Jacko gets off, promises no more sleeping with boys

Well, apparently Michael Jackson isn't guilty of the charges he was facing. Good for him, but we all know he's guilty of something. Even if he never so much as jerked a kid off, he was cavorting in an unseemly fashion with minors. I mean, avoid the appearance of wrong-doing, will ya?

Apparently, that's the next step. Michael's lawyers have said he won't be sleeping in the same beds with boys any more. Well gosh, that's a great first step, ain't it?

In this day and age, I don't like to be left alone with ANYBODY. It's not that I am a molester, it's just because people are crazy as fuck and who knows who will make some shit up about you later on. I've met women who have lied about being raped. I worked with TWO of them. One was even the subject of a criminal investigation after she claimed four black men abducted her in broad daylight from the middle of the Iowa State campus. I've met plenty of other people who operate in a similar vein though perhaps not to the same extreme. Women are always making up shit about other people, especially other women, which is why a lot of women don't even like to work with other women.

When I went to a Iowa Press Women's Ass. meeting, one woman said she wished she worked in an office full of men and many of the women present agreed. I figured why the hell should I put up with it then?

Still, I think that if the jury found Michael not guilty, then at the very least, his accusers just didn't have enough on him, but he might well not have done anything. But man, you should be smarter than to put yourself in a situation where people have very good reason to talk.

Red-headed soul-suckin vampire bitch Stephanie w/new stuff

Red-headed soul-sucking vampire bitch no. 2 is the long-awaited
and much requested, Stephanie Ogren.

In short, Stephanie is one of those small town whores who did
her best to get out of Shenandoah, Iowa as fast as she could.
This meant fucking a lot of middle managenet types, some right
on their desks in the office. Others were simply blown. For some,
she would just stick things in her vagina as they requested
it.

I know these things because when I worked with Stephanie at the
Daily Nonpareil, she told me all about them. Like most daddy issues,
Stephanie had a great desire to see if she could manipulate men with
her 'sexuality.' This meant that most of the time when she would
come over to my desk to talk to me, she had to have one hand on her
stomach slowly raising her shirt to reveal some fleshy stomach, arching
back, pursing her lips a lot and sticking her boobs out as far as she could.
She also had just about the foulest mouth I've ever heard. That kind of thing
isn't too kosher on men, it's even less so on women in the office.

Stephanie didn't give two shits about me as a co-worker... not intitially.
She hooked her wagon to anybody's star and when I started she pretty much
treated me like the new fish using her limited powers of perception to dismiss
me as useless to her until I proved myself otherwise. She had herself hooked
up to some other dumb bitch, Julien Fielding, the weekend editor and player
hater who started writing a column after my success convinced her that
everyone would love her more than me. They didn't of course, so naturally
she hated me and because Stephanie was her toady, she hated me too.

Then JF quit and SO had to find someone else to leech off of. When I got there,
Stephanie had some rudimentary design skills. She could lay out a paper,
but it wasn't anything spectacular. She wouldn't even capitalize the second
word of a two word feature headline because "That wasn't AP style." Word to
the wise, AP would be the first to tell you they don't really have anything
to say about feature headlines and also their rules are just guidelines, not the law.
But being a dumb bitch who never went to college, she didn't know that or anything
else worth repeating.

In short, she was and is a dullard and a slut. I feel sorry for her children, both of whom
were conceived in an attempt to trap her husband who wasn't smart enough
to run like hell after the first bastard was born. "Well, I guess we better get
married" is what Stephanie told me he said after she announced she was
pregnant for the second time. Hmmm, how'd that happen? It's an old, old
story isn't? How to trap a man who makes decent money.

As a consequence, she has been extremely unhappy in her marriage. Her
husband, Corey, is squid who spends all day on the Internet. Occasinally,
he bothers her for anal. He doesn't pay any attention to his children, but
who could blame him. They are just a constant reminder of the hell his life
has become because he was tempted by the fruit of a slutty chick from the
sticks. He keeps bugging her for anal and she won't go for it, so she says, and
I had to hear about it because she thought she was turning me on and wrapping
me around her finger.

