My godmother almost got scammed.

So, my godmother's son is trying to sell his jeep, so she keeps it on the street in front of their house with a "For Sale" sign on it, and one day this guy with half the teeth missing in the upper right part of his mouth came to the front door and rang the doorbell and asked about the jeep. My godmother got a bad feeling, so she didn't open the door, but went upstairs to get her son. After he came down, he was nasty to the guy when the guy tried to talk them down in price, and the guy ended up going away.

Anyhow, I guess that simultaneous to this, there's this scam going around where a bunch of Hispanics are going around to different people's houses in Detroit and if they see an older car out there in front of some homes, they go ask people if it's for sale, and if someone looks like they're home alone, they either knock them out and rob them or distract them so someone can go in the back door and rob them while they're busy. So, my godmother was like, "And I was talking to Claudia, and she started telling me about this scam and was asking me if this guy was Hispanic, but I said, 'Oh no, I don't think so, he didn't have any teeth.'"

Incidentals from my visit with my grandparents.

Hungarian sounds funny since there's only one stressed accent per word and it always falls on the first syllable, which makes it sound pretty funny if it's a borrowed word or a really long word. So, when I asked my grandfather what the Hungarian word for "porch" is, he was like, "It's a nice Hungarian word, 'VEY-rahn-dah'" (veranda). Also, he gave a two-pack of Metamucil to my dad that he got for cheap somewhere, and so he was talking to him in Hungarian and somehow incorporated the pronunciation "MEH-tah-moo-seal" in his sentence.

Also also, my grandfather is recording our family history from 1940-1949 on tapes that he's duplicating and giving to everyone. He finished the eventful years, 1945-1949, already, and he's starting on the earlier period now. When it's done, it should be two tapes front and back.

Also also also, he told me a couple stories from when they were living in Germany. In the one rural town they were living in, everything was under American control and had been for some time, but no Americans had been there yet, and then word got out that some officers were coming to visit, so the mayor and a couple officials came out with a white flag as a welcoming committee, only when the American officer peeled up in a jeep, he kept saying, "Eier, eier" to them, and they were confused until someone sent to a farm for some eggs, which they gave in a basket to the soldiers, who then drove away. It turns out that my grandfather later found out that soldiers got good breakfast rations in everything except eggs, which they got in powdered form, so the officers must have made a trip out to the country just to get fresh eggs. He also told me about another time that he went fishing with an American soldier, who just chucked a grenade in a river and let it blow up and then just picked up a couple of stunned fish to cook.

Went shopping with my grandfather today.

The last time I went shopping with my grandfather, he got a twenty-pound pork roast and twelve packs of Depends. Today no Depends, just groceries, and he bought me two new coffee cans for my collection that I've never seen before -- a "Sultan"-brand coffee with Arabic writing on the label, and this other knock-off Italian espresso brand.

We ran into some Muslims in the grocery store, including this one woman who was kind of thin and dumpy and had a big black scarf around her head, and like five kids (two boys, three girls, and the girls unscarved) following her. Another had a cell phone headset sticking out from under her scarf.

Biology and religion: An interdisciplinary moment.

I just found out today that like five or six years ago, the Catholic high school where my dad used to teach at started asking teachers to incorporate Catholic teaching into all their classes, since Catholicism should be a total worldview and something not just left to Sundays and religion class. At first I guess my dad was like, "How the fuck do you do that with biology?", but then he thought some more and retooled a few short answers on some of his quizzes, like, "Jesus healed many people afflicted with leprosy, which is caused by this class of organism" (bacteria). "There," he was like.

Problems at the ice cream counter.

Last night after the concert I got to play in -- more about that later -- I went home and I convinced my mom to go out for ice cream, so we went down to the small town near us and got a couple of cones. Only, even though it was almost ten, the place was packed with retirees from downstate in their polo shirts and tans and all the shit like that, and they were really annoying; there was six of them, but they were all talking together, and there was a ton of people behind them, but they had one person order and then another and another, only the first person and the third person were paying together but the second one was paying with someone else, and one lady had the girls behind the counter bring out a size of bowl for ice cream to show her, and then a larger one, only to say that the second was too large and have her go back again to bring out the first and only then get her some ice cream, and a ton of shit like that. I was getting pretty ticked -- my mom didn't even notice -- and then, when I decide to settle myself down and start thinking about ice cream flavors, the last of the pack of retirees, this old dude with this big old gut, has his gut resting against the cooler, and it was big enough to cover four ice cream labels (the counter was two deep, so his gut covered two labels over towards its left side and another two over towards its right; the place only had the ice cream labelled in the cooler, and didn't have a big list hung up above or off to the side or something). I had to exaggerate my motions and pretend to try to look around under his gut from both sides and then cough a couple times until he even noticed that he was blocking my view, and then he pretended to move as if that was what he was going to do all along. What a cockrag.

