was getting back to my car tonight when I noticed this monstrosity parked nearby:

Here's another shot:

What in the hell is this thing? It's an old sedan, painted metalic pink and green, and then lifted so that it has more ground clearance than my SUV. The amount of money it would take to do this to a car is staggering. Who the fuck would willingly do this to his or her car? Why? Why?

Can someone--anyone--please explain to me what goes on in the mind of a person who decides that he needs to spend thousands of dollars to turn a shitty car into a completely useless eyesore?

Plus, also, I thought we were dropping cars? I thought we wanted the car to be as close to the ground as possible? Is that different now? Now we want rims as big around as a small moon and the ability to handle wicker terrain?

Seriously, what the fuck?

Posted by Ismael Tapia II at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)| Filed under Existential Nonsense, Rants About Things That Make Me Irrationally Angry

o, I was thinking about something I don't understand.

There are some people who think that premarital sex is wrong. That's fine, people can think that. People are also free to teach their children that premarital sex is wrong. And people are free not to discuss sex and reproduction with their children at all. That's not what I'm going to do with my kids, but, hey, I'm not going to tell you how to raise yours.

So if your goal is to teach your children that it is morally incorrect to have intercourse before marriage, fine. But let's say that your goal is something else. Let's say that your goal is to reduce instances of pregnancy and STD infection in teenagers. As a policymaker, wouldn't the best thing to do be to evaluate the effectiveness of various strategies--say, abstinence-only education versus education on STDs and proper condom use--and decide, based on that evaluation, which approach would be most effective?

You'd think that yes, that would be the best thing to do, right?

But there are still people in this country that think that we have to implement abstinence-only sex-ed everywhere, even though it's been demonstrated to be less effective, because we have to keep from appearing to encourage the evil of premarital sex.

People who are of the opinion that sexual education in the schools should consist only of a stern warning are dumb, at least insofar as they actively take a position which is unlikely to bring about their ultimate goal.

All of that is fairly clear to me. Please tell me why you disagree if you do.

But then I started thinking: what if there are areas in which I am as just as dogmatic as the abstinence-only people? I mean, certainly there are certain moral imperatives on which I would not accept a compromise. So I'm wondering: in those areas, am I likely to be blinded by my ideals to the point that I'm incapable of evaluating policy on the basis of its efficacy?

This is going to keep me up at night.

Posted by Ismael Tapia II at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)| Filed under Existential Nonsense, Legal Rants, Philosophical Rants

he grocery store had pork tenderloin on sale the other day, so I bought two and decided to try Alton Brown's recipe for .Pork Wellington. Basically, you stuff a pork tenderloin with dried apples, wrap it in prosciutto, wrap that in puff pastry, and bake until delicious. And it was delicious, but I thought I could do something better with a savory rather than sweet filling.

So, I took some onions and some mushrooms and sauteed them down. Then, in my bad-ass cast-iron skillet, I fried up some D & G bacon from the Farmer's Market. While that was cooking, I sliced the tenderloin and stuffed it with the onions and mushrooms. I took the bacon out of the skillet and laid the pieces parallel to each other on my cutting board. While the bacon was still pliable, I used it to wrap the tenderloin. Then I wrapped all of that in the puff pastry and stuck it in the oven.

Meanwhile, I threw some Farmer's Market potatoes into the skillet with the bacon fat, added salt, pepper, rosemary salt, fresh rosemary, and some ancho chili powder from Penzey's Spices. The potatoes looked fan-fucking-tastic. But don't take my word for it:

When the pork was done, I let it rest for a few minutes, then served it on the cutting board with the potatoes:

I sliced it open and, goddamn, that shit was delicious:

Chelsadilla and I both preferred my version to Alton Brown's, although his was really good, too. But the main part was that I developed a little bit more confidence in my cooking abilities. I can't wait to see what I do next.

Posted by Ismael Tapia II at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)| Filed under Existential Nonsense, Fun Shit I've Done, Reviews

remember this one time in high school. Me and some friends were in my friend's car. My friend's brother was also there. He was listening to HIStory on his Walkman. I made fun of him for it. I made fun of him for it because I was weak and stupid and because I was more concerned with being perceived as cool than I was with being honest. Because, although I railed against Michael Jackson, the truth was that I loved Michael Jackson.

I remember being ten years old and buying Dangerous on tape. It was the first album I remember buying (though not the first CD--that was Green Day's Dookie). I remember listening to all of the songs and being blown away, but also feeling like it was vaguely too adult for me. Still, I loved it.

