Savannah's Hair Down There

This is not a blogpost about pubic hair. That would be my fellow blogger Damned If I Know Her Name's: My Pubic Hair. No, it has come to my attention as I've rambled around The Forest City (its nickname, not mine) that Savannah has a certain fascination with the horticultural equivalent of pubies, the Creeping Fig. To the Latin it is ficus pumila. To the Savannahian, it is something to be trimmed, kept in check (If not, it can cover a three or four story building within a matter of years. You have been warned). Something to be admired by those lucky enough to chance a glance. Witness a very nicely shaped example:

Here is Elsie describing her handling of the stuff that wants to get where you don't want it to get (from Southern Living). “I trained it into a rectangle first, but it looked blah, so I added the arch on top, sketching my shape with chalk,” she says. “Mistakes were easy to correct with a squirt from the hose.”

To keep the shit looking good, Elsie says, “shear it like a sheep.” Other folks may prefer theirs more natural and loose. “At first, I groomed three times a year; now it takes six,” she adds. The older this stuff is, the faster it grows."

Elsie also recommends using box cutters for good straight lines.

Here's Elsie's thang now:

Now, don't even get me started on Vajazzles. Swarovski Crystals for le place d'intime. Yeah. Also, our ficus pumila, is once again heading northward after a long, hot bikini summer.

PS I absolutely did not photoshop the middle image. Ty Ty Nursery at its finest. More to come.

Sorry! We're Closed! You're Screwed!

In what has become an all too predictable pattern, my gym has shuttered its doors. This makes three gyms that have closed this year, pretty much within weeks, if not days, of my joining. This most recent closing was Impact Fitness, which opened maybe two months ago a solid six months behind schedule. The sign states they are "temporarily closed." More appropriate wording, I believe, would be that they were "temporarily open." In fact, my experience with this gym (formerly Downtown Athletic Club, which closed on me after ONE visit) leads me to question whether Somebody Up There really wants me to exercise. And I, for once, plan on listening to the Big Guy........at least until another gym temporarily opens in that God-forsaken spot on Broughton Street.

Bring Out Yer Dead / Marketing Your Funeral Home In This 21st Century

C'mon Guys--This'll be FUN!!!

The Staff at Fairhaven Funeral Home here in Savannah apparently just returned from a very inexpensive marketing seminar with an idea whose time is upon us. Every 2nd Sunday they are hosting a FREE MOVIE with FREE PUNCH and FREE POPCORN for the KIDS! Where? At the FUNERAL HOME! It's a casual affair--simply RSVP (seriously) and be there for the PROMPT START (their caps) and take note: "There will be no intermission." Which is a shame because that would have given them such a great opportunity to further traumatize the kids by taking them on a tour of the morgue, maybe let them try their hand at a little embalming, fire up the crematorium for roasting some weenies or leftover body parts, take naptime in a coffin. See Kids--There's nothing weird about a place where your dead Grammy gets drained like a leaky radiator then tossed into a fiery inferno that resembles what you've been told happens in hell!

How many times have you been to a seminar and heard that utterly useless phrase, "There are no bad ideas?" I think that's the seminar The Staff at Fairhaven Funeral Home attended.

The Royalty Tenenbaums

Joel Tenenbaum, a 25-year old grad student at Boston University, was ordered to pay four record companies $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs between 1997 and 2000. The jury showed admirable restraint in not awarding the $4.5 million the record companies were seeking. Still, that's $22,500 per song which makes a $1 i-tune seem like quite the bargain. Even at that low standard, a similar jury verdict against TCG would put a very painful $180,000,000 (give or take a few $10,000,000 or so) dent in the old wallet.

And folks wonder why I'm headed for the border.

Sugar, I Wish I Knew How To Quit You

Rodell, meet Sugar. Sugar, this is Rodell. Perhaps you've met. "Rodell" is Rodell Vereen, a 50-year old guy from South Carolina. Sugar--probably not her real name--is a 21-year old mare, from Longs, SC. That's MARE, as in a female horse, of a certain age. As reported by AP:

A South Carolina man was charged with having sex with a horse after the animal's owner caught the act on videotape, then staked out the stable and caught him at shotgun point, authorities said Wednesday.
But this wasn't the first time Rodell Vereen has been charged with buggery. He pleaded guilty last year to having sex with the same horse after owner Barbara Kenley found him in the same stable and was sentenced to probation and placed on the state's sex offender list.
Kenley said she noticed several weeks ago her 21-year-old horse Sugar was acting strange and getting infections again. She noticed things in the barn had been moved around — dirt piled up and bales of hay stacked near the horse's stall at her Lazy B Stables in Longs, about 20 miles northeast of Myrtle Beach.
"Police kept telling me it couldn't be the same guy," Kenley said Wednesday. "I couldn't believe that there were two guys going around doing this to the same horse."
She spent several nights at the stables, which are about four miles from her home, but didn't find anything. So she installed surveillance cameras, and when she reviewed the footage from July 19, she couldn't believe she was seeing the same man doing the same thing to her horse.
Kenley didn't call police because she was certain the man would come back to the stable, and she wanted to make sure he was arrested. So she staked out the barn and caught Vereen inside Monday night, chasing him to his truck and holding him with her shotgun until police came.

According to his mother, Rodell generally "does pretty good, as long as he takes his medicine." Hey, Mom, something ain't workin.

The victim is currently being treated for "infections." Ewwwwwwww.

28 Days Later

Sailing tomorrow, out of Seattle, the Infectious Disease Cruise Conference. Seven boisterous days of HIV, MRSA, Tuberculosis, Lyme, Clostridium and our current fave H1N1. Haz-Mat suit fashion show on Wednesday. Explosive coughing contest Thursday. TCG gets feverish just thinking about it. Be sure and pack plenty of anti-microbial soap and handwipes. And for pete's sake, try and stay out of confined spaces like, um, airplanes and cruise ships. No word yet on the city for the return docking.

To Cornhole Or Not To Cornhole?

The first time TCG saw the game being played, it was instantly familiar: Bean Bag Toss. As a child, it was fun enough to occupy a half hour at a birthday party but not much more. Fast forward to adulthood and then some to find grown men and women whippin those bags towards the target and, behold, the phenomenon known as.....Cornhole? Exsqueeze me?

Described by Stephen Colbert as a "combination of horseshoes and sodomy," this new leisuretime pursuit is sweeping the nation. And by nation, I mean a demographic of undereducated, overfed, orthodonture-impaired, vermilion-necked yahoos located primarily in the former Confederate States of America. They giggled when they first said "cornhole" as a young tyke and, for them, the hilarity never ended. Indeed, the Cornhole lexicon is full of shit-yer-pants kneeslappin disambiguity: swish, back door, blocked hole, dirty bag/sanchez, gusher, police (u betcha), slider, lick side, etc. Pros can "hustle the hole." Players are known as, of course, Cornholers. Just ask Beavis or Butthead, I never knew which one was who.

Like so many of the major sports, Cornholing is experiencing growing pains. Chief among these is the fact that its very name conjures up images of Ned Beatty squealing as he is man-raped by Toothless Bugger #2 in Deliverance. But does the sport thrive because of or despite its name? A spokesman for the toy company that promotes its Cornhole products under the name Baggo puts it thusly, "What would you rather hear your child shout out when they score?" On the other hand, Delmas McCoon, president of the American Cornhole Association says, "Hey, it's just a name. Of course I know it's another word for anal. That's the beauty part. Guys come for the sex and stay for the game." Wheeee-doggies!