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Don’t want them aliens more educated than we are

Way to go, State Board of Community Colleges (along with both NC gubernatorial candidates). Let’s make sure we do all we can to guarantee there will be a persistent, dependent underclass in North Carolina for years to come.

Denying undocumented immigrants a means of getting an education that might help them support themselves is probably not the most efficient way to avoid having your tax dollars support them. Keep in mind that these people were paying out of state tuition rates which covered more than the cost of their education, so they weren’t exactly suckling at the public teat to begin with. However, without access to job training, it’s pretty much a given that they (or their children) will eventually be doing so.

For worse. Much worse.

With Grandpa predictably having another heart attack just in time for Elizabeth’s wedding day, Lyn Johnnston has changed her mind about the future of For Better of for Worse (a/k/a FOOB) for the 413th time. Apparently the mix of old to new content will now be 50-50, and she will be returning to her old drawing style to match the old strips. Apparently she wants to make Ellie’s nose smaller, and “fix” some of the mistakes she made over the years.

That said, I’d like to announce that I will be re-launching Planet SOMA later this year. In the process, I will be increasing the size of my penis and correcting mistakes and mishaps like this one, this one, and this one.

Those of you ho have been following this FOOB saga over the past few years will probably agree with me when I say that I fully excpect Lyn Johnston’s next announcement to be that she will be re-launching her strip again in October using discarded artwork from Gasoline Alley and Snuffy Smith and recycled storylines from The Katzenjammer Kids.

Robert Plant’s crotch

The Song Remains the Same is on VH1 Classic tonight. Again. Is it there for all us old guys who were still just a little too young to have seen it at the midnight movies as teenagers, or are they trying to force yet another generation to be mesmerized by Robert Plant’s crotch? Robert Plant is kind of gross, and his crotch is not someplace I’d ever really want to be, but the damned thing is almost the primary theme of the whole movie. It’s really quite distracting.

My concentration is shot tonight. I need to make up for lost sleep. I also need to spend tomorrow making up for lost time not spent on work this week. We’ll see how that works out.

One final thought: did the world really need cinnamon-flavored margarine?

Cool stuff

This has been a very good week for getting cool stuff in the mail from people I’ve never met. I received a Finast Supermarkets promotional yardstick (yes, such a thing exists) and about 400 vintage photos from two different Groceteria fans, plus two CDs of last Friday night’s show from someone who was friends with someone else who happened to record it. And none of it was birthday-related.

Another quick road trip this week (I haven’t been home a lot lately), not to mention my birthday festivities will be covered at some later date. Screw this internet stuff. I’m going to bed.

Let’s Active and Pylon

I saw Gravel Truck (which Mitch Easter describes as his “new Let’s Active cover band” and Pylon (who are occasionally calling themsleves “The Pylon Reenactment Society”) tonight.

I first saw Let’s Active twenty-five years ago last month, about two miles north of where tonight’s show was. I met both Mitch Easter and my future San Francisco roommate at that show. REM was there too, but I didn’t meet them. My first brush with Pylon goes back even farther, to my first college road trip in 1982, when I saw them open for Talking Heads at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta.

I think most of the people I used to know around these parts either don’t live here anymore or don’t go out much. That’s not surprising; this is the first time I’ve gone to a show (or a bar, for that matter) since I moved back three years ago. I did, however, run into my faculty advisor from my undergraduate days at UNCG, which was sort of odd. I’d forgotten that he’d been in grad school in Athens in the early 1980s; he was all excited about seeing Pylon again. And we were both excited (relieved?) that there were people there who were even older than we were.

It was a great show, and when I left, it was cooler outside than it had been in a month, and there was a breeze, and I was walking around downtown Winston-Salem, and it was really nice, and I was thinking I really need to vary my pattern and do something other than the same old things once in a while. Not bars or shows specfically (I just can’t stay up that late and, well, I don’t drink), but just any sort of thing that I don’t ususally do. A change of routine is a good thing, especially for someone like me, who’s in danger of becoming exceedingly boring.