Congress is ours

This rules. The next two years are gonna be fun.

Believe the Hype...

...and go see Borat as soon as you possibly can. Every seat in the theater was filled when we went. I am not exaggerating when I say that this is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. It got to the point where it hurt to laugh. I was in tears. A lady sitting behind me evidently didn't have any clue what she was in for, and sounded like she was experiencing an acute combination of ecstacy and pain. Every next moment she would be going "Ohhhh.....nooooo.....OOOOHHHHH!!!....oh no....." This would have been really annoying if I hadn't been laughing myself nearly to death the whole time. This carried on behind me until a certain part in the movie, and believe me, you'll know what part I mean if you've seen it, where I believe she was stunned into silence and uttered not a peep for the remainder of the film.

Back Da Bears...Grow A Moustache

There reaches a point in every championship season where something special occurs, a transcendent moment where boundaries are crossed and legends are made. The Chicago Bears, if you ask nearly anyone in the land of Chicago, may very well be in the midst of such a season.

But have the Bears yet reached that threshold of transcendence? One might claim that it was crossed when Rex Grossman started the season with 262 yards against the Packers, firmly closing the door on a dismal preseason. One might claim that it came after that miracle comeback in the desert, a game which featured a number of transcendent moments, from Devin Hester's punt return for a touchdown, to twin fumble returns for touchdowns by Mike Brown and Charles "Peanut" Tillman, to the Cardinals' Neil Rackers, a Pro Bowl-caliber field goal kicker just a season previous, booting a floppy miss to seal a historically improbable comeback win. One might go so far as to claim that a threshold will be crossed in the Meadowlands on Sunday night if the Bears can manage to shake their miserable loss to the lowly Miami Dolphins and beat the suddenly red-hot New York Giants.

Oftentimes it is impossible to pinpoint that exact moment when a team goes from a contender to a champion until long after the dust has settled and the final score goes in the record books. But what is certain is that along the way to the realm of legend, champions must make sacrifices, just as the aforementioned Mike Brown has again sacrificed his body and suffered a season ending injury, and just as Jerry Azumah did, sacrificing so much that he was forced to retire before this potentially legendary season could even begin. What's more, true contenders must elevate their game to a level where only excellence is tolerated. The Chicago Bears, under the wise and watchful gaze of Lovie Smith, will be doing their part to bring the Lombardi trophy back to the house of Halas. In my opinion, it is time for the fans of the Chicago Bears to do their part as well.

To help cheer my beloved Bears along to what I hope will be a Super Bowl win in Miami this January, I have decided to grow a full Superfan-style moustache, and I will not shave it off until either the Bears win it all, or when they are eliminated for good, whichever comes first. I am not doing this out of any sense of irony, although like in most things I do, I am aiming for a few laughs along the way. I truly hope that by this small gesture, I can help supply some little amount of positive energy to raise the Bears' spirit, and hopefully there are more Superfans out there that will do the same.

This is where you come in. I have created three buttons that can be posted in any blog, Myspace, email signature, or whatever. Please, even if you can't or won't grow a moustache, copy whichever of these buttons you like best, paste it wherever you want it to be seen, and link it to this post so that other Superfans will understand and join the cause. If you can grow a moustache and will grow one, by all means let those strands grow. Just as Chicago was full of moustaches in 1985, let there also be a city of moustaches in 2006, and let's ride those moustaches all the way to the Super Bowl!

Disclaimer: The NFL, the Chicago Bears, Mike Ditka, William "Refrigerator" Perry, and Kyle Orton are in no way affiliated with this effort. Any pictures, likenesses, or mojo contained herein are utilized in the spirit of fair use and good clean fun, and anyhow any attention this effort might happen to engender will likely be forgotten as soon as it occurs, if it happens to occur at all.

Soundtrack for quitting

When I was leaving Suck-Ass Online University after my last day, I heard this song in my car. It was appropriate. The band is called Wolf Parade, and the song is "I'll Believe in Anything." The song's coda perfectly encapsulates my experience in that torture chamber of corporate education:

Nobody knows you, and nobody gives a damn anyway.

Eyebrow revolt!

My eyebrows are out of control! There are little thatches of eyebrow hair that get a lot longer than the rest, and they are going in all directions. For the most part these thatches grow at the arch points on the top of my eyebrows. These points are very defined on my face, and in the past I have been able to make a dramatic statement simply by raising one eyebrow. Part of me thinks it's cool, but then sometimes they will just be all wrong. Today, after I took a shower, I noticed certain portions of them were hanging like long hair. That wasn't too cool. I've started plucking these extra long ones when they start misbehaving, but they seem to come back pretty regularly. I'm a little paranoid that I will pluck too many of them and they won't grow back, and I don't want to lose that sharp arch in my eyebrows. I'm not sure whether I should be proactive with my eyebrows, or let them grow wild, like Andy Rooney has. It would be a lot cooler if I had white hair, and if my hair grew out in a sort of crazy white-guy afro like Einstein's, or Kramer's. But that's not gonna happen. Hair is such a bother. I wish I didn't have to deal with it.

You Be My Imaginary Readers

Oh my oh my, I could not be more excited about Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. All the hype has been right up my alley. He doesn't have to even say anything funny, just seeing him makes me laugh. Even the commercial for the soundtrack is funny, especially the part when he plays portable synthesizer on "You Be My Wife":



And don't forget his press conference in front of the White House:

I'm so excited about seeing Borat: CLOAFMBGNK that I almost don't want to see it.

By the way, you can expect a lot more of these random, pointless blog posts as I have decided to take part in NaBloPoMo, which rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? The point is to write a blog post every day in the month of November. I'm inspired by my former comrade from Suck-Ass Online University, the Repressed Librarian. I am also two days late from starting, as is my wont.

Oh, I didn't tell you, my fair imaginary readers, that I no longer work at Suck-Ass Online University, did I? To be fair, I never overtly referred to it in any previous posts. The closest I came was this awfully turgid entry, which I wrote after I accepted the job. So many bad things happened there, I could have been making your hair curly on a daily basis. Somehow, I just couldn't bring myself to catalogue the daily horror of helping provide questionable education in a soul-sucking corporate hell-hole. RL did her part, so a lot of our travails are listed there. But were out of there now, which is all that matters.

Now I'm working at an actual academic library in an actual, honest-to-goodness university. In the spirit of anonymity, I will henceforth refer to my place of employment as New Deal University, in light its being the only university in the Land of Chicago named after a President (real hard to figure out which one I mean, right?) Like RL, I don't want to guarantee that all, or even a majority of my posts will be about my work at the New Deal University Library, but I will try and mention it every once in awhile, because goodness knows there aren't hardly enough library blogs out there in the world.

I am a scientist, I seek to understand me

You Are An INTJ

The Scientist You have a head for ideas - and you are good at improving systems. Logical and strategic, you prefer for everything in your life to be organized. You tend to be a bit skeptical. You're both critical of yourself and of others. Independent and stubborn, you tend to only befriend those who are a lot like you. You would make an excellent scientist, engineer, or programmer.

What's Your Personality Type?