Aquafresh. Idiot Artists. Vagina Monsters. Single Mothers. More Football.

--I thought there was going to be a final and essential debate tonight, but all the stations are telecasting “the best of” snippets from the first two.

--Excited about this new Aquafresh Extreme Clean in the silver tube with the space age top?

I was.

It looks like the future.

The moment I saw it in the grocery market I believed I was looking at progress. I said to myself, “If ever a toothpaste was going to change your life, this is that toothpaste.”

I bought into it the way I’m tempted to buy into the things that Kerry has to say about the miracles he’ll accomplish if elected President.

I’ve brushed four or five times now, waiting for that ill-defined magic. As of yet, when I’m done, my mouth feels as it usually does after I brush.

I sure am naïve for a cynic.

--Thanks to Maria Alquilar for reminding us that idiots sell “art” (and what does that say about the people that buy it?). She was paid forty thousand dollars for a ceramic mural to be displayed outside Livermore, California’s new library. On it, she’d painted 175 names of influential historical artists. Ms Alquilar misspelled 11 of their names, including: Einstein, Shakespeare, Vincent Van Gogh, and Michelangelo. At least she had an articulate response to those who criticized her for this mistake and for charging the library council to fly her back and fix the misspellings. Said artist Alquilar: “The people that are into humanities and are into Blake's concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words.” Hopefully, they won’t be looking at the sculpture either. Thanks to Michael Bellesiles for putting me in touch with this story.

--The earliest myths of which we’re aware are full of vagina monsters and castration nightmares. Have men always been afraid of women? Or is that men are afraid of the way they find themselves debilitated in the face of their own lusts.


--Do single mothers really have hard time finding interested men? I find them sexy as hell. Maybe that means somewhere in my subconscious I believe that a single mother feels less attractive to the average male and so some little fiend in me recognizes that vulnerability the way a lion recognize lameness in a gazelle and singles it out. Or maybe there is no little fiend and I’m just subconsciously trying to replace my ex wife and complete a family with an instant sibling for my son.

I don’t suppose many of us really want to know the motivations behind our various hungers.

--Gator’s Zook aught to be concerned not with his own image in the sports and academic world, but with the idea that his football players are getting their asses beat by frat boys. Brett Farve is washed up. And for a non-seq, Don Knotts is a comic genius. Back to football, Rick Camat, apparently a Seahawks fan, and winner of an eleventh part of 87 million dollar lottery, was shot to death by police outside a sports bar in Seattle.