Oklahoma Tornado Facts

1. Basements and underground shelters are the best place to be during a tornado.
2. Most houses in that region don't have basements.
3. Tornadoes are common in that region.

How not to be pathetic

The Complete and Total Loser is all right with being a complete and total loser. What he wouldn't be all right with is being a pathetic complete and total loser. 
Many things can make a person pathetic. A particular one the Loser is thinking about today, May 19, is finding an excuse to tell just about anyone that it's your birthday. You know that people will automatically say, "Happy birthday!" to you and smile. That's why you did it. Pathetic. 
Today is the Loser's birthday, by the way. He told no one at work or elsewhere. 

When the Loser sees couples on his train platform he feels whistful and sad. Pathetic.

The Loser Loses Big

I will give you $10,000 in US currency for reading this post by midnight of May 18, 2013. 
If. 
Ahh, there's always an "if," isn't there? The if in this case is that the Complete and Total Loser's Powerball ticket wins the grand prize tomorrow night. 
And this is something we all know won't happen no matter how many tickets we buy. 
Lotteries are a panacea for the poor. Rather than work to find out the hows and whys of the ridiculous inequality running wild in this era, they, the people who can least afford it, buy tickets. And hope. And dream.
Morons. Idiots. Losers.

The Great Gatsby

Why do I never hear anyone mention the gay things going on in The Great Gatsby? The first place the Complete and Total Loser saw it referenced was in the 1970 Elliot Gould/Candice Bergen movie, "Getting Straight." It that movie Gould plays a graduate student who, during his master's oral exam, cites Gatsby as Fitzgerald's best novel. He's grilled on this by one professor who chastises Gould for not realizing that Nick Carraway is gay. 
"Carraway was queer for Gatsby?" Gould says. "Did you truly overlook the homosexuality at the core of The Great Gatsby?" the professor says. He previously pointed out how Carraway's sole love interest is Jordan Baker, who's described as lean, athletic, small-breasted and "boyish," and plays golf, "a man's game." Gould melts down at this, shouting, memorably, "It's gonna be a hell of surprise to Sheilah Graham!" when the professor says Fitzgerald wrote the novel in part to cover his own panic over being homosexual.
Indeed, there's an odd sequence at the end of the second chapter that hints at what then may have been called the love that dare not speak its name. Carraway is drunk for the second time in his life and accompanies a photographer, Mr. McKee, who is described as "effeminate," to his apartment. The innuendo and hints begin in the elevator. McKee speaks first:

"Come to lunch some day," he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.
"Where?"
"Anywhere."
"Keep your hands of the lever," snapped the elevator boy.
"I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't know I was touching it."
"All right," I agreed. "I'll be glad to."
... I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands."
"Beauty and the Beast ... Loneliness ... Old Grocery Horse ... Brook'n Bridge ...."
Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning "Tribune" and waiting for the four o'clock train.

Something beyond getting drunk at a party is happening here. 

 

Wear Sunscreen

The Complete and Total Loser avoided the sun for most of his life. Then, when traveling two decades ago, he went to the tropics for the first time and got burned badly. The damage is still evident today. Spotchy, ugly, uneven skin. 
It's fine to catch a few rays in moderation, but don't get more than a few minutes of sun a day. Sun are cigarettes for the skin. Bad idea long term, and tans don't even look that good. 