Sausage in my pocket.

Today on the way downstate me and my dad stopped at a bakery so he could get some coffee and I made sure to pick up some apple cinnamon bread to take to my uncle's since he always likes sweet things like desserts and pastries. We were almost checked out, and then I saw they had a rack of no-refrigeration-needed packs of Kowalski's hunters sausages, so I got one of them too so I can sneak them into a bar and share them with friends over beer and a shot once I get back home. They're really tasty, and I was stoked.

Anyways, there was this big thing where the lady had already given us a bag for our bagels and our donut (we got breakfast there too), and then she had given us a paper bag for the bread, but the bag was a really good fit, so there wasn't any room for the sausages to go into the bag when I tossed them on the counter and decided to buy them. She went to get some mega-big bag to toss all our bags in, but I was like, "No worries, that's why they make these shorts with so many pockets on them," and I put the packet of sausages in the lower pocket on the right thigh of my shorts. When I did that, the lady stepped back from the counter and looked at me and was like, "You're gonna have dogs following you if you do that."

Correction: Parade post.

I realized the other day that my parade post where I was talking about the one guy who was picked up by the police for picking up a transsexual hooker was incomplete. I think when I was talking to my one friend's one aunt, I was like, "That's the guy who was picked up by police for picking up a transsexual hooker down in Detroit," and she agreed, but then she thought for a moment and was like, "No, he's from Flint, that's where he was picked up; he knows the streets there."

Just heard "Lady Marmalade" on the radio.

I just heard "Lady Marmalade" (the Patti LaBelle version) on the radio. I have mixed feelings about it. Though I like a lot of songs that have French in them -- Melanies' "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma" and Blondie's "Sunday Girl" among them -- those songs have verses translated into French, and not a French refrain. That said, I like the melody of the refrain. But, I hate how Patti LaBelle says "Lady Marma-lahd", because that sounds pretentious to me. It would be like if I said, "I just heard the Patti LaBelle version of 'Lady Marma-lahd' on the rahd-io"; everyone would hate me for speaking like that. That said, I love Patti LaBelle's voice; it's killer in the high range. But, I hate how the song is set in New Orleans, maybe because that's the setting of "The House of the Rising Sun", which I've always thought is one of the most overrated songs ever, and is also about sex-for-sale in New Orleans, incidentally.

BUT, what happened that was new when I heard the song this time, is that I realized is that in addition to the "gitchee gitchee ya ya ya ya" part of the refrain (which I like, it's almost like a perverse something you'd say to a baby in a crib), is that the next words after that are "mocha chocolah-tah ya ya". I think that's fantastic. It's much more evocative than the run-of-the-mill line in the song about Lady Marmalade's skin and how it's the color of cafe au lait (which is a nice image but a shitty lyric and has no poetry to it; it's prose, not poetry).

Belated update: Red onion.

I did find that red onion, by the way, and not too long after finding the bat. There were like three paper bags sitting out on the kitchen floor from the previous evening when we had gone to the farmers market, and though two of them had been emptied out, the one containing the onion and some green beans hadn't been, so the red onion I needed was sitting in there all along.

Jailbait past and present.

Sometimes when I'm home I see younger high school girls checking me out. Last summer, I remember, I was on the computer at the public library and these two girls a couple computers down were whispering to each other behind their hands and looking down at me and then talking to each other some more. This summer, when I was down at the show to see the new Harry Potter movie, I was walking in with my friend and this young high school guy gave me a not very subtle up-and-down with his eyes when I came in, and then when I got out of the show, he was checking me out again as I left.

The times, they are a-changing.

This is my posting in honor of the new Harry Potter book.

Could have danced all night.

At my one friend's wedding last weekend, I hardly got to talk to everyone I wanted to since the wedding was so big. When it was getting towards 11-ish, though, I started going around saying goodbye to people since I was going to head out to grab a drink with one of my friends who was a bridesmaid since she was getting tired of all the chaos, but when I was over by the dance floor I saw the mother of the bride, who I hadn't seen all night, dancing with one of her lady friends, and she was like, "[My name has been removed], come dance for a second," so I cut in, threw my arm around her lower back, and drew her in close for a slow dance. When that happened, she was like, "Whoa, [my name has been removed], isn't that a little tight!", and I was like, "When you ask me to dance, I dance," and she laughed, but her friend came around and pretended to imitate a nun at a middle school dance and was like, "Leave room for the Holy Spirit!"

Drive in (II of II): Animal tidbits.