After that, I started listening to all his older stuff. Thriller and Bad were friggin' mind-blowing. It was like every song on those albums was a perfect little piece of infectious earwormory. I loved the spoken-word part in "Thriller," the innuendo of "Dirty Diana," and the energy of "Smooth Criminal." And I didn't mind the preachiness of "Man in the Mirror" one bit. In fact, that remains one of my favorite songs.

I listened to Michael Jackson before I listened to rock music. I loved Michael Jackson long before I had any idea who Billy Corgan or Kurt Cobain were. Michael Jackson was the first musical figure outside of the Smurfs or the Chipmunks that I listened to over and over again. My appreciation for whatever sort of music I listen to now starts, on some level, with Michael Jackson.

The man was probably crazy, and he may have been a horrible sexual deviant, but he was undeniably an amazing singer and an unparalleled performer.

I might be in the minority, but I, for one, think that the musical world has suffered a loss. And I'm sorry that we won't get to see what the Moonwalker had in store for us in the future.

Posted by Ismael Tapia II at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)| Filed under Existential Nonsense, Music Reviews, Things I'm Irrationally Attached To

've known for a while now that one of my favorite books, Youth in Revolt (if you haven't read it, go do that now--it's fucking funny), is getting made into a movie. This knowledge fills me with an difficult to understand mix of emotions.

On the one hand, I'm excited to see these characters and scenarios on the big screen. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the movie probably won't be as good as the book. Out of all of the numerous adaptations I've seen, the only movies that are anywhere near as good as their source material are the Lord of the Rings movies. So while I guess it's possible to really hit all the right notes with an adaptation, it's just so unlikely.

I was also disconcerted when I learned that Michael Cera will be playing Nick Twisp. Cera would have been good for the role seven years ago, but now I think he's just too friggin' old: he's twenty-one and Nick is fourteen. But also, I guess I never pictured Nick as a George Michael Bluth type. Nick's an awkward teenage nerd, but he's more deranged, outgoing, and aggressive than I've ever seen Cera be.

And now there's a poster for the movie:

I don't know. What do you guys think? It leaves me feeling very "meh."

Posted by Ismael Tapia II at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)| Filed under Book Reviews, Existential Nonsense, Things I'm Irrationally Attached To

erhaps I should have included South Carolina on my poll of ridiculous state governments. I woke up this morning to a headline telling me that their governor was missing. "Missing," I thought, "Like some stranger offered him candy and now police are combing the neighborhood looking for clues?"

How the fuck does a governor go missing, exactly? The real story is much lamer than you might think. It turns out Mark Sanford wasn't abducted by aliens or terrorists or anything. No, instead he went for a long walk after getting his ass handed to him by his state's legislature. And it turns out that he didn't tell anyone he was going. Not his wife or his children (even though he was gone over Father's Day), or, you know, anyone in the state government he's responsible for running. His cell phone apparently went straight to voicemail. And now his office is saying that they knew he'd be checking in infrequently for a few days.

Let's think about this for a second. Let's say I'm still an undergrad or law student and I need to miss a few days of school for whatever reason. The first thing I'd do is e-mail my professors and let them know, asking them to send me any homework we're going to have to do over that period of time. I'd tell my friends I was gonna miss, and I'd ask them to e-mail me their notes.

Let's say I'm the CEO of a major corporation and some personal emergency requires that I leave the city where my company is headquartered. I'd ask my secretary to clear my calendar, tell her where I was going to be, and ask that she forward urgent matters to my Blackberry.

Let's say I'm me, a criminal-defense attorney in private practice, and I have to fly to California for a few days to deal with something important. The reality is that I probably wouldn't be able to do it, but in order to even think about it, I'd have to spend hours on the phone with various courts and I'd have to strike up some deal with my partner in order to have him cover whatever court dates I couldn't reschedule.

In other words, very few people live lives where they can simply disappear for a few days. And it looks like jobs with increased responsibilities are generally those where it is harder to disappear. So one would think that the governor of a state has a job where he can't just disappear. But apparently, in South Carolina, that's cool. The governor can disengage from the entire world whenever he needs a few days to recharge, get away from it all, take his mind off all of those meddlesome governing duties, and just really concentrate on himself. Never mind that he's the only person able to act in certain situations, that being unavailable but alive renders the authority of his others in the government questionable at best, and that it's just plain strange to leave your family on a holiday weekend. The guy really needed to get away, it seems.

