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That Guy Next Door UPDATE

Today Neighbor Man spent the afternoon doing shirtless yoga and sit-ups on his front lawn. Next to him, Fozzi the Dog did its own brand of yoga, namely lying on its back with its legs straight up. Soundtrack: Metallica, followed by the Offspring, and then I think it was Phish.

Neighbor Man kept his eccentricities largely to himself during the winter. Now that the weather's improving, we learn more about him every day. But, as usual, each answer only brings more questions.™ I urge you, stay tuned.

That guy next door

I call him "Neighbor Man." Here are the relevant facts. He:

-Purchased the house next door within a week of it going on the market for $179,000.
-Lives alone.
-Drives a 4-door Audi, leather seats, the works.
-Has no obvious occupation, keeping odd hours and grooming habits.
-Has a dog that looks like Fozzi the Bear, only really really small. Like a foot tall.
-Frequents Rennie's.
-When walking his Fozzi dog in the winter, wears one of those wool coats with a print of a wolf howling at a giant moon.
-In good weather, opts for a tie-dye if wearing a shirt at all.
-Builds beer bottle shrines in his front window.
-Appears to be in his early 30's.
-Just mowed his front lawn; it was three feet high. Definitely no shirt that day.
-Often strolls out to his mailbox wearing only a towel, without compunction.
-Apparently has parents.
-Lately has taken to sitting in his front lawn, blasting Metallica and doing macrame. Perhaps this is why he mowed it. And after a while the Metallica gives way to Skynyrd.

Needless to say, I do not disapprove of any of this behavior; most of it is salutary and an eccentric neighbor trumps a boring one any day. But still, every day the mystery deepens.

To be continued . . .

Destination E-Rock

Rumored for a coupla weeks, and now confirmed, Spc. Michael Atkinson is sandbox-bound:

Due to recent events in the sandbox, my relaxing
summer in Europe has been cancelled. I will be
spending a few quality months in Iraq instead. To
paraphrase Yogi Berra, if it's 125 degrees in the
shade, I hope I won't be in the shade!

I don't know when I leave, but it should be a matter
of weeks.

Remember, I should be more worried about you-- you
drive on America's freeways every day.

later,

Mike

So, yeah. I don't really know what to say about that. Mike is assigned to the 1st Armored Division, which has been deployed in Iraq for the past year and has, as he implied, been extended there an additional 90 days. Mike had arrived at the 1st's home base in Germany during deployment, and would likely not have seen Iraq if not for the recent turn for the worse there.

Here's hoping Mike spends his time in the sandbox safely tucked inside a Bradley fighting vehicle and comes home safe and sound.

On a lighter note, there's this. Check it while it's hot; only 2 hours to go.

FLOG™: Bridging Two Americas

A long, long, long, long time ago, a very young FLOG™ got all excited about getting one reader from Belgium. I commited, very briefly, to making periodic Belgium-related posts in an effort to reach out to this demographic. Either I or Belgium was too fickle for the arrangement, and I soon moved on to developing a good relationship with my two Australian readers. That didn't last, either; both "features" have gone the way of the Esoteric Distinction. You just can't tie me down!

Anyway, all of this cultivation of my Belgian and Australian readership has gotten me nowhere. And in the meantime, by paying absolutely no attention to it whatsoever, I've built quite a healthy following in Brazil. No really, look: here for New FLOG™, and here for the Old. Brazil accounts for 3% of my readership. And this is not just one crazy little fella out in Fonte Boa who visits my site twice a day. I get hits from 4 or 5 different Brazilian ISP's.

I can't explain this. Unlike Japan, the UK, the Middle East, and mainland Europe, I don't know anyone in Brazil, or anyone who knows anyone in Brazil, at least as far as I know. (There are known knowns, and there are known unknowns...) All I know is, whatever I'm doing here has struck a nerve in Brazil. That, or "FLOG" means something really naughty in Portuguese. Whatever it is, I assure my Brazilian fans of this: I will continue to pay zero attention to your country's affairs, because I can see that's the way you like it.

Great Spams of the Internet, FLOG™ Style

This one's just patently unfair:

From: "Socorro Goodwin" [TMYHMV@hotmail.com]
Reply-To: "Socorro Goodwin" [TMYHMV@hotmail.com]
To: [Dan Atkinson]
Subject: Osama Bin Laden Captured

Just got this from CNN Osama Bin Laden has just been captured! A video and some pictures have been released. Goto the link below for pictures, I will update the page with the video as soon as I can:
http://220.95.231.54/pics/ God Bless America!

