A woman mistakenly put a baby through an X-ray machine at Los Angeles International Airport.

Man, people will do anything to avoid a copay, won't they?

I always felt bad that the online version of Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail was the crappy one where the vocals drop out in the fourth or fifth chapter. Anyway, it was remastered last year and (re)released on Innova Records... I've heard tell that it did fairly well, but I really have no idea. I am about as disconnected from the mechanics of this project as I've ever been.

Now it is available for free download.

I'm going to let it speak for itself. Merry Christmas.

I'm going to be out of town on Election Day (plowing my way to Dickinson, ND, and then on to Denver), so I went to City Hall yesterday and voted. There's something very liberating about knowing that there is no way I could change my vote now, even if I wanted to. The constant barrage of ads that already started their ramp-up Sunday morning can have absolutely no effect on me, other than my influence on word-of-mouth. I'm virtually immune!

Now, if any horrible information about my candidates suddenly surfaces, I hope you guys will have my back come Election Day -- and I mean something really serious. Not breaking news that they are for or against granting in-state college tuition rates to an apparent swarm of illegal aliens (hey, that's the last ad I saw). No, I mean literal skeletons in the closet, text message transcripts clutched in their boney hands. It could happen. It's never the ones that seem to be the most likely, and I didn't vote for any of them.

I almost hope one of the folks I didn't vote for would show up at my door. It would be fun to invite them in for coffee and take up an hour of their time, just to tell them at the end I already voted. I'd enjoy watching those crazy eyes dart around as they calculate how many hours left until Election Day.

Oh, and if you're thinking of doing this for convenience, just remember. No sticker this way.

Check out my pal Brian's video response to the GOP's recent scare ad about how if you don't vote for them the filthy arabs terrorists will kill you.

Metro Transit has told a bus driver he doesn't have to drive a bus with an ad for Lavender magazine.

A city bus driver who complained about a gay-themed ad got official permission not to drive any bus that carries that ad, according to an internal memo confirmed Tuesday by Metro Transit.
Transit authorities call it a reasonable accommodation to the driver's religious beliefs...

More accurate would be to call it a reasonable accommodation to the driver's disability. Thank God for the ADA!
Also, does this mean gay drivers don't have to drive busses with ads for The Patriot?

Forgot to mention that I'm at ACME this week. Okay, I didn't forget exactly; I just wasn't sure I was going to have any new material to make it worth it for anyone who's seen me before to come out. I met with a financial advisor once who told me that the sad state of my career is a marketing problem, not a talent problem. I think she may have been right.

Anyway come one and come all. Last night was a fascinating exercise in throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. A surprising amount hung in there, so I'll be scraping those hunks off, putting them in my bag and mopping up all the other piles from the floor, never to be seen again. I'm not afraid of a poop metaphor.

Faulkton, SD tonight. 9:30 at the Steak House if you happen to be in town. No, I did not come in to town on jackalope, though some day, perhaps I will.

Ghost Rider 2: Goes Wild does not deal with a comic book character, but the only way it could be more surreal, is if the rider had a flaming skull for a head. I dare you to not be compelled by footage of a guy in all black breaking traffic laws at high speed in Sweden on a motorcycle. It's 52 minutes long, and it takes five or ten before it hits you exactly what is happening.

I have no other words for what it's about. It's just one of those things you stumble across online that beg you simply show it and say, "hey, somebody did this."

After you get a vasectomy, you are supposed to go to a diagnostic clinic twice to provide a semen sample. "Literature" and a private room are provided. They ask you to go to this clinic first at eight weeks following the procedure, and again at ten weeks. I finally got around to going in for my first one last week, eleven weeks following the procedure.

This is proof that I will procrastinate for anything.

I'm headlining the Potowatomi casino tonight in Downtown Milwaukee. Sometimes it's a Friday-Saturday room, but this week it's just Saturday. However, I still had to come down Thursday to do radio Friday morning. I had a full day Thursday, and then, because my wife is in New York for her job, I had to drop off the girls at my in-laws' house in Ham Lake (gateway to Blaine). It was 9 p.m. before I got out of town.

It's been a while since I've done a late-night drive. It was a challenging one, mainly due to the fact that the Indy drive exhausted about 22 hours worth of iTunes material. Considering that I have just over twelve days' worth of audio on my computer, it's hard to believe that I had to grab West Wing DVDs to listen to on the drive. Fortunately, I have wi-fi in my room, so I've been able to pull material from the ether in the form of podcasts and other assorted downloads, so I'm covered for the drive home.

I arrived at the hotel at about 2 a.m. Friday morning. They gave me a whirlpool suite because the other rooms were sold out. This means that there is an entire room that I don't need. I can't invite my brother and his girlfriend to hang out, because it's a non-smoking room and my brother smokes like one of those smokestacks from the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Last night, I sat in the other room and watched television for a half-hour just to be able to say I used it.

I was picked up Friday morning for radio at 7:30. Unlike other times when you're picked up by the club manager, or a door guy or this week's MC, they sent a limo service. It wasn't a stretch limo or anything -- it was a town car, but still, I had a driver. Weird. I tipped him $5, and agonized about whether it was enough, until my brother pointed out to me later that there are probably a lot of times where he doesn't get any tip at all.

The hotel is across the street from the Grand Avenue mall in downtown Milwaukee, so I went to the food court for dinner last night. The people working the counter at the Chinese place were literally calling people over, pushing samples like carnival barkers, but with a charming accent instead of a spooky rasp. I tried the barbequed chicken and the orange chicken and realized there was no way I was not having Chinese by this point. It was very satisfying. They were still harranguing people to try their food as I left. I caught sight of the guy at the counter of the Greek place when I walked by. He looked positively miserable because the Chinese folks were getting all the customers before they even got to his place. I wanted to go up to him and say, "dude -- gyro meat cuts up just fine into small pieces. Fight fire with fire." On the other hand, maybe he usually does give out samples, but just ran out of toothpicks.

After dinner, my original plan was to get a bottle of wine and drink it while sitting in the whirlpool, but that just seemed a little too Will and Grace, so I picked up a small bottle of vodka and some orange juice and drank screwdrivers while sitting in the whirlpool. Why I thought the wine was the faggy part, I don't know.

The problem with solo time in whirlpools is that when you're sitting in one, that's pretty much all you're doing. It faced away from the television, and the motor was too noisy for me to watch a DVD or play music from my laptop (unless I used headphones, but I wasn't going to risk having the laptop that close to churning water). It was relaxing, but there was an undercurrent (no pun intended) of grim obligation, too.

I was asleep by 10 p.m., which may be the earliest I've gone to sleep in, literally, years (perhaps decades). Woke up at 7:30 this morning, and now, here I sit, typing away on my bed. I've got one of those lap-tables with the cusion on the bottom. One would think this would be comfortable, but it's not. I think I'll be returning to the desk once I'm done with this. However, like the whirlpool, I had to try it out.

Who knew unsolicited luxury could be such a challenge?