But here's what I think'll be really interesting: what's the fallout from this whole thing going to be? I'm envisioning protesters in Columbia (which is apparently the capital of South Carolina) holding up giant milk cartons with the governor's face on the side. Honestly, if that happens, I'm going to root for more governors to randomly disappear.

Update:
I saw this morning--and then Santi pointed it out to me--that Sanford wasn't on the Appalachian Trial as had been originally reported. In fact, he wasn't even in the country. Or on this continent. No, instead he headed to South America! Argentina, specifically. With no security and apparently without telling his office where he was actually going.

Wait a minute. Argentina? According to The Superficial, Bill Clinton was in Argentina recently. And he was busy hanging out with strippers.

Coincidence?

Second update:
Are you fucking kidding me? He was banging his Argentinian mistress and he couldn't come up with a better cover story than "I was hiking. Umm . . . . I needed some time to recharge . . . . I was hiking to recharge. Except that I was in Argentina. I was hiking in Argentina? I was driving in Argentina. Yes, that's right!" I'm honestly surprised that his statement didn't include the phrase "Yeah, that's the ticket!"

And read the excerpts of the e-mails--they're like the love poetry of an over-achieving sophomore nerd. Take this passage:

I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night's light--but hey, that would be going into sexual details . . . .

This guy deserves everything he's about to get if for no other reason than that he's a fucking idiot. Wow.

Posted by Ismael Tapia II at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)| Filed under Existential Nonsense, Funny Shit, Political Rants, Rants on the News

love t-shirts. They're comfortable and versatile and, best of all, they give you a great platform from which to express your love of a band or your irreverent sense of humor. In high school, I had enough Smashing Pumpkins t-shirts to last for two weeks without repeats. I also had several shirts from Hot Topic because, hey, Hot Topic was awesome when i was thirteen. Fucking deal with it.

But the problem is that most t-shirts are sort of boring or just far too cliche for people to really wear. For example, the first time I saw a "Trust me, I'm a lawyer" shirt in the law school, I thought, "Ha, that's sorta funny." But then when everyone had them, they started to be really annoying. This is why I love Woot Shirts.

They have a new design every day, and they only cost $10. The shirts are designed by members of the Woot Shirt community, so the designs are extremely varied, even though they tend heavily towards varying iterations of geek. But still, the people who design these things are talented.

Shirts are only available for $10 for one day. After that, the twenty-five most popular ones are available for $15, until they drop off of the top twenty-five (i.e., the reckoning), at which time they become completely unavailable. There's a different design competition--called a derby--each week, with the top three most popular designs being the Woot Shirts for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Past derbies include steam punk, bbq, and something about the literal representation of expressions.

Some of these shirts are really, really awesome. As a bit of a grammar dork, I really liked "The Quick Brown Fox." I think that "The Impostor" is really cute. I'm not sure which one is my favorite, though: my time-travel geek side prefers "It Came Out of Nowhere," but the side of me that likes cute penguins and steampunk prefers "The Aviator." So I did the only reasonable thing: I bought them both.

In fact, that's the only problem with the Woot Shirts: they're really fucking addictive. At this rate, I'll have enough Woot Shirts to last me a year without doing laundry. Which, I guess, wouldn't be an altogether bad thing.

Posted by Ismael Tapia II at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)| Filed under Existential Nonsense, Reviews, The Smashing Pumpkins, Things I'm Irrationally Attached To

have two cats. The oldest one, Smash, is a pretty standard cat. He's playful and he requires constant attention. He chases my ceiling fan and meows. He loves cuddling and being pet.

The younger cat, Lily, is another story. She's the most bizarre cat I think I've ever met. For starters, she never meows. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard her do a straight meow. That isn't to say that she doesn't make sounds. She barks and grunts and whimpers. But no meows.

She also hates to be touched. She'll come up to you and make some cute little whimpering noises, but then recoil the second reach out to nuzzle her behind her ear. If you manage to pin her down and rub her belly, she'll grunt and claw at you. But then, sometimes, I'll be sitting at my desk and she'll put her front paws up on my thigh and stare at me with her giant eyes. And I'll reach out and she'll let me pet her.

Lily thinks that she can climb the walls. If something on the ceiling catcher her fancy, she'll do her best to run right up to it. Or jump--this last weekend, I swear she jumped four feet straight up.