This day, May 6th

Hell of a lot happened on this day. Maybe not so much if you adjust for cultural bias, but a lot.    The Renaissance ended with the Sack of Rome by the armies of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, in May 1527. In eight days, his Spanish troops and German mercenaries killed around 4,000 Romans and looted works of art and literature. Even the Pope, Clement VII, was imprisoned. Though the Renaissance was effectively ended, Rome bounced back and by 1600, it was once again a prosperous city. Holidays Feast day of St. Edbert, Saints Marian and James, St. Evodius of Antioch, St. Petronax, and St. John Before the Latin Gate. Egypt: Sham El-Nessim. Ireland: May Day Bank Holiday. Vatican City: swearing-in of new recruits to Swiss Guards (commemoration of Sack of Rome, 1527). Events 1527 - German troops began sacking Rome, destroying libraries, capturing the Pope, and killing thousands. 1840 - The first postage stamps were issued, in Britain. 1861 - Arkansas seceded from the Union. 1882 - Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants from the United States for 10 years. 1937 - The hydrogen-filled German dirigible Hindenburg crashed in New Jersey, killing 36 of its passengers. It was the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany. 1941 - Soviet dictator Josef Stalin assumed the premiership, replacing Vyacheslav M. Molotov. 1954 - Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile during a track meet in England, in 3:59.4. 1957 - Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book "Profiles in Courage." 1960 - Britain's Princess Margaret married Anthony Armstrong-Jones, a commoner, at Westminster Abbey. (They divorced in 1978.) 1994 - A rail tunnel under the English Channel officially opened, connecting Britain and the European mainland for the first time since the Ice Age. Births 1758 - Maximilian Robespierre, French revolutionary. 1856 - Sigmund Freud, Viennese founder of psychoanalysis. 1856 - Robert E. Peary, American explorer, discoverer of the North Pole, explorer of Greenland. 1895 - Rudolph Valentino (Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaello Guglielmi di Valentina), silent-film star. 1915 - Orson Welles, American actor, director, producer, writer. 1931 - Willie (Howard) Mays, American baseball great. 1953 - Tony Blair (born Anthony Charles Lynton Blair), British politician and prime minister. 1961 - George Clooney, American actor, and nephew of Rosemary Clooney. Deaths 1862 - Henry David Thoreau, American poet and writer. 1987 - William Casey, American Central Intelligence Agency Director. 1992 - Marlene Dietrich, German film actress and singer. 2006 - Lillian Gertrud Asplund, the last American survivor of the Titanic disaster.

The Loser Knows He's Getting Old Because ... #4

When looking at a nearly completed skateboard park his greatest concern is the quality of the benches.

Nice benches.

You call this freedom?

You think that little smart phone you have makes you a god, don't you? That it makes you free because you have all this access to information and communication all the time. Bullshit. It binds you like a chain. 
Look at this woman. She's sitting on a train platform so she can charge her device's ridiculously weak battery. People spit on this platform all the time. If you'd told her fifteen years ago she'd be sitting in dirt in public for any reason, she'd probably have hit you in the face. 
So many so are addicted to these stupid things they literally walk into walls. Turn the fucking thing off and put it in your pocket. Don't use it unless you need it. Stand up for yourself! Be free!

Nice Stats, Loser!

His Father's War

The Complete and Total Loser's father was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the early 1980s. He died from unrelated ailments at age 91 in 2011. 
In between, he bored many about prostate cancer, which had come to define him in some ways. He became an expert in it. It may have been the only thing he knew more about than most others, and he became an expert at steering conversations to the topic.
He could not understand why when notable deaths were reported the cause wasn't given and wrote letters to newspapers and magazines questioning this lack. When a cause was cited and it was prostate cancer, his reaction was a twisted sort of glee, an I-told-you-so that wore on his three sons and others. 
He'd say the reason for his joy was that it gave the disease a higher profile and generate more money for research, but the Loser often wondered whether it weren't because it linked him to the famous and rich. 
Now, a year-and-a-half dead, all is forgiven. 
Cancer makes everyone see life in a new way and in his case, it broadened his cultural horizons. The Loser's father had never read anything by Phillip Roth before, but bought Everyman in hardback because he'd heard it was about a character with prostate cancer. Frank Zappa, Bill Bixby, Charlton Heston, Dennis Hopper, Timothy Leary. Good company and people the Loser's father may have only dimly been aware of had they not died from the same disease afflicting him.
Look at the boxes in this photo. The white ones are full of prostate cancer information. Newspaper and magazine clippings, hospital handouts, reports from his doctors and, in later years, printouts from websites. 

Nearly all of it is obsolete now and was before his father died, but he kept it anyway. 
It hit the Loser why in a flash. Imagine you live in a house and it's being invaded by a growth of some kind that threatens to destroy it. It will retreat at times but never leave. You call in experts, of course, and they do what they can but end up telling you they've done everything they can but to call them if you think there's more they can do. Meanwhile, it destroys thousands of houses, some near you, more far away. Sometimes it is stopped, but often it succeeds. 
You like your house and you want to continue living there. Wouldn't you want to do everything you could to know everything about this invader you could? 
That's what the Loser's father was doing.
The Loser has always disliked the battle metaphor people use when talking about cancer. It makes it sound as if there are armies in conflict and that right will ultimately prevail. That's not fair to those who die from it; it paints them as people conquered by a superior sentient force. It's not that, it's just a simple (or complex) growth of mutant cells acting mindlessly. But if the battle metaphor helps you stay focused and remember to keep your doctors' appointments, stay with it. 
The Loser's father soaked up all the information he could and shared it with others in support groups designed for the cause. It helped him and, as noted at the start, he died pretty much of old age, not prostate cancer.
Victory! 

