Funny Strange is Lori Culwell's blog

My Dad Throws Down, Did You Know?

Hey, did I ever mention that my dad is a total bad ass?
Maybe this will help explain my "never say die" mentality.  My dad is a retired Army Colonel who served in Korea, Vietnam (twice), was in Saudi Arabia in the eighties, and then was in Mogadishu. Somalia when it got really hectic.  I don't really mention him that much because he's retired and I want to try to protect his privacy, but now he's in the public eye again, so I think it's ok.

Given his awesome and dangerous military history,  I'm sure it won't surprise you that he's not afraid to take on the church, right?

Yeah, now that he's retired, he has free time to do things like "getting prohibition repealed in his county in Kentucky.".

Yes, I said "getting prohibition repealed.".   They're having a big vote on September 29th, and the church is saying if people vote yes, they will be SHUNNED.   

Shunned!  It's a word I've never used before in a blog post, as is prohibition.  The church is also going door to door, informing people that they're welcome to come to church and repent for even considering this vote, the whole purpose of which is to bring alcohol into the town to stimulate the town's economy, which presumably would also benefit the church.  But, aapparently, and I mean this in the most inflammatory way possible since I am clearly a Los Angeles living liberal, the church would rather their parishioners be broke and unemployed, as long as they're still righteous.  I'm not sure where the whole "JESUS' BLOOD IS WINE" and all the wine-drinking in the Bible fits into this logic, but I'm not even going to pretend I understand what goes on in the minds of die-hard Christian conservatives, ok?  I try not to get political (at all, not just on this blog), but that is just plain.  Old.  Stupid.  There is clearly a difference between being a drunkard who beats his children and being a person who just wants to go to a nice restaurant and have a glass of wine with dinner, which you can't do in that county, because a) you can't serve wine because of prohibition, and b) you really can't open and sustain a nice restaurant anywhere UNLESS YOU CAN SERVE ALCOHOL.

Anyway, I think it might entertain you in a "what the hell?" kind of way if you read the complete kerfuffle that is going on down there.   Stephan recently did some volunteer work for them, which I'm sure you can imagine he did with the glee and hand-clapping that befits a true liberal agnostic.  He is only too happy to help inflame the religious right, ok?  He likes it.  In fact, the more heated it gets, the more he's like "make sure the Bible people know it was me!!!"

Here's the website for the Grow Trigg campaign, of which my dad is the president, in case you know any liberal journalists who would like to cover the story.   I did email the one person I know who is engaged to a writer at The Daily Show-- doesn't this seem like something they should totally cover?

Anyhow, wish my dad luck, and tell everyone you know, because this time, he's out to kick some prohibition ass.

Warning: This blog post contains material that might be disturbing to you. Viewer discretion is advised.

So, on Monday I mentioned the fact that I was a slasher victim on the season finale of The Closer.

Did you watch?  Did you see me?  In fact, I was already dead when the show started, having been one of the victims of the serial killer who dressed as a ninja.  In fact, if you have it recorded, you can see my "murder sheet" right around minute 50, when the detective from El Paso hands Kyra Sedgewick the folder of slasher victims, and then she looks through it and has an emotional moment before deciding to hand the killer over to the state of Texas for execution.

Further, are you ready to see the picture? ???? Here is the close-up version of the murder photo, which I am warning you in advance, is VERY DISTURBING.  I was even commended for my convincing "death stare."  For real.  

Are you ready?  Because it's bad.

Whoa!

And, how did I end up dead on The Closer, you might ask?

Well, when your friend is the Co-Executive Producer of The Closer and also the writer of the finale (great job, Adam!), sometimes you get a call like "Hey, can you come to the set and pose for some murder photographs?". The answer to this, of course, is "Hell yes I will-- but only if I can have to gory photo for my blog.". Because I care, and I want to provide you with interesting stories and things to see, ok?

I did it for you, people!

I did have one almost-disappointing moment when I discovered they add the gore in PhotoShop and that I would not be getting fake-slashed for real, but that was quickly mitigated when I saw how messy the REAL fake gore was (that they put on the girl at the beginning of the show who got slashed by the pool) and decided that my Diane von Furstenberg dress would never have recovered.

It was a very fun day, I did get to meet the cast and got a tour of the set, and I also snagged this photo of a pile of dead plastic dummies for your amusement.

Also, Kevin Bacon directed the episode and I got to meet him as well, so if you know me, I think you can now safely say you are two degrees from Kevin Bacon, and that's always exciting as well.

Hello!

It’s International Stephan Cox Day around here (also known as Stephan’s birthday), so I am taking the day off to do important birthday things like getting him an iPhone and taking him to dinner, and making sure he eats enough cookies.  

Wish him a happy birthday in the comments, won’t you?  Or send him an email.  Or call him.  Or whatever you like.  He’s the bomb, man, and we need to let him know we’re glad he was born, some (<number redacted>) years ago today.

 On another note, Birthday Boy sent me this link last night, which is a helpful resource from the United States government as to what to do when you find mold on certain types of food.  I’m sure some of you (Rachel, Jan) who have told me that when you find mold on food you’re fine to cut it off and eat the food anyway will find this useful.  I want you to know that after I read this list, I had a dream that I ate at a restaurant, and as I was walking out I noticed that it had a “C” rating, and then even though there was nothing wrong with me (yet), I went directly to the hospital.  That’s how mental the list made me.

For me, every box on the right should say “THROW IT AWAY, AND TRY NOT TO SCREAM.”

Call me "award-winning blogger" from now on...

So, yesterday, totally out of the blue, this awesome blog gave me a 2008 award, and it was like, all I could talk about on Facebook of course.   An award, dude!  That makes me an award-winning blogger, and frankly, when you have a career that involves long periods of waiting followed by skin-peeling rejection and occasional personal affronts, it is damn nice to get an award. 