She hates being picked up and, like I said, he doesn't really like being petted. But every morning when I'm getting dressed, she'll follow me around and play with my feet and pant legs when I'm putting on my pants. And she'll usually follow people around, making sure to put her body right where a foot is about to be. One day I'm going to fall though my sliding-glass door because I was trying to avoid stepping on her.

Oh, and she absolutely likes chelsadilla more than she likes me. That's just not cool.

Of all the pets I've had, I think that Lily probably has the most distinctive personality. She's cute and independent and, when she's affectionate, she's really adorable. If I had to choose only one of my cats for some reason, I'd choose Smash. But Lily adds a lot to the household, and I'm glad I got her.

Posted by Ismael Tapia II at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)| Filed under Existential Nonsense, Things I'm Irrationally Attached To

y friend Mr. X graduated from college one year ahead of me, by which I mean that he rushed through the subject matter in four years while I took an extra year to really let things soak in.

Anyway. Mr. X went off to grad school and came back talking about how much he hated undergrads and how annoying they were. I, still being an undergrad, thought he was crazy and out of line. Then someone reminded me that it was my turn in beer pong, so I screamed at the top of my lungs and chugged a beer while haphazardly tossing my ping-pong ball towards the far end of the table.

Within seconds of arriving in Madison, I thought to myself, "Jesus, undergrads are fucking worthless." I realized that I had sold myself out, but I didn't even really pretend to care. Not only was I older than the undergrads, I was better than them. In every way. Or maybe not.

But undergrads really do look like they're twelve years old. They are more self-centered, more self-involved, and more filled with a sense of entitlement than should be allowed. And they're loud and obnoxious to be in bars with. I'm speaking generally, of course. Some are pretty amazingly mature people. I'm looking at you, The Reeg. But for the most part, not so much.

The thing about it is that I'm sure I was just as bad when I was twenty-two. In fact, I know I was much, much worse. But it's still strange to see some kid drunk out of his mind on game day with his shirt covered in his own vomit and think about how that guy will probably be a doctor or lawyer or engineer or something.

And the other thing is that I sometimes find myself being extremely jealous of the undergrads. Sometimes I'll be walking towards my car downtown and pass one of their house parties. There'll be a beer-pong table set up on the porch, raucous music coming from inside (every now and then something like Outkast's "Hey Ya!" will come on--an oldie for them), and red plastic cups strewn everywhere. And you know that somewhere in that house, there's some SERIOUS, IMPORTANT conversation going on and a Scarface poster hung slightly off-level. And a little part of me is extremely jealous and nostalgic.

Being an undergrad forever would be both a great reward and a terrible punishment, I think.

Posted by Ismael Tapia II at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)| Filed under Existential Nonsense, Funny Shit

o the vast majority of you agree with me--not to mention reason and good sense--that "Gangsta's Paradise" is Coolio's best song. Some of you voted for "Fantastic Voyage," which I guess is respectable. One of you voted for some other song, which frankly makes no sense to me. I think this should lay our previous disagreement to rest, Mr. Vice.

In any event, the new poll also got its impetus from a conversation I was having with a friend. Morenononsense and I were discussing various state governments, and I asserted that New York's is clearly the most ridiculous. He pointed out that Illinois and California were pretty fucked up, too. But I still think that New York's takes the cake. Here's a brief summary of the why each of these states is up for consideration:

New York

Parliamentary tactics stall all business for a week after a coup that involved, in one way or another, all of the following: a billionaire power broker who is not a member of the senate; two state senators--one accused of slashing his girlfriend's face with a bottle, the other accused of taking illegal campaign contributions--who defected from their party on the grounds that it wasn't being aggressive enough about seeking ethics reform; a locked door; a literal search for a lost key; ridiculously parliamentary tactics; a complete disregard for the actual functioning of the state government.

California

A recall election featuring a porn star, a dwarf, and about 90 percent of the state's population which lead to the election of an Austrian former actor and Mr. Universe as governor wasn't bad enough. Now the state's facing a nearly $25 billion budget shortfall and could literally run out of money in the next few weeks if they don't figure something out.

Illinois

Rod "LEGO minifig" Blagojevich.

My vote goes to New York. The shit that's going on there is, in my opinion, the most ridiculous nonsense that's happened in a state government in my life time. I'm impressed that the New York State Senate is able to be that incompetent and petty. Just wow.

Posted by Ismael Tapia II at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)| Filed under Existential Nonsense, Funny Shit, Polls