I'd think it would be hard to be an Amish stripper, since you can't use the jukebox. It's got to be unnerving to try and seductively take off your clothes while an Amish jug band plays "Girls Girls Girls."
Seriously, this girl looks like she went to the tattoo shop with a "Buy One, Get Two Thousand" free coupon. When she took off her clothes, how could you tell? Her skin is so colorful, it looks like she's stripping down to a skin-tight Greatful Dead tye-dye bodystocking.
It's census time in the grand ol' USA. Every ten years, the government takes a head count, and everybody hates it.
It's always amused me how people resist telling the government anything, like the fact that they have two kids is something that could be used against them by the sinister G-men. These are the same people who'll use their Facebook accounts to announce things like their separation from their husband, or when they're leaving town on vacation.
I actually worked for the Census Bureau when I was right out of high school, as a part-time summer job. Remember how bad that 1990 census was, and all the controversy about how the numbers didn't add up?
Yeah, that was my fault. Anyone who's ever been to my Census-beat of Shelby County, Texas, will understand my plight. If a man is common-law married to a farm animal, does it count as a spouse, pet, or dinner? I didn't know what boxes to check.
Anyway, I went to my mailbox yesterday and found a letter from the Census Bureau. As someone who's been on the other end of that transaction, I kind of looked forward to it being over and done with.
Snake-eyes.
Nope, It's not my census. It's just a lettertelling me that they're about to mail me a census.
Imagine the logic of that. To make sure I read my mail, they send me a letter. And they'll probably send me another letter later to see if I read the first two.
Ah, government waste in action. It's like the Census Bureau is singlehandedly trying to prop up the Post Office. Hopefully if they ever need to call me, they'll give me a call beforehand and make sure I answer the phone.
Reid Kerr remembers quite unfondly losing the muffler off his car to an exceptionally awful Shelby County road in the Census of 1990, which the government would not reimburse him for.
Like many of you, I enjoy television. I spend a lot of my life camped out in front of the tube, enjoying what I consider to be the new Golden Age of TV.
By the way, I'm well aware there are no longer any "tubes" in a television. "Camped out in front of the plasma" doesn't have that same romantic tone.
Technically speaking, I have a metric crapload of channels to watch. For what I pay for television, I should be able to call up my provider and have them stage one-act plays for me.
However, as anyone with more than two channels knows, that's not the case. There are great stretches of time where there's nothing worth watching.
I've grown increasingly frustrated with the pay channels, especially. I have an HBO package, which I've had since the Sopranos was on the air. While HBO still does have good original programming, the other 23 hours a day appear to be programmed by a drunken monkey with darts.
Here's a random sampling of my eight HBO channels tonight at 7pm central time.
Real Time With Bill Maher - An original HBO series, if you discount the fact it's basically the same show Bill Maher has been doing since 1993.
Planet of the Apes - Nine years old. Here's my policy, any movie with Mark Wahlberg's name over the title, skip it. "Max Payne," "The Happening," "Rock Star," bleah. Any movie where's Marky Mark is part of an ensemble cast, like "The Departed," "The Lovely Bones," or "The Perfect Storm," watch it. It's probably pretty good.
Band of Brothers - Fantastic miniseries, which is what I said when it came out nine years ago.
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl - Two years old, and I doubt I'm the target audience for it anyway.
The Assignment - This movie is thirteen years old, yet I've never heard of it.
Suburban Commando - Okay, I know this must be their "family" channel, but it's nineteen years old, and it stars Hulk Hogan. That's two things right there that shouldn't be used to entertain kids.
Ghost Dad - Just when you thought HBO was slacking, along comes a movie that makes "Suburban Commando" look like "Schindler's List." This is a twenty year-old piece of dreck from Bill Cosby, which is widely thought of as one of the worst movies of all time. This movie, along with "Leonard Part 6," pretty much undid all the positive karma Cos had from "The Cosby Show."
Alice - Even better. I have no idea what this is, and the "Info" button doesn't even help me. Unless Linda Lavin is in this one, I'm clueless.
By my count, I pay forty-five thousand dollars a year for my HBO channels, although my math might be off a few decimals. You'd think I'd be treated to better programming than "American Kickboxer 9" and "Larry The Cable Guy Gets Worms."
Reid Kerr does not have a favorite Hulk Hogan movie, only a list of the ones that aren't the worst.
I live-blogged the Oscars last night through Facebook. We had some great interaction, here's the highlights from the big show.
8:00 (Central Time) - I'm watching the Oscars, even though I haven't seen any of the movies up for awards. In fact, I'm not even sure what movies I saw in the theater in 2009. Is "Wolverine" up for anything?
8:15 - This Kathy-Ireland-Bot they have interviewing people at the Oscars is pretty good. It only seems about 60% robotic.
8:30 - Neil Patrick Harris starts off the Oscars. I guess they were afraid if they had the hosts do the musical number, Steve Martin would have insisted on bringing out the banjo.
8:44 - They're showing the clip from "The Blind Side," where a rich white woman adopts a poor African-American kid. I hope that movie doesn't inspire a lot of people to do the same, because you know it'll turn out like "Finding Nemo," when a lot of people went out and bought fish, then flushed them later when they got bored.
