Top 10 Reasons Chicago Failed to Win the 2016 Olympics

From my friend (and recovering Bush apologist) David Brazeal:

10. IOC delegates disappointed to discover Oprah hadn’t hidden portable DVD players under their seats.

9. Voters perturbed by President Obama’s effort to lead them in a chant of “USA! USA!”

8. US credibility damaged when Michelle Obama expressed her hope to meet “international soccer star David Beckett.”

7. Many of Chicago’s most supportive IOC delegates still partying in Pittsburgh after last week’s G-20 protests.

6. Chicago officials bribed delegates with US dollars instead of euros.

5. Delegates unswayed by promises that Chicago Olympics will “save or create 8-million jobs.”

4. Withdrawal of US missile defense from Eastern Europe swayed large bloc of Polish and Czech soccer moms to support Rio de Janeiro.

3. Voters creeped out by Joe Biden’s pro-Chicago video presentation, praising “northern girls with the way they kiss.”

2. Delegates turned off when American Kanye West interrupted Tokyo’s presentation to say Beyonce really deserves to win.

1. It’s all George W. Bush’s fault.

The boys remains one of the funniest people I kn0w. [Files under: Too Funny for His Job]

Radio station streaming live video from Palin event

Hit99fmvideoSarah Palin is holding a rally in Springfield, Missouri, and radio station Hit 99 FM is streaming video live from the event. They could have made it easier to find but deserve props for the effort. I’m having trouble getting audio but perhaps that will change when the event gets underway.

Interesting that this is a music formatted station, not a news/talk’er. David Brazeal is there and might interview someone from the station. We’ll post it here if he does.

PS: This is what we lovingly refer to as “a face for radio.”

Monkey Fez

The Order of the Fez now has enough members to play ping pong doubles. Please rise and join me in recognizing David Brazeal, Order of the Fez #4:

“Hereby is submitted my application to the Order of the Fez. Thanks to ebay, I have obtained a fez from a monkey trainer in Tel Aviv.  It belonged to his dear, beloved macaque, Ahmed, who was recently crushed to death in a fruit stand accident.”

Another one bites the Mac

Learfield pal David Brazeal has looted his son’s college fund to buy himself a new MacBook Pro. He’ll be Mac-dazed for bit, unlearning the thousand things you need to know to make a PC go, but we’ll try to keep up with his progress here.

On the off chance my own Mac experience contributed to David’s high dive into the Mac pool, I’ve added him to the Mac Gallery.

Casio Exilim EX-Z1000

My beloved Casio camera started giving me some weird white screens and rather than wait for it to completely fail at a critical moment… I upgraded. The Casio Exilim Ex-Z1000 is the new, bigger brother to the model I had. Slightly larger form factor but that allows for an even larger display. Lots of megapixels and some optical zoom. But the real clincher for me was the video. With a 2 gig SD card, I can record up to two hours of video! Amazing. Sound is pretty good, too. Here’s a little 2 min clip (13 meg .wmv) I shot last night. John Fougere and David Brazeal doing the weekly high school football scoreboard show.

I owe it all to squirt cheese

“To this day, the taste of squirtable cheddar is forever paired in Mays’ memory with the hot, dusty stench of chicken manure and mayonnaise; and yet, he cannot help but consume the delicacy at every opportunity. And though that day 50 years ago may have seemed trivial at the time, its lasting influence on the state of the blogosphere is but more evidence of the power of Squirt Cheese in History.”

— David Brazeal

More Squirt Cheese in History

“It was against this backdrop that Marco Polo floated into Japan in a hot air balloon, carrying with him the most luxurious goods from his homeland: extra virgin olive oil, Venetian blinds, and his 5 remaining bottles of squeezable parmesan cheese. The Japanese people, after years of gustatory oppression, gobbled Polo’s golden ribbons of delight with gusto. They rose up against their oppressors, won their freedom, and never looked back.

Is there a lesson for the modern reader in Japan’s tragic romance with its scrumptious first love? Perhaps it is this: we fight the good fight for that which we hold dear, but ultimately, to win or lose is a mere footnote to our having tasted our bacon-flavored life to the fullest.”

Wouldn’t you love to know and hang out with someone that can write like this? I am so pleased to know David Brazeal and so sad we don’t get to hang out.

Squirt Cheese and the Declaration of Independence

I stand by my earlier assertion that my friend David is too funny for his job. Offered as Exhibit A, this excerpt from his recent post exposing the role of Squirt Cheese in the founding of this great country:

Jefferson was not only a deep thinker and philosopher, but also an inventor of the first order. Having developed a more effective plow, and the color now known as Yellow No. 5, Jefferson turned his attention to the culinary arts. During late nights at Monticello, discussing politics in his hemp laboratory with George Washington, Jefferson experienced what modern readers would call “the munchies.” Washington, unable to chew effectively with his wooden teeth, implored his friend to invent a softened snack. Jefferson turned his considerable talent toward solving that problem, and soon invented a whipped cheese product that he stored in wooden bottles. A pump mechanism forced the cheese out the top of the bottle, allowing it to be applied to breads, crackers, and pemmican.

If you need further evidence of David’s genius, I offer this: Of the nearly 25 million blogs crawled by Technorati, only 217 include a reference to pemmican. I rest my case.

Ladies and gentlemen…SquirtCheez!

In June of 2003, I posted a short list of “Blogs I Would Read If They Existed.” Leaving David Brazeal off that list was an oversight but David is easy to oversee. Not unlike Topsy. Tonight I am honored to be among the first to link to David’s new blog, SquirtCheez.

SquirtCheez has a long and illustrious history as a metaphor for the human experience. Homer called it the “nectar of fat and happy Olympian consumerism.” American colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards, in his most famous sermon, noted that SquirtCheez is the only source of sustenance that will explode upon being thrown into the flames of hell.

It’s totally unfair of me to put this kind of pressure on David and I will look like a total dumb-ass if he screws the pooch on this. But gosh darn it, I’m willing to risk it. Because David is part of that tiny, select group I refer to as: TFFTJ (Too Funny for Their Jobs). Please welcome him to the ‘sphere.

Are we more than our stories?

Could it be that our purpose is to tell a story, and that the better lived a life is, the better the story that survives after you’re gone?

An intriguing question posed by Dave Winer (a couple of years ago). If I read the post correctly, he’s wondering if there is really more to us than the stories we tell. For those of us that attempt to share our hopes and fears, successes and failures (in journals like this one)…is there really more to us than our blogs? Reminds me of a great T-Shirt David (Brazeal) found on someone’s blog: Enough about me. Let’s talk about my blog.