Another Shithead Athwart Liberty's Path

AK in PDX links to this news on the OLCC taking a baby step towards privatization of the state booze cartel.

As a matter of course, the article had to feature at least one quote from the Women's Christian Temperance Union, this from Judy Cushing, president of Oregon Partnership, a "nonprofit prevention group." Like so:

"Your proposed changes . . . will make hard liquor more visible and accessible to the populations most vulnerable -- teens and problem drinkers."

Shit. Let's begin with those "problem drinkers." Is any effort to make booze more or less "visible and accessible" to them going to matter? Does Cushing genuinely believe that keeping hard liquor in hard-to-find, high-priced stores with bad hours is actually deterring any "problem drinkers" from seeking it out? That if they don't walk past it in the grocery store, their cravings might just one day vanish? POOF! All gone! Why deny convenience and a fair market price to the rest of us on illusory assumptions of prevention?

Likewise the teenagers. If teenagers want booze -- really, really want it -- no amount of inconvenience is going to thwart their efforts. They will try again and again and again, using bribery, theft, chicanery, and deception, until they get their hands on it. Trust me on this.

Cushing ought to acknowledge reality: teens and problem drinkers are not those "most vulnerable" to booze; they are those "most determined" to get booze. But of course, casting it in terms other than "vulnerability" takes all the paternalism out of it. And then what fun is there left in being a moralist ninny?

_______________
PS Wondering about the title? Well, I'm taking my Constitutional Law final tomorrow so my head's all full of haughty judicial hoo-ha.

Special Randy Barnett Constitutional Cryptograms

CRYPTOGRAM #1:

CRYPTOGRAM #2:

-Detail a:



-Detail b:



-Detail c:



From notes taken during a talk by constitutional scholar and Volokh-inator Randy Barnett.

Asteroid Commission

So maybe I'm thinking too much lately about the possibility of an asteroid wiping out humanity. It's probably just the stress talking.

But check this out. Marginal Revolution imagines an independent inquiry into the government's failure to predict & prevent an asteroid attack:

Q. Why was our government woefully unprepared to prevent the deaths of millions of citizens and world-wide devastation?

A. We had only vague, historical information.

Q. What about 2002 EM7?

A. That was a previous administration.

Tee-hee-hee. Funny.

Perhaps I Was Afraid it Wanted to Grind my Organs

Blog's feature on the Organ Grinder Pizza Parlor is a fantastic memoir for a Pacific Northwest motherlode of childhood terror and psychological damage. There is little that I can add, beyond reiterating how damned scared I was of that Demon Monkey.

On that note, I present a verbatim transcript of an audio tape recorded one early '80's evening around the dinner table in the Atkinson household. It provides some first-hand evidence of the paralyzing terror that fucking Organ Grinder monkey inspired in me as a toddler. (And, as an aside, there's a great lesson in effective sibling mockery from one of the masters of the craft, Michael Atkinson.)

OPEN ON THE ATKINSON FAMILY KITCHEN, EVENING, CIRCA MAY 1981:

ROLAND (father): Jude, did you scare us up a babysitter? For tomorrow night?

JUDY (mother): Yeah.

ROLAND: Great.

JUDY: We’re set.

MIKE (age 6): Where you going tomorrow night?

ROLAND: We’re going to the Organ Grinder Pizza Place.

MIKE: I’m gonna stay home?

ROLAND: Yeah, you’ll stay home. Yeah, and Danny, too. He really doesn’t like it.

MIKE: Like what?

ROLAND: The Organ Grinder Pizza Place. Makes him cry.

[Adult laughter, BABY DAN whines.]

MIKE: The reason why is…

JUDY: He doesn’t like that monkey.

MIKE: Yeah.

GRANDMA ELAINE: I think he thinks the monkey’s gonna come out and do something…

ROLAND: He really just hates that monkey.

[Toddler chatter]

ROLAND: He’s shaking his head again.

GRANDMA ELAINE: Maybe he thinks it’s real.

[BABY DAN starts crying.]

JUDY: No, you’re not going to the Organ Grinder.

ROLAND: You’re not going, dear, it’s okay. Don’t you wanna eat your ice cream?

[Continued crying.]

ROLAND: You’re not going anywhere, it’s okay.

MIKE: He sees the monkeys!

[Continued crying.]

ROLAND: Hey, you’re gonna stay at home, where everything’s fine. Don’t you want to eat your ice cream?