How to Walk on a Roof

Don't walk on a roof unless you're young. 
The Complete and Total Loser is using his vacation time to get things done around his late parents' house, where he lives (his brothers are starting to talk). Yesterday, it was cleaning gutters and other roof-based things.
When he was a kid, the Loser ran on roofs like a monkey, never a slip. Now in his fifties, his balance isn't what it was and he's top heavy. 
They say most accidents happen around the house. They say dumb things and this is one of them: Most of the time people spend is around the house. It's like when they say most car accidents occur within 25 miles of people's homes. Of course, that's where nearly all of most people's driving is done.
But falls are the major household accident. The Loser must be careful. The house is not equipped for the handicapped. It's barely equipped for losers.

James Salter vs. Ken Kalfus

A week ago, the Complete and Total Loser went to a book reading that featured two authors. 

The Loser went to hear James Salter, who's prose the Loser loves and he knows he's not qualified to try to tell you why.

Salter is 87 years old and has a history of not publishing much. The book he read from, All That Is, was just published after a 30-year gap. Salter set the reading up and read from the novel's early pages for about half an hour. What he read was interesting and good enough to make the Loser happy that he'd bought it. (He can't remember when he paid full price for a hardback edition of a current novel.)

The second author was Ken Kalfus. 

Kalfus is four years older than the Loser. His book is called Equilateral. He launched into his reading, and he read badly. Too fast. No set up. The Loser had no idea what was going on and he guessed that anyone who hadn't read a synopsis of the novel prior to the reading felt the same way. Kalfus read about the building of a huge triangle in a desert for some reason. You had no idea when it took place or whether or not it was real, and the technical aspects were hard to keep up with.

The Loser admires Kalfus immensely. Anyone who has enough confidence to write for a living deserves our admiration, especially if they're writing long fiction and they know it's not going to be one of those trick books that sells crazy amounts for years, like Tuesdays With Morie. 

Nonetheless, the Loser has a mean streak and after the reading, when the two authors sat at desks signing their books, he was glad to see that the line in front of Salter was markedly longer.

By the way, if you're ever curious about Salter's writing, read The Hunters, his first novel. It's about fighter pilots in Korea, where Salter flew during that conflict.

The Loser Knows He's Getting Old Because ... 3

Most people walk faster than he does.

A Complete and Total Loser Rule - 15

Be quiet. Minimize the noise you make at all times. Does your dog bark? Does it annoy you? Multiply the degree to which it annoys you by ten and you'll know how much it annoys anyone around you. Never honk your car horn in front of a friend's house or apartment building. It's thoughtless and rude. If you play music use headphones if it would otherwise be heard by others. Not everyone likes what you like, and the right to silence supersedes any right to make noise. Think of others.

Boston Strong!!

Boston is a unique city with a rich variety of architecture, steeped in history, powered by hard-working, educated people from diverse backgrounds and ethnic groups, many of whom have great faith, who make their hometown a dynamic, interesting place to live and work.

Miami is a unique city with a rich variety of architecture, steeped in history, powered by hard-working, educated people from diverse backgrounds and ethnic groups, many of whom have great faith, who make their hometown a dynamic, interesting place to live and work.

Seattle is a unique city with a rich variety of architecture, steeped in history, powered by hard-working, educated people from diverse backgrounds and ethnic groups, many of whom have great faith, who make their hometown a dynamic, interesting place to live and work.

Dallas is a unique city with a rich variety of architecture, steeped in history, powered by hard-working, educated people from diverse backgrounds and ethnic groups, many of whom have great faith, who make their hometown a dynamic, interesting place to live and work.

Get the point? All this "We're Boston, man, we're not going to take this lying down!" over the past week may sell newspapers and get eyeballs on screens, but it's bullshit. (Besides, some are arguing that by closing the entire metro area to conduct a manhunt for one suspect is the definition of lying down and taking it.)
Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Chicago. There all great places. That's one reason so many people live in them. And yes, their people may have different accents and grammar tics from others and they may eat forms of food people from elsewhere may find odd choices (ever heard of scrapple?), but they're no better, worse, braver, smarter or lazier overall than people anywhere else. Except for ... No. Not going to do it.