The radio station, an oldies one, then stopped the music so the announcer could tell three anecdotes about animals, and I noticed that the music underneath was the Laura Palmer music from Twin Peaks. It was odd because it crescendoed at just the right time when he was telling the third story, about a cat who lives in a senility ward in Providence, Rhode Island, who has sat at over twenty-five patients' feet and all of the patients have died within four hours, so now hospital workers call up the families of a patient to come in right away whenever they see the cat curled up with them. It was right at that last part that the music crescendoed like it did whenever they showed Laura Palmer's prom photo.

Drive in (I of II): Angel of the Morning.

On the drive in just now with my mom I heard the song "Angel of the Morning" and I was telling her how the songwriter Chip Taylor was once thought to have a lot of promise but after writing "Wild Thing" and "Angel of the Morning" he made so much money that he just stopped songwriting and was on cocaine for like twenty years straight. She was like, "Good for him," and when I asked her why, she was like, "He probably went into songwriting to make money anyway, so he's doing what he wants to do."

Blackspeak: Fireworks.

Back when I went to the fireworks display on the 4th, I went to go watch the ones downtown from this park on the lake where you can see off the north bank four or five miles right to downtown. Everyone was out there on their lawnchairs and blankets, and they all started clapping when the first fireworks went up, even though the fireworks were like two inches high from where we were sitting. As soon as that happened, this one black kid near me who was just standing around and hugging his girlfriend in the middle of the crowd was like, "C'mon, we ain't clapping for that."

Sign at one of those yuppie stores.

I just passed by one of those yuppie stores that has a lot of crafts and collectibles and some over-priced, non-perishable food items like jams and jellies and sometimes watercrackers for the over-priced cheeses you can buy at other yuppie stores that have deli counters and wine. The sign outside said

"CHIPOTLE MUSTARD FOR YOUR BRATS".

What I want to know is, why would anyone want to reward their despicable little children with chipotle mustard?

Womanly Adornments (II of II): Baptists.

I've always know that the woman of this one gigantic baptist church in my town always wear floor-length denim skirts, but I found out last week that when their kids go skiing, they make their daughters put on floor-length denim skirts over their ski pants. Someone was telling me that their one friend's daughter who isn't a baptist was invited along on a trip to a local resort with some of her friends who were, and when they asked her to put on the skirt, she asked why, and they were like, "So you don't tempt the boys."

Womanly adornments (I of II): Polo shirts.

The other day I went to a yuppie resort town on the lake and spent the afternoon walking around the downtown there with my mom. On the drive back, somehow we got on the topic of yuppies, and I found out that every time since me and my brother were kids my mom's gone there, she puts on a bright solid-color polo shirt, usually hot pink, and khaki or white shorts. When I asked her why she did this, she was like, "Because that's what you do when you go to [town name removed]." I pressed her further and she was like, "I figure, when you're in Rome, do as the Romans do."

Bikers against Granholm.

I was just in a local restaurant getting a coney when this biker and a friend of his came in and started talking with the owner about a recent crash in which another biker had died. This one biker was a big old guy with a big beard and black jeans and a black Harley t-shirt tucked into his pants over his man-tits, and he was talking somehow about a cell phone was involved with the crash and how talking on them while driving should be outlawed, but that would never happen since Governor Granholm is "next to useless." "Send her back to Canada!" his one friend was like, and then he was like, "And give her a quarter so she can go downtown and get a rat to chew that thing off her face."

Runs in the family.

Like a couple weeks ago, I was visiting this one friend of mine at her house, and for some reason though I've been there before I was looking at the pictures that her and her boyfriend had up. This one was of them had some gumpy looking old guy with a goiter and childlike eyes, and my friend was like, "That's [her boyfriend's name]'s uncle," then she started telling me how funny it is, since she had never realized before dating her boyfriend that the way a dick looks runs in families. Only, she'll never tell her boyfriend that, not because she slept with his uncle or anything like that, but because his uncle is retarded and she used to wash him back when she worked at a nursing home and she doesn't want her boyfriend to think of his retarded uncle's dick whenever they sleep together.

Addendum: Grand Parade.

12) Usually in the past my one friend's family would bring out hoses and spray down the floats and marchers since they were at the end of the parade route, but they switched the parade direction several years ago and so now they're at the end of the parade route and don't bring out the hoses anymore. Anyhow, one of the floats had a hose somehow hooked up on it, and this little kid in there decided out of nowhere to spray the my one friend's one aunt who was shouting the most at the floats. When he did that, she was like, "If I had a hose right now, I'd kill you!", and everyone else was like, "Nice way to talk to a six-year old, [my friend's one aunt's name removed]."

13) The animal shelter float, the one where my one friend's one aunt was like, "Throw us some animals," had a hand-drawn poster of Jesus on its side, since the theme was "Heaven 2007" or whatever the heck it was this year. He had a kitten and a puppy at his feet, though they were drawn a little larger than life and almost came up to his knees.