But like I was saying, she had only rudimentary skills in design, but she never
went to college like most editors who are worth a shit, so she wasn't going to get
much further in her career. She dearly wanted to be a news editor, but that wasn't
gonna happen because in addition to not having any people skills, she doesn't have
any editing skills. She can't write. And her personality is such that she has to create
drama around her at all time to feel like she is the center of attention.

Attempts to go from half-assed copy editor/paginator at the Nonpareil to News
Editor at the Omaha World Herald were rebuked as politely as they could be
considering she was incapable of seeing just how ridiculous her request was.
So in order to get a few extra skills, Stephanie leeched off of me as best she
could. She thought she was sexing me up with lame come ons and posing. I didn't
say anything, to her any way, but I pointed it out to everyone else so they could
have a good laugh at the leech as she "worked it" in front of the fat guy.

Push-up bras might be appropriate in strip clubs, but for the everyday place,
they are just not cool. Pretty much every single woman who worked at the
Nonpareil thought of her as a complete skank who would not only run around
wth her tits hanging out but would then go around and talk to all the women
about how awesome she thought her boobs looked. "Oh I can't believe how
everyone is staring at my boobs." Yeah, that's a real accomplishment, slag,
ever been to a dairy farm? Lots of people stare at a cows udders too
because they are haning out there. It's not so much a compliment as it is
incredulity. It's hard to believe that anyone could be so needful of attention, but
then when you ain't gettin' anything but repeated requests for ass sex from your
husband who is a dullard and boring as fuck in your estimation, you are bound to
look outside the marriage for satisfaction of one kind or another. If you can combine
you need for attention with your longing to move up in the work place, well you can
kill two birds with one slutty stone.

Stephanie had a real habit of stealing other people's ideas and the credit for those ideas.
It came as a real shock to her one day when I told her I wasn't giving her so much as
a headline idea until she stared sharing a little of the credit for the design advice I'd give her.
I swear, there were a couple of times when everything ona fucking page was put there at my
direction, the boss would say good looking page, and she'd say thanks right in front of me.
It was like pulling teeth to get her to say, thanks, but it was all Greg. That just reflects a complete lack of integrity.

There were plenty of times she would say, can you look at my page? Or I'm out of ideas, can you help me? A page designer should never run out of ideas, the story elements suggest ideas. How stupid would you have to be to not be able to come up with something? So you would see me standing right behind her going do this, put that there, go to this web site for idea, and basically giving her the short course in college design that I actually had to pay for.


A talented person would not have been concerned that I was going to cut them off,
but she decided to try and get me fired right there and then by telling the boss I was being
mean to her. Yeah, I guess it is mean of me not to give away the education I spent
thousands on.

In the Nonpareil's great tradition of promoting incompetence, they
made her design editor recently. I get updates from all sorts of
people inside the Nonpareil. You'd really be surprised at who
hates what, who and why there. It really is a sickening shithole
excuse of newspaper that exists merely to be bled dry by the
World Herald Company, which could give a shit less about
Council Bluffs, Iowa or journalism for all I can tell.

I've never seen a bigger star fucker in my life than Stephanie.
When I was asked by Z-92's Todd and Tyler to be on their show
to talk about the Huskers and why I hate them, she tried to horn
in on that action. Right. Like I'd take some skank to a rock radio
station so she could stick her tits in everybody's face and pretend
that everyone found her desperation charming? What excuse could
I possibly have to take a paginator to a radio talkshow?

Her fake laugh would make a cannibal puke.

She has lately pretended to convert to Christianity, but it's just another
excuse to make people pay attention to her. It isn't working unless by
"working" we mean making people hate her more and more with each
passing day. Her pastor can't even stand her. She kept bugging him for
advice until he gave her the old "pray and point to a passage in the Bible"
brush off. That old weeze.

