective reduction" on the twins. This is a procedure that involves injecting potassium chloride into the fetuses heart. She goes through with it and then goes on to have a normal pregnancy with the remaining fetus.

The disturbing thing about this essay was the reasons she gave. Most people wouldn’t argue with her choice if her own life or health were at stake, or if one of the fetuses was horribly deformed.

But that isn’t why she does it. In the article, her first question to the obstetrician is, "Can I get rid of one of them? Or two of them?"

Why? She says, "I’m going to have to move to Staten Island. I’ll never leave my house because I’ll have to care for these children. I’ll have to start shopping at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise."

So she did it because of class snobbery?

Richards also cites other reasons: "I lived in a five-story walk-up in the East Village; I worked freelance; and I would have to go on bed rest in March…I would have to give up my main income for the rest of the year. There was a part of me that was sure I could work around that. But it was a matter of, do I want to?"

So she did it because it would have been inconvenient?

Her boyfriend Peter, at least, has pangs of conscience, saying, "Oh my gosh, there are three heart beats. I can’t believe we’re about to make two disappear."

But from Amy there’s not so much as a flinch, at least not in the essay, which is written in very matter-of-fact tones. Is that because she really didn’t have any moral question about the rightness of her action? Or is it because, as a feminist, she doesn’t want to imply that there is a moral element to the decision?

She never mentions adoption either.

not fat, sick

Did you heave a great sigh of relief this morning? If so, you're probably one of the Great American Fatasses who heard the news that the Feds have decided that obesity is a disease covered by Medicare.

"It's about time," says Professor Judith S. Stern, professor of nutrition and internal medicine at UC-Davis. "It means that private insurers will have to recognize obesity as a disease, instead of denying coverage."

Wait - so eating too much and not exercising enough is now a disease? I thought it was just lazy, or self-indulgent. Thank goodness for the federal government and Professor Stern setting me straight. I now realize that eating a 1/2 pound beef & potato burrito from the $0.99 menu at Taco Bell, and then plopping down in front of the TV for hours, isn't a choice people make, but rather a symptom of disease. Those people need my help! Please, Uncle Sugar, take more of my taxes to help these victims! This policy is going to be great news for anyone looking to avoid personal responsibility.

Remember the war on smoking? Of course you do – it continues to this day. Well, as soon as politicians made the argument that society pays for the costs of cigarette addiction, it opened the door to government telling us not to smoke. By making obesity a disease that we all bear the costs for, it opens the door for the government telling us what to eat. This policy is going to be bad news for the food industry.

It’s also going to be bad for the budget. Did you know that according to the CDC, two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese? Did you also know, that according to the laws of time, 100% of Americans will be either disabled or elderly at some point in their lifetimes, making them eligible for Medicare?

stout

Last night, X and I went to Guapo's, the new Mexican restaurant where Cantina Del Sol used to be, which was where Mercado Juarez used to be. It's not bad; inside it still looks pretty much like Mercado Juarez, only with better paint and more galvanized metal.

As we were headed to our table, a blonde girl working behind the bar called out to us. "Hey, I can make you a Yellow Rose margarita if you want. Just tell yout server."

This was very nice of her, but also? A little sad. See, X and I go to Tia's about twice a month. Apparently we are fairly conspicuous, because this girl, who also works at Tia's, not only recognized us but also remembered what we usually order when we go. Like I said, nice, but yuk.

And damn, the margaritas were stout. I looked like a corncob all day at work today. People kept saying, "Shit, what happened to you?"

what did we just steal?

THIS is great. From the Denton Record-Chronicle's Crime Blotter today:

800 block of North Bell Avenue — A man reported that someone broke into a storage shed he rents at an apartment complex and stole his entire inventory from an Internet sales business. The victim reported losing merchandise that included sex toys and stimulation creams. Two other storage units in the complex also were burglarized, according to the report.

Can you imagine the thieves getting home with their boxes and opening them? Guess they won't be pawning those bad boys. On the other hand, I bet you could find all that stuff for sale along with the popsicle-stick birdhouses and dreamcatchers at Trader's Village next week.

I hope the thieves get caught, though, just because it would be great to be on jury duty when the evidence was submitted at trial.

Need a schadenfreude moment? Check out this Ireland Online article about Joey, the Friends spinoff coming to ABC this fall:

Former Friends star Matt LeBlanc has hated shooting the sitcom's NBC spin-off Joey, because he misses his old castmates too much. The 36-year-old hunk wishes he was still working with the popular comedy's stars - Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow and David Schwimmer - but he particularly misses Matthew Perry, who played his character Joey Tribbiani's best friend Chandler Bing. LeBlanc confesses: "When I first got to the stage, I kept waiting for the door to open and for Chandler to walk in."

