I wrote this blog entry back in January of this year but never got around to posting it. After coming home yesterday to an overpowering, nearly coma inducing stench, I decided this entry needed to be resurrected.

I always know when my cat Charlie has had a disturbingly large poop. First of all, he never covers it up. He just drops his load and walks away from it like a deadbeat dad. I’d have to drag him onto Maury before he’d claim that poop.

Secondly, after Charlie takes a mad poop, he always reacts to it in one of two ways. He’ll either run out of his litter box like he’s a terrorist who just slipped an incendiary device under the mounds of soiled litter. I mean, he tears out of there like friggin MacGyver! Or, he walks away from his litter box and stops mid-stride to stare at me. And he’ll stare and he’ll stare. He does it just long enough for that mad poop smell to hit my nostrils. Then, when I grimace, he tears out of there like friggin MacGyver!

Every now and then, Charlie will poop and walk away from his litter box with his head hung low, his eyes unwilling to meet mine. It is as if he is embarrassed about the fact that he created such a monstrosity and I have to be the one to clean it up. That’s rare, though. Usually his attitude takes on the tone of, “I just took a dump, dad. How bout waddling your dumb ass in there and scooping it out while I lay on the clothes you laid out for work tomorrow and rumple them up so much, people will think you’re a functioning alcoholic?”

Nothing smells worse than cat poop. The only thing that may smell worse is death. But honestly, the first thing most people say when they walk into a room where someone has died is, “Did a cat just take a shit in here?”

I love my cat. He makes me smile more than he makes me grimace. But man, does his doo doo stink!

Pat-downs, full-body scans, potential “junk” touching. A lot of Americans have expressed outrage over the methods of safety checks the Transportation Security Administration has recently implemented. Civil rights befouled, personal space violated. “I don’t want anyone touching me down there but my wife and my doctor,” says John Tyner, ballsy folk hero and TSA-aphobe. “If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.”

“Calm down, Redd Foxx. I’m just doing my job. As much as I love groping baby testicles all day, I really just want to get this over with. You smell funny and that looks like crusty ejaculate on the front of your trousers.”

That’s what I wish the TSA agent had said. Sadly, it didn’t go down that way. And seriously? Your wife? I have a feeling she let out a humiliating (to you) guffaw when she heard that. “Touch him down there? I haven’t touched him down there since he fooled me with the old “wrinkled penis at the bottom of the popcorn box” trick during the Titanic. He had it hidden under an unpopped kernel.”

You may get the impression that this Tyner fellow annoys rather than emboldens me. You would be right. Such a coincidence that on the day he decides to throw a fit about his junk being touched, his little cell phone happens to be on and captures the whole incident. Forgive me if I don’t equate this great moment in video journalism with the Rodney King beating or perceive it as being even remotely as engrossing as anything John Stamos has ever done. It felt all too manufactured.

I have two questions and a comment on this whole TSA kerfuffle.

1) Would your outrage be the same if you were to see a dark-skinned man with a beard and turban and holding the Koran get stripped to his underwear and one sock for a simple security check? Or his kid for that matter? I’m thinking no. But I could be wrong.

2) Would your outrage be the same if the TSA became less stringent with their rules and some guy with an ass-bomb ended up taking down a plane somewhere between Peoria and Waukesha? I’m thinking yes. And I doubt I am wrong.

3) While I will agree that the methods by which the TSA chooses to examine people are not perfect and are at times violative, I must consider the alternative. I will be traveling soon and the idea of another man sliding his hand up my crotch without paying me does not titillate in any way, form or fashion. But you know what? If it means that I and the aircraft I am on get to my destination in one piece, they can give me a prostate exam for all I care.

I hope to GOD I am not regretting that last sentence in the next few weeks.

“You using your whole hand there, buddy??”

to air your dirty, geeky, heartbroken laundry than on CSPAN!

The woman in this video is ninety and refers to Black people as Coloreds. That term hasn’t been PC for over 40 years. Does she still refer to movies as talkies? Is she still bedazzled by indoor plumbing? Doubt it. Anybody notice that the woman called into C-SPAN?? She has cable but still uses a term that hasn’t been a part of the American vernacular since the Johnson administration?? Sorry. I’m calling bullshit.

“I just want to ask the colored man…” If you are still saying Colored, C-SPAN is not for you. You just need to pull out the Victrola and listen to some more Al Jolson records, cause you have lost all credibility with that first sentence, Jessica Tandy.