I feel sorry for her kids. The old whore will no doubt drive them crazy.
When I made her mad by asserting my right to get credit for my work -
this was just a month or so after getting out of the hospital failure, by the
way - she told her kids to not talk to me. Now, I don't care so much,
because her kids are just as annoying as anyone else's, but if you're
gonna bring the shits into the office, don't imbue them with your
insanity. I only say hello to them to be polite, the least you could do
is not train them to be impolite because you're a disgusting ho-bag.

She bears many of the same psychological symptoms as untreated syphilis victims.

She writes a shitty column in the Nonpareil and yet tried to run for Council Bluffs School Board. This was the most ridiculous of all her attention grabbing schemes since 1) she only votes to "double" her husbands vote 2) doesn't keep up with any politics 3) had never been to a school board meeting and 4) is dumb as shit but 5) is a huge fucking conflict of interest. As a matter of fact, I emailed the ethcis expert at the Poynter Institute just to make sure I wasn't full of shit because no one around me seemed to get that an "editor" and "columnist" would have massive conflicts of interest in running for a public office.

She ran around the office getting signatures for her petition to get on the ballot and eventually, someone straightened her dumb ass out because she canceled her run. She claimed that he pastor suggested she get more experience first. Right. Her pastor is smart enough to know that her run for office would have been not only a conflict of interest, but a violation of Iowa election laws as well that could have gotten lots of people in trouble.


I'll have more so check back.

Good Night Anne

Poor Anne Bancroft. I always thought she was a
great beauty, even as she got older, she never really
lost her looks. I suspect that is because she had a
real inner beauty. Maybe it was combined with a shitload
of cosmetic surgery. That is not unheard of in Hollywood.
I'm not judging.

But what an actress. I enjoyed her in many
of her roles, but particularly as Annie Sullivan. She
really managed to capture the brilliance, patience
and compassion of one of America's greatest teachers.
It takes greatness to perform like that.

You know, every time someone we are all familiar
with dies, it diminishes us as a group for just a few
days and then we all go on with our lives as though
nothing ever happened. I supposed in the Zen sense
of things, nothing did and nothing ever will. Although in
the Western view of things, existence is a heavy burden
filled with angst and mourning and loss that grows and
grows until we just can't take it any more. Who's right?

The world may never know.

I [heart] Jason Taylor

Did I ever tell you about the man they called Jason Taylor?
He was a funny fuck. Founding member of Grandma Mojo's at
Iowa State, playwright, master of comedy. Now he's skulking
around the Internet leaving anonymous messages of praise
on this site. Some say Jason Taylor doesn't really have a
physical form any more. Some say he evolved beyond this
earthly realm like Lawnmower Man or some shit. Me? I'd
put even money that he's wandering the United States
like Shazam or the Hulk, getting into trouble, solving
people's troubles and then fucking off like a real
unsung hero. Wherefore art thou Jason? Don't leave
us hangin', baby! Send the word and I will publish
it right here.

Construction is inevitable, but does it have to be irrational?

For the better part of the last two months,
Highway 30 as it runs through Carroll has
been choked off with construction as the
old surface has been pried up and a shiny,
new asphalt layer has replaced it. I use
the word choke deliberately because at any
given moment, anyone driving along 30 and
attempting to turn right or left or to just
keeping going straight might find themselves
redirected or even turned back. One night
last week, I found myself practically trapped
on North Main bouncing back and forth between
Highway 30 on the one side and a rail crew on
the other. To get to my home on North Main,
I eventually had to drive down to Grant and
come around that way.

Now, I’ve never been one to complain too
vociferously about road construction. After
all, if one wants to drive on smooth asphalt
lanes the majority of the year, one has to
put up with some maintenance in the summer.
But the construction on 30 seems almost
punitive in nature. I’ve never seen anything
like it.

I don’t envy road workers their job especially
when the heat is brutal, but twice now I’ve had
flag wavers directing me to drive straight into
oncoming traffic they themselves apparently did
not see. I’ve driven up streets toward 30 only
to be turned back once I got there. I’ve seen
other drivers confused as they attempted to
turn toward 30 and were only waved off after
they tried to make that turn. I’ve found myself
turning out from a business not knowing which
lane I was supposed to be using, the reconstructed
one or the dug up lane three inches below it. I’ve
seen very few signs except those posted at the very
ends of the construction zones.