Well of course he misses them - they've all moved on, because they CAN.

sen. sam brown(shirt)

Senator Sam Brownback (R. - KS) has written a column for National Review Online promoting the Federal Marraige Amendment. Unsurprisingly, it's dishonest from start to finish.

As the United States Senate debates the wisdom of a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman and protects against judicially-mandated same-sex unions, it is important to keep in mind the costs that we face as a society if we fail to protect traditional marriage.

Here's the text of the amendment: "SECTION 1. Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups."

See anything there about banning anything mandated by the judiciary? Nope - it also would prevent any state legislature or the federal congress from allowing civil unions or gay marraige. He continues:

The costs to our society should rogue federal judges force the states to recognize the legal equivalence of same-sex unions would be significant — even devastating — when measured in terms of the effects on our central social institution, the family.

Here we go with the federal judges again. Let me repeat: this amendment would prevent any legislature or voter-driven ballot initiative allowing civil unions or gay marraige. Also, please note the ad hominem assertion that the costs would be devastating. Evidence please? Let's press on:

Government registers and endorses marriage between a man and a woman in order to ensure a stable environment for the raising and nurturing of children.

Yes? And?

Social science on this matter is conclusive: Children need both a mom and a dad. Study after study has shown that children do best in a home with a married, biological mother and father. And the government has a special responsibility to safeguard the needs of children; the social costs of not doing so are tremendous. As Child Trends, a mainstream child-welfare organization, has noted, "research clearly demonstrates that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage. Children in single-parent families, children born to unmarried mothers, and children in stepfamilies or cohabiting relationships face higher risks of poor outcomes... There is thus value for children in promoting strong, stable marriages between biological parents."

Wait. So the amendment is about providing a mom and a dad to every child? Let me read it again...nope, that's not what it says. Maybe if we keep going he'll make more sense...

Giving public sanction to homosexual "marriage" would violate this government responsibility to safeguard the needs of children by placing individual adult desires above the best interests of children....

Where does the Constitution say that it's the government's job to safeguard the needs of children? I thought that was a parent's job. I expect this kind of "it takes a village" from the Clintons, but not from the Republicans. Also, grownups do things every day that place their "adult desires" above the best interests of their children: splurging at the mall instead of socking the money away for the little fartling's college education; hiring a babysitter to have an adult night on the town instead of staying home with the kids; taking a job in Washington thousands of miles away from your five kids in Kansas.

If the experience of the last 40 years tells us anything, it is that the consequences of weakening the institution of marriage are tragic for society at large. The movement away from traditional moral conventions left us with soaring divorce and out-of-wedlock birthrates, family breakdown on an unprecedented scale, and devastating consequences for children... the social science is clear. The best place for a child is with a mom and a dad. Both are needed.

So, Sam - are you supporting an amendment outlawing divorce? How about one outlawing out-of-wedlock births? No? If not, then it seems to me that even if your amendment passes, the dire conditions you describe facing children will stay at least as bad as they are now. How do you square the "public sanction" you talked about earlier with this grim acceptance of the status quo?

The truth is, Senator Sam Brownback doesn't care about the children, as such. If so, he would be supporting a much different amendment. What he's really against is: making sure I can visit X if he's in the hospital. Making sure that X automatically gets inheritance rights if anything happens to me. Letting us file a joint tax return at the lower rates that everyone else gets. Allowing us to get Social Security survivor benefits for each other. In other words, equality under the law.

I'd have more respect for his position if he'd just tell the truth: he hates us.

popsicle-san

I ordered a couple of t-shirts from jlist last week and they arrived today. Jlist is a company specializing in Japanese pop culture trinkets, and some of it is really fun. X's shirt has a logo that you see in every convenience store in Japan - a cartoon cigarette and beer mug with kanji text reading "you must be 20 years old to buy alcohol or cigarettes." Mine says "dirty American devil." Plus, the package came with a toy surprise - a Japanese comic book. It's called "Pretty My Maid!" I can't read it, of course, but it seems to be about the vaguely erotic adventures of a pair of...well, maids.


Umm, super frosty popsicle-san! 

I went outside this morning with my coffee, and I saw a bluejay in a branch a few feet over my head. It had caught a locust and was busily ripping off the locust's wings and legs (I guess they tickle going down). Things like that make me hope that reincarnation is a crock of shit.

rep. pitts? go cheney yourself.

