When In Doubt, Review Something

(Proper credit to some Tony Pierce dude.) The Dog (****) Today, the dog stepped on my foot as she was going up the stairs. As far as foot-stomping goes, I'm going to rate this one pretty high. It hurt initially, but not bad enough to make me think she'd broken anything, but here it is lunch and it's still tender, so I'd say it got stomped pretty good. If you're looking for a dog to step on your foot, I highly recommend this one. Breakfast (*) Breakfast today kind of sucked. We were out of orange juice so I tried to make up for the lack of vitamin C by eating a shitload of Apple Jacks. It just didn't give me the same feeling of "complete" that my breakfasts normally give me. The Weather (*****) Could it be any more beautiful? If you are in Nashville and you are not outside right now, you are a loser. For the record, I am not outside. Lunch (***) For lunch I had a turkey and cheese sandwich and some pretzels and some cookies. Almost always, I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, baby carrots, and an apple, and maybe some cookies if we have them laying around the house. This lunch was okay. If you have to have brown bread on your sandwich, it's good to have turkey to put on it. But I was disappointed to have to deviate from my usual. Me (**) I'm off my game. Usually, I can count on me to be at least amusing, but not so today. Maybe I was thrown off by breakfast or my aching foot, but still, usually by lunch I can rebound. However, today I have already hidden in the bathroom for 20 minutes and shut my door in order to give the impression that I'm doing something IMPORTANT, when really I'm just eating my crappy lunch. Plus, I have to pay bills and do laundry. So, obviously, today is not a good day to hang out with me, the moody, sullen person with chores to do. My Senator (*) Well, in a compromise with no clear winners, he was the clearest loser. I'm curious to see if the Republicans really will run him. He's got some strikes against him. There's the kitten killing thing, the making medical diagnoses by examining edited video tape, and the assertion, despite being a medical doctor, that there is a real danger of getting AIDS from sweat or tears. But I almost think that his more obvious political pandering won't count against him. Everyone who isn't going to vote for him already isn't going to vote for him and folks who are either believe his bullshit or have convinced themselves that it's just what politicians have to say to get elected. What's going to count against him is the way he looks. Take a gander at these two photos and see what I mean. 1. The way he clenches his face when he smiles makes it seem as if he doesn't genuinely know how to smile. 2. He seems to always be looking just to the camera man's left, as if he's receiving smiling advice from someone standing over there. 3. In a lot of the pictures on his site, even when he's smiling, his eyes look scared. I don't know how to fix that, but it's pretty terrible that the most genuine emotion on his face at any given time seems to be a hint of fear in his eyes. But I think he has an even more insurmountable problem, one that is drawn only more sharply into focus by the variety of photos on his website. 4. He's got to have the most amazingly un-eye-catching face of anyone I've ever seen. He's fine looking. I'm not trying to say that he's ugly or plain, because that's not the problem. It's just that his face is so... hmm, I don't know... bland, maybe that I keep finding myself drawn to his ties (and, for the record, he's got some very beautiful ties). If you look at all the folks he's got his photo with, you can see what I'm getting at. All of them have something (Musevini looks stern and proper; Kwasniewski looks intense; Jiabao has an open expression; al-Thani looks genuinely amused; Basescu's got a distinctive nose and some real character to his face; etc.) that makes you linger on their faces and recognize them as fellow human beings. But Frist's face is so indistinct that my eyes slide right over it down to his ties. There's nothing about his face that keeps you looking at it. Maybe he needs a scar or an eye-patch.