I’ve also heard law enforcement say things over
their radios such as “Well, I finally got to Wal-
Mart.” Fire trucks, ambulances, deputies, police.
If they’re confused and delayed, we all are. And
if there is one thing I know it’s that when the
average American driver get confused, he gets
dangerous.

According to the Cherokee office of the Iowa DOT,
construction should last until the end of July
and that’s IF the weather holds. I’m all in favor
of nice roads. I brake for road workers every time.
If the Iowa Department of Transportation wants to
fix up Highway 30, more power to them. We will all
benefit in the end, but why tear up the length of
30 from one end of Carroll to the other? Why make
it harder for drivers to get out of your way? Why
not reroute traffic for a day or two to get the
job done section by section? Why not put a few more
people on the job to expedite things so the
commercial hub of Carroll County can get back to
business and pay the taxes that pay for these road
projects in the first place

For those who are not familiar with the great
American tradition of complaining, here is a phone
number you can call just to say, “Hey, it would be
great if we could get this road construction done
with sooner rather than later.” Be polite, but firm
if you decide to call. The squeaky wheel gets greased,
but you get more flies with honey and other mixed metaphors.

Call the Iowa Department of Transportation at
(712) 276-1451 to voice your concerns.

Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars

"The best, most concise assesment of Revenge of the Sith
that I have read - courtesy of my pal Greg Jerrett."
—Ben Godar

I went in with low expectations and that saved
me from utter disappointment. Had I known it
wouldn’t give me any great satisfaction, I would
have still gone to see “Revenge of the Sith”
much in the same way I might go to a funeral
for a relative I had lost touch with years ago
just to feel a sense of closure. Just as at a
funeral, everyone feels inclined to say something
nice about the deceased, there are those who will
tell you this movie is good and a fitting way
to end nearly 30 years of extended childhood
bliss. But that is nothing more than wishful
thinking.

_______________________________

Finally got this image to work. It's high quality for printing.
This is the image from the poster and T-shirt that my good
friend, JC Dahlager dig for me (without my asking) one summer
when he was an intern at the Nonpareil. I love it because it's
cool, yeah, sure who wouldn't? But also because he made
it on Nonpareil time as a pure expression of friendship.

A little peace and quiet

You know what gets me is that people will look at you
like you is the devil if you walk into a restaurant
and ask to be seated where there are no children.

Great googly moogly!

God forbid that while spending $20 on a piece of
overpriced "prime" rib (a real crime if you ask me) I
should like to be able to concentrate on enjoying the
damn thing rather than listening to the oh so sweet
sounds of a 2-year-old screeching like a spider monkey
being ripped apart by chimps at a Who concert.

I don't hate kids per se. There are all sorts of
places I go where I don't bitch too much about kids.
Any fast food hambuger joint I go to is off limits for
the kiddie complaint machine since I reckon that's
their turf or at least they've clearly been invited by
the management to come one by. Besides, I can eat that
stuff in my car or come in at times I know kids are
less likely to be there or I could just not go.

But if I enter what is presumably a fine dining
establishment to spend a bit of cash that I could put
toward books, bills or my retirement, then I better be
treated like reasonable fucking man when I ask to not
be seated next to kids. And even so, I'm usually
pretty reasonable. I just don't want to sit next to
screaming kids. They are all pretty disgusting, loud,
little looky-loos that I could do without. But just
give me a modicum of peace and quiet and I'm happy.

____________________________________

Proud Moment No. 1

Remember The Iceman with respect, honor and envy

For years now, I’ve been following the
story of The Iceman, a 5,300-year-old
mummified corpse found frozen in the
Austrian Alps in 1991. Have you heard
of this gentleman? Ötzi — as he’s been
dubbed — has been the subject of several
documentaries because he reveals so much
to us about the Neolithic. Scientists
from Europe, America and Australia have
been using the most advanced of our modern
technologies to probe into every corner
of this primitive man’s remains to find
out just what his story was. How did he
live? How did he die? How much better are
we than him?