[Crying. Bawling!]

ROLAND: Look at this good ice cream. Mmm.

BABY DAN: No! No!

GRANDMA ELAINE: He’s so upset!

ROLAND: Mmmm, that’s good.

BABY DAN: No! No! Lemme sit down!

JUDY: Poor guy.

MIKE: [mocking] Lemme sit down! Lemme sit down!

BABY DAN: Lemme eat it!

MIKE: [mocking] Lemme eat it!

ROLAND: Okay. No – it’s Danny’s ice cream!

BABY DAN: No me!

MIKE: No me!

[REPEAT 4x]

ROLAND: Okay, Dan, you win.

Posted by FLOG at 1:33 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Gateway = Shitforbrains

Coming soon!

In the meantime, there is this.

Toilet!

In deference to the workplace concerns of Stu and Not Stu, the shit-spatter background pic has been replaced with an artist's rendering of same.

Meantime, FLOG™ now features a naked vagina.

More on the Vadge Badge

The Vadge Badge to the right now features a link explaining the "mission" and providing a free code to include a Vadge Badge on your page.

Beatallica

On the heels of DJ Dangermouse come Beatallica, another Beatles novelty product. Free tracks at the link above. Maybe. Perhaps a review later, once I actually hear the stuff.

Vadge Badge

I'm not usually one for token gestures of political involvement. But the Justice Department's assault on "obscenity," a campaign in which "nothing is off the table," led by a man who insists that even statues show a little more modesty, has stirred me to action.

Sort of. Basically, I have created a little digital "Vadge Badge" through which one may show his or her support for free speech in all of its goddamned beautiful forms. The first one ever is over there on the right. I will soon have a link with code allowing you to put one on your website, as well. Tell your friends.

As Walter Sobchak once sagely screamed, "C'mon, this affects all of us, Dude!"

A call for FLOG™BACK!

By now, regular FLOG™ readers have probably noticed one, uh, particular photo that serves as one of the random, rotating background images on this site. You know which one I mean.

QUESTION: Does it cross the line, disgusting you and leading you to hit "reload" as soon as it comes up? Or is it just one more array of pixels, a mere abstraction adding depth to FLOG™'s mise-en-scene? Please comment.

{Background: what materials are present in the toilet are not my doing. It's a long and largely pointless story involving beach houses, fireworks, whiskey and military service, but suffice it to say I was acting as a photojournalist when I snapped that picture.}

I Just Don't Need All That Mad Max Bullshit!

SOME FEW DRUNKEN THOUGHTS ON THE NEW MODEST MOUSE ALBUM

Tracks 1-6
(Horn Intro / The World At Large / Float On / Ocean Breathes Salty / Dig Your Grave / Bury Me With It)

I can't think of a single bad thing to say about this stretch of tunes, aside from the uneasy "Is this prog-rock???" freakout triggered by that Tull-esque woodwind line on "The World At Large." By the end, though, you find it sounds more like a feedback squeal, so it's okay to like it without irony.

This stretch of songs could win me over on lyrics alone:

"The moths beat themselves to death against the lights / Adding their breeze to the summer nights."

"We'll all float on OK."

"For your sake I hope heaven and hell are really there, but I wouldn't hold my breath / You wasted life, why wouldn't you waste death?"

"We were shootin' at a mound of dirt / Well nothing was broken, nothing was hurt / But I probably should have been at work."

Track 7
(Dance Hall)

This track is good for dancing to and singing along to in a demented Beavis voice. Other than that, I could do without it.

Track 8
(Bukowski)

This track has its moments, but really, after 3 listenings it comes off as a Moon & Antarctica-esque take on Life & God that didn't make the cut -- too obvious and half-baked. The inquiry "Who'd wanna be such a control freak?" just doesn't hit me as hard, philosophically, as "It takes a long time, but God dies too / But not before he'll stick it to you."

Track 9
(This Devil's Workshop)

Modest Mouse does well enough sounding like Modest Mouse. There's no documented need for Isaac Brock to start sounding like Tom Waits. That said, I do like the lyrics.

Track 10
(The View)

Ooh, a song about conflicting property rights that sounds like Led Zeppelin's "The Crunge"? You fuckin' know this hits my Top 10. It's got a classic Talking Heads feel, what with the obtuse, maybe-you-know-what-he's-on-about lyrics crossed with happy disco beats. Plus, "we are fixed right where we stand" may well keep me up nights.

