On a recent trip to New York I was driving to LaGuardia at the ungodly hour of 4:45 AM, when a fancy car zoomed past me with a license plate giving me the distinct feeling that I was just passed by Dom Imus.

Watching his luxury sedan speed off into the pre-dawn darkness, my recent thoughts on life and career suddenly crystallized.
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Per usual I was reading the Star and Tribune, and came across this article about new driving laws.

The first one I can accept: it’s now illegal to drive and text/send email from your phone. But how do you enforce that; outside of actually seeing someone typing on their phone while driving 80 down the freeway? And besides, how do you know they are texting and not dialing a number? Is making a phone call also going to be illegal?

But what concerned me more was the other set of laws aimed at teenage drivers. It would seem that teenage drivers have been severely limited in their ability to drive, any place, at any time.
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I thought I’d blogged about this before, but my quick search for the orange cat on this site didn’t turn up anything, so I’ll try to set that right this time.

Anyway. I found an old article in the Washington Post this morning, that highlighted one of my newer internet finds: Garfield Minus Garfield. And as it turns out, Jim Davis actually reads and approves of it.

Very nice to see an author who’s cool with someone taking their work and extending/expanding it. Not that he’d authorize a GMG book, no doubt, but still. And seriously, check out Garfield Minus Garfield, it’s kind of like watching a train wreck…

As a founding member of simpleprop, and a prolific writer for the first several years, it actually pains me that my writing production has tapered off so dramatically over the past year.

The reasons for this are plentiful: loss of access to SP from work, increase in workload at work, General Malaise (code for “sheer laziness”), etc. Although if you graph out my writing output next do a graph of my general stress level over the past few years, you’ll notice a stark inverse proportional correllation.

Regardless of the reasons, even when I do set time aside to write, or find a spare couple hours at work (like right now) I seem to have what is classically referred to as Writer’s Block.

A popular solution for getting around writer’s block is to actually write about writer’s block (hence this post).

I have no shortage of topics I would like to tackle: Global Climate Change, Why Society Is In The Crapper (working title), ROWE, and Gay Marriage. And maybe that’s my problem. Those are all big, heavy, mammoth topics. Perhaps I should start with some lighter fare to get things moving.

Thankfully my co-conspiritors here at SP have done a marvellous job of picking up the slack in the meantime, and I’m grateful for their continued blathering, er, writing. Just know that I miss all of you more than you miss me, and hopefully I’ll find a way around this and get back to form in the near future.

An upcoming road trip may just be the thing to spark my creative juices… ew, that just sounds gross… who comes up with these sayings anyway? Some of them are horrible.

Ok, bad joke. You’ll see.

A little preface. Weak stream. Urgent need to go. Incomplete emptying. These days it seems you can’t watch a sporting or news channel without hearing how men, basically, can’t hold it in. A fact that assuredly isn’t helped by all that beer and coffee and watermelon consumption. I find the commercials annoying, but the product I’m about to show you is nothing short of offensive.

Presenting: The UroClub (apparently TM).

I say this without hyperbole: this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. I’m almost offended more as a golfer than just as a man (though I’m offended on behalf of my gender, too). First of all, I have never played on a golf course that didn’t have at least one porta-john per nine holes, and many have two per. Second of all, you’re on a freakin’ golf course! If waiting just absolutely is not an option, you duck behind a tree, or hell behind your golf cart, and take a whiz, and no one’s gonna know. On the other hand, if you use this thing, peeing into it is the only possible thing you could be doing. You’re not going to take any kind of realistic practice swing with it, trust me. And no one puts a towel over their hands to take a practice swing. And I’m trying desperately not to visualize how most of the old duffers who really need this are going to manipulate their fly discreetly enough to do anything but add to the carnival atmosphere of using this thing.

To top it all off, when you’re done, you’ve got a fake plastic golf club filled with urine! That’s fun at parties, I’m sure. If the inventor of this product is making any money at all, it’s a crime against everyone’s better judgement.

(h/t to Deadspin, where at least Christmas Ape managed to turn a Seinfeld reference dirty.)