8:52 - Matthew Broderick and Molly Ringwald eulogizing John Hughes. It's 80's teen angst all over again. Man, he WAS the 80s.
9:02 - Boy, nothing breaks up the tension of an Oscars broadcast like a half hour salute to short films, foreign language flicks, and documentaries. It's like the Super Bowl halftime show being an all-star game of Words With Friends.
9:15 - Just watched the clip for "An Education." That's a movie I not only didn't see, I was actually unaware of its existence. That movie could have had Dolph Lundgren in it, for all I know.
9:19 - Sarah Jessica Parker's hair appears...unbrushed. And unwashed. And like someone's been rubbing a balloon on it.
9:25 - The Oscars salute to horror movies starts out with scenes from Jaws, The Exorcist, and Child's Play. One of these things is not like the others.
9:34 - Who is the woman on the arm of James Cameron? She looks awful. She looks like Helen Mirren SHOULD look.
9:45 - Demi Moore's skin is uncomfortably bronzed. With her dress the same color, she actually looks like an Oscar.
9:48 - Oscar tribute to the deceased of 2009. Anyone else unable to look at David Carradine the same way anymore?
9:49 - No Farrah Fawcett mention at the Oscars? It's always a bit confusing who gets in that montage, like when George Carlin was left out last year.
10:05 - They always complain about the Oscars running long, and yet they feel perfectly okay about having twenty people from a Gap ad burst onstage for a ten minute set of interpretive dance. Like what Avatar was missing was breakdancing and jazz hands.
10:16 - Man, The Hurt Locker is cleaning house. James Cameron is no longer king of the world.
10:32 - I'm not sure who Kate Winslet is wearing, but she has the hair of Jessica Rabbit.
10:35 - There is order in the universe. The Dude abides. They gave Jeff Bridges forever for his speech, man. Good job, man.
10:59 - Suck it, James Cameron. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and Kathryn Bigelow winning over Cameron's Avatar in the same year his Terminator franchise finally runs aground must be especially sweet.
The Blockbuster near my house is going out of business. I know that's not really cause for alarm anymore, as that industry is taking a big hit.
These days, walking around a video store is a quaint little throwback to the bygone days of a few years ago. It's like you're transported back in time to a Starbucks, or you're listening to a James Blunt song or something. It's all 2005 in there.
Anyway, I strolled on down to the video store to see what was still for sale. Come to find out, their "going out of business" sale started a few weeks ago and most of the inventory was picked pretty clean.
Fair warning, when your Blockbuster goes out of business and sells out everything, at a certain point you're left with a frighteningly high percentage of Dolph Lundgren movies.
Apparently, Dolph Lundgren has been in sixteen movies in the last decade. Who knew?
It's amazing what's left over at these places. It's not that I'm surprised that some movies are still available, I'm astonished that some movies were actually made.
I'm not just talking about the umpteenth generations of Friday the 13th movies. Somehow, they made three "Slapshot" movies. Every crappy horror movie from the 90s spawned a couple of sequels, with each one getting farther and farther down the Hollywood food chain.
There, in my trembling hands, was a movie starring 50-Cent, right next to the atrocious-song-turned-worse-movie, Toby Keith's "Beer For My Horses."
As I flipped through the dreck at the bottom of the bowels of Tinseltown, it began to dawn on me why video stores are a thing of the past. The concept of getting dressed, leaving the house, driving across town and filling out a credit application just to take home a copy of "Larry The Cable Guy Gets Worms" is just foreign to us these days.
The Olympic Scoreboard: 100,000 Condoms, 1 Giant Beaver
The Vancouver Olympics have finally ended, bringing us tears, joy, and a giant beaver.
Yeah, there's always that.
Anyway, while we return to our regularly scheduled television viewing, one thing stands out about this year's games. There's one number that shines past Canada's 14 gold medals, or the USA's 37 medals, or even the 190 million viewers NBC pulled in.
A hundred thousand. Sex of...well, Olympic proportions.
As the article points out, that averages out to more than 15 condoms for each man and woman at the games.
While on the surface, that seems like an awful lot of doin' the nasty, I think it's about right. The Olympic Village has long been thought of as a place where pretty much anything goes for the athletes.
Face it, there is no other point in the space-time continuum where a guy who does the luge is going to get groupies. A biathlon athlete never pulls in the babes like a rock star, except for that brief moment that only occurs every four years.
Most of the athletes aren't professionals. By that, I'm not saying they're college athletes waiting on their big break to turn pro. I'm saying they train all of their lives to come curling at the Olympics, then they go home. They go for gold, then they go back to picking up the kids from school and putting cover sheets on their TPS reports.
There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for most of these athletes. They're here to march in the opening ceremonies, perform their sport on MSNBC at two in the afternoon, and take advantage of free condoms for the first time in their lives.
It's really just the natural tradition of the original games being handed down. Remember, the ancient Greeks competed and weren't even wearing pants.
ABC News reported Jesse James' mistress is also an Amish stripper. 