Tracks 11-13

With "Satin In a Coffin", the album begins to regain its footing, even as it continues to raise questions about who Isaac Brock might actually want dead. Am I the only one who hears a musical companion to OutKast's "Dracula's Wedding" in this track? Probably.

After that, the lyrics begin to get cloudy:

"Blame It On The Tetons"
Believe me, I'd like to. "They might get a little better air if they turned themselves into a cloud," says Brock. Maybe. But how many 7th-graders want to do that?

"Black Cadillacs"
"And it's true that the clouds just hung around like black Cadillacs outside a funeral / And we were laughing at the stars while our feet clung tight to the ground . . . "
That couple of lines is pretty one of a kind.

"One Chance"
"I'm just a box in a cage." Jesus, that's even worse than a rat in a cage. I hope things work out.

"The Good Times Are Killing Me"
As far as anti-drug singalongs go, I rather like this.

All in all, a decent album, though far more "confessional" than I might have demanded. While it doesn't leave the listener with the same "transformed" feeling they might have after cruising through The Moon & Antarctica on headphones . . . it still does get to you.

B+

COMMENT!

Another Day in the life of Italy's "Committee for the Control of Paranormal Claims"

"Someone wrote to us saying the solution was to sacrifice a black goat and collect its blood. At some point, that's going to start looking like a good idea."

What the hell is going in Sicily?

Attention pirated music downloaders!

Are the demons from your years of trespassing on intellectual property keeping you up nights? Here's a chance to soothe your conscience.

It damn sure beats suing your fans, Metallica.
___________________________
BLOG FIGHT AVOIDING DISCLAIMER: I do not per se object to p2p file sharing. I do it myself occasionally. But still, after getting all that shit for free, you gotta give somebody something.

Lean Days in Flog™ Country

Wondering why I haven't said anything here in nearly a week? Well, I've hit one of those times of the year where any second not spent with my nose to the grindstone has a significant effect on my course grades. Exactly two weeks of class left in regulation, before I hit the long sweaty finals stretch.

Compounding the situation is this goddamned weather, and my lack of internet connectivity in the back 40.

To compensate, here are my notes on contract divisibility. There are some entertaining moments:

DIVISIBILITY: Gill v. Johnstown Lumber Co.
Gill contracted to deliver logs downstream to Johnstown Lumber Co’s lumber boom in Johnstown. He had delivered some of them when that whole flood thing happened. He sued for payment of his partial performance.

Trial court held the contract to be “entire,” i.e. requiring full performance as a condition of payment.

On appeal, the contract was found to be “divisible” or “severable.” (We call it “divisibility” now; “severability” is something else.) There were discrete units of payment stipulated -- $1 per 1,000 feet delivered. So Gill was entitled to payment for the units of lumber he had already delivered.

Form & Substance
The divisibility doctrine cuts the whole contract up into little mini-contracts where possible. In form, there’s one big contract that calls for the whole deal—4,000,000 feet of logs. But in substance there are 4,000 mini-contracts, each for 1,000 feet of logs for $1. The form is a triviality. The substance matters.

However, the court does not go so far as to find that he is entitled to payment for some logs he had transported halfway at the time of the flood. He didn’t deliver them. So, in divisibility, the contract is broken into smaller contracts, but each of those requires full performance unto itself. Where he failed to fully deliver, that mini-contract was not performed.

How divisible?
How is a contract to be found divisible? It requires a particular statement of the consideration. In this contract, each 1,000 feet of lumber could be matched up in a bargained-for exchange for $1. It was stated on its face that oak logs would be paid $1 per 1,000 feet.

Just because the terms of a contract can be divided does not make a contract divisible. In this case, the contract itself provides the division. “Pairs of matched performances.” Whereas, an agreement to drive a person to Portland for $20…that can be divided down to about 20 cents a mile. But you can’t just drive 50 miles, throw a person out of the car, and collect $10. This contract was not for miles, it was for the whole provided by the miles: getting to Portland.

Wait, divisibility will NOT be determined by the expression of consideration. That helps, but it’s really up to the intent of the parties. The question is, does what is bargained for work as a set, or can each unit of it be of value on its own? A ride to Portland is a whole, only valuable if completed. A bunch of logs is a bunch of freakin’ logs. You’ll have logs either way, just less or more of them. By contrast, if you contract to have those logs made into a house, no divisibility. A bunch of freakin' logs in that context is not fuckin' good enough. You wanna da house, you gonna getta da house.

Yes, that is how I take notes.