I used to joke in columns that Ötzi
wasn’t miraculously still alive when
he was thawed out. That isn’t entirely
true, though. His heart wasn’t beating
and his brain wasn’t firing off
synaptically, but old Ötzi was telling
quite a story.

The food in his colon indicated that he
ate primitive bread, preserved bear meat
and cultivated plants. Ötzi’s fingernails
had stopped growing several times in the
six months prior to his ultimate demise.
This told us that he had been near death
and recovered with the help of medicinal
herbs.

He had tattoos indicating he had undergone
acupuncture treatments. He carried a copper
axe and wore mocassins tied to snowshoes,
the first of their kind.

Anthropologists are constantly gob-smacked
by Ötzi because he keeps proving that our
so-called primitive ancestors were on-the-ball,
well-equipped, socially, technologically,
artistically and medically advanced men
and not just slightly improved upon animals
on the way to becoming the glory that is
modern man.

In fact, the more we learn about Ötzi, the
better he looks and the more primitive we
appear.

Before Ötzi, anthropologists thought people
in the Neolithic were running around like a
bunch of monkeys with some skins thrown over
them tied roughly together with twigs and
grasses. Not so. Bearskins were tailored for
Ötzi — he even had a hat — and a cape made
of woven grasses kept him dry.

Copper, they believed, hadn’t even been figured
out yet, but Ötzi had an axe made of the
material. This means he was the proud owner
of a fairly common tool and not a rare item
kept only for ceremonial purposes.

Ötzi carried everything he needs to start a
fire in the snow. I don’t know about you, but
while I think I know how to start a fire, I’ve
never actually done it with anything less
primitive than matches, rolled up newspapers
and lighter fluid soaked briquettes. Let’s be
honest, there are a lot of basic skills and
knowledge about the world that each of us lacks
today because it just isn’t needed in our daily
repertoires.

Ötzi was 45 and quite old by Neolithic
standards. It was originally thought he’d died
of a combination of old age and exposure to the
elements. I think that was wishful thinking on
the part of modern scientists who wanted this
primitive to look like something of a helpless
tool at the mercy of the natural world when all
was said and done.

But it turns out that Ötzi lived in harmony with
his world and died from an arrow wound he got
from one of his fellow humans. He received the
wound several days prior to his death, too. Imagine
that if you will. The will and determination this
man had. How capable he was. He was a model of
self-sufficiency capable of living almost
indefinitely in the wilderness on food he killed
and in shelter he provided for himself. Even
after several illnesses failed to kill him off,
he managed to go on for days after being
shot, for what reason, we can’t know.

Maybe Ötzi was attacked. Maybe Ötzi started
something he couldn’t finish. It doesn’t
matter ultimately. What does matter is
that when we look back across our history,
we see names and dates and places of
significance. We revere men and women
whose actions changed the course of
human events and we marvel.

Yet 5,300 years ago, a primitive man — at
least in the sense that he came before us —
whose real name we will never know, whose
life is a mystery to us, died without fanfare
or record. Because a hiker stumbled upon him,
Ötzi came back to life with a message no
scientist has discovered or approved, but
which will one day be undeniable to all. We
may be modern, but we are not better, and
certainly no more capable, than our ancestors.

In October, 2004, Helmut Simon, the German
hiker who discovered Ötzi, died in the same
mountain range where he found The Iceman.
Simon fell 100 meters from an unmarked path
to his instant death on a peak called
Gaiskarkogel south of Salzburg, Austria,
home to some of mankind’s greatest artistic
achievements. He will no doubt be remembered
fondly by friends and family for some years,
but to history, he will be lucky to be a
minor footnote in the story of Ötzi who
never wrote an opera or wore a Gortex coat,
but neither did he slip and fall to his death.