UPN is planning to air a new reality series this fall called Amish in the City. It's about some Amish kids who are participating in a custom called rumspringa. The deal is that the kids, who normally live in immaculately crafted wood huts without microwaves, cigarettes, or hair products of any kind, get to live outside the community for a period of time to experience the outside world, meaning: sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Then, at the end, they have to decide whether to return to Amishistan. If they do, cool. If not, they can never return.

So anyway, UPN is filming the whole thing, á la The Real World. I'm not interested personally, but it doesn't seem any worse than any other reality show. However -

Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) has put in a call to UPN asking for a private screening. His initial reaction to the announcement of the show last February was to hold a news conference on a Lancaster, Pa., farm, and ask UPN "not to put our Amish youth in a cage to be laughed at like animals at the zoo." Which begs two questions: first, were these kids filmed secretly? Or were they compelled to participate against their will?

And second, if you can't laugh at the Amish without fear, then who?

And what if Pitts gets his private screening and doesn't like what he sees? No comment, beyond saying: "We are keeping our options open."

I hope UPN tells Rep. Pitts to go Cheney himself.

feh

Back to work today after a rather dull weekend. Didn't do anything on Saturday. When X returned on Sunday, we went to see Spiderman 2, which was fun. Doc Ock was the best part. Even though the tentacles were only CGI, which everyone's already seen done about a million times, it was impressive. My only complaint about the movie was that it was awfully pensive for a superhero flick; Toby McGuire's eyes welled up with tears more than Frodo's in Lord of the Rings. It was Ordinary People, Graphic Novel #1.

That's weak, but fuck it - not in the mood.

photoblog test

This is a test of the photoblogging service.  

tuna casserole and pabst blue ribbon

I took my grandmother to lunch today, then shopping. We ended up close to Grand Prairie, where I spent my junior high and high school years. So I thought, why not go by the old 'hood and check it out?

Why not? I'll tell you why: it's gone straight to the shitter. No one in my family has lived in Grand Prairie since the last year of the Reagan Administration, so I've had no reason to return since then. But man, driving around those streets was strange - everything looked pretty much the same, except that the trees were bigger and the houses were more decrepit.

I remember thinking when I was in high school: I need to get the fuck out of here so I don't turn into white trash. And except for the occasional craving for tuna casserole and Pabst Blue Ribbon, I'm not too haunted by those years.

Also, today - this was kind of cool - I emailed kozyndan to see if there were any more Tokyo Jumbles available, and there was one left! It should be here in a couple of weeks.

art prostitute

Yesterday X and I went to open mic night at the Brickhaus Cafe. No, we didn't perform, although we do a stunning "I Got You, Babe" that would have had the place in tears. I swear, I've never seen so many acoustic guitars in one place outside the Kerrville Folk Festival.

The performers were all over the map; some good, some awful. There were a couple of poets, one of whom probably went straight home afterwards and stuck his head in the oven, based on lines like:

I am stretched on your grave
And will lie there forever

Oh, wait. That's Sinead O'Connor. Well, close enough. You get the picture.

A couple of the musicians were fun. One guy wandered in looking like a chiché of the sensitive art student; painfully thin with self-cut dark hair, thick hornrim glasses, long-sleeved maroon shirt, a bright blue t-shirt over that, and vintage jeans. He got up onstage and when he opened his mouth it was like he was channeling Clay Aiken. Technically, he had a great voice but in the end he was all syrup and no pancakes.

Another cool performance came from these two older guys (50's? 60's?) who were both professors at TWU. One played a clarinet and the other a keyboard. Their first number was called "Black Cadillac," a dixieland song about taking your final ride, and the next one was about wandering through the lingerie section at J.C. Penny, asking "What color are your panties," which could have been kinda creepy except that all the girls were singing along quite lustily.

Today I wandered around downtown for awhile. I stopped at Jupiter House for some coffee, and can I ask you something? Why is that girl such a bitch?

I also went to Art Prostitute, a new gallery on E. Hickory. This place has a cool backstory; the two guys that own it, Brian Gibb and Mark Searcy, are UNT grads who saw an opportunity for a local niche market - affordable originals that you wouldn't normally find in Texas. I met them both today, and they're really cool.

The gallery is small and cleanly designed. Art for sale is along 3 walls, and down the center they have a long low table filled with t-shirts and other merchandise created by the artists they're featuring. There was a pretty high ratio of interesting pieces for sale; I would have bought the kozyndan, but someone beat me to it. Bastards.

Anyway, check them out -