And it was a good thing I was a newly-appointed award-winning blogger too, because later in the day I got a phonecall involving a garage in my building, a backed-up sewer line, and, um, a big puddle caused by the rain in Los Angeles.  I'll just let you use your imagination to fill in the rest of the details, including the smell.  I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't just had something nice said about my work, I would have found the prospect of arguing with a plumber and a property manager about who, exactly, was responsible for pumping out the POO that had accumulated in the drain much less glamorous.  Although, I must admit, it was still funny when the property manager said "this is really a murky area" in reference to whose jurisdiction the poop was, because he was talking about the situation, not the actual poop, but I am juvenile and couldn't wait to run back and repeat it on my blog.    Maybe that is why they gave me the award.  Who knows?   Also-- we'll have to come back to this later-- because this is Los Angeles, the property manager of my building also does a little print modeling on the side. 

Oh, did I mention that later in the evening, my neighbor and I cleaned the garage floor with bleach and a hose, because even after the plumbers left, it still smelled like poo, and we found that totally unsanitary?    When you think about homeownership and being the Vice President of your Homeowner's Board and how totally glamorous that's going to be, be sure you also factor in a giant puddle of stinky water in the middle of your garage, and some rubber gloves, bleach and a hose.

I'm telling you, winning an award made it that much easier. 

Operation: Stink

So, we flew back on Friday, went directly from the plane to another holiday party, and by 10:30 pm I was so tired I could practically see through time.   Did that stop me from not only taking a seminar, doing a freelance job, going to another holiday party, AND Christmas shopping this weekend?  No, it did not.

Also, I was working on a very, VERY important side project I've been calling Operation:  Stink, or Project Stink, depending on the day.   Operation:  Stink is about some gym clothes of Stephan's that are made of polyester (apparently they "wick" away sweat, who knew), and sometime a couple of months ago, he started leaving them in the washer when he got home, where they were free to mold and fester for a few days, so that even when they'd been washed in HOT WATER with soap, they were still stinky.  I was never aware of this, as none of my clothes have this problem (and, ahem, none of my clothes are made of polyester), and in fact, I didn't even know that it was possible for clothes to still smell after they'd been washed.

Anyhow, while we were in New York, he took the aforementioned stinky gym clothes, worked out in them, then put them in a PLASTIC BAG, where they achieved a level of stink that was quite unprecedented-- one might even say toxic.  Let's put it this way-- they were so noxious that when we got home, I super-hot water washed and dried them, just so I could figure out what to do next.   After they were done in the dry cycle, I sniffed one of them and almost passed out.  That is how still-stinky they were.   At one point, we were actually considering setting fire to them, just to kill the stink demons.

But, lest we forget, I like a challenge.  Challenge is the character-builder of life, right?   Did I mention I had to write a SECOND Master's thesis after my committee didn't like my first one, and that this took a whole year?  Yeah.   I've done WAY harder things than this, and so, over the weekend, I was obsessively determined to figure out a way to save the clothes.    First, I BOILED them, like a woman in freaking medieval times with a cauldron or something.  After boiling, I put them back in the washer with tongs, super-hot washed them again, then dried them.

Guess what?   Boiling them did not kill the super-fungus that was living in these clothes.  Still stinky.  Working out in them again resurrected the smell, and so I went back to the drawing board.

Next, I went to CVS in search of color-safe bleach, which I gather they only make in the context of detergent.  Since I figured detergent alone was no match for the task, I moved on to Target, where they have a whole section of stuff for your laundry.  No color safe bleach there, but I did find some liquid OXY CLEAN, WHICH, IF YOU'LL RECALL FROM THE COMMERCIALS WHERE THEY GUY CAN'T STOP YELLING, IS SUPPOSED TO CLEAN YOUR TOUGHEST STAINS.

I would like to interject for a moment, though-- how come they don't make a product that's just for getting funky smells out of your clothes?  Stain-fighting is one thing, but I'm sure other people have their own "Project Stink" and need something specific to deal with it.  Maybe something containing Agent Orange.    They totally should make "Tide for Stink."  That would sell. 

Anyhow, back to the OxyClean.  I pre-soaked the clothes for FOUR HOURS in a sinkfull of liquid OxyClean, then super-hot washed them with Oxyclean and detergent, then super-hot washed them again in a different washer (ours is high efficiency, and I thought the lack of water might be one of the problems).

Et....voila!  Two days, four washings, and four hours of pre-soak later, I was victorious in the Battle of Stink.   Even another workout could not bring back the funk, if you know what I'm saying.   Turns out, that guy has every reason to be SHOUTING ABOUT OXYCLEAN!  IT REALLY DOES WORK!

Oh, and in case you're going to give me a hard time about the Women's Lib, clothes washing is one of the things I do in the house, because I have zero knowledge of how to cook, but I really like eating.

Who Could Forget the Songs of the Seventies?

Oh my God, I can't believe it took me so long to write this up, since the life-changingness of it really cannot be underestimated. 

The other night I was watching tv upstairs, and this completely awesome infomercial came on.  Have you seen it?   It was for "Time Life Classics Presents Classic Soft Rock."  Right away I knew it was going to be just awesome, because the very first shot was the two guys from Air Supply doing an acapella version of "Lost in Love," only now they're really old, and the twenty-something hostess has to pretend like she knows who they are and is all "Wow-- that's a great song!  Tell us what ELSE we'll get in the 10-CD set!"  And then the guys from Air Supply start reading off this list, and they start showing these old videos, and I start crying from laughter, partially because I KNOW THE WORDS TO EVERY SONG.

Oh yeah.  I'm just going to throw a few out there for you, just to get us started.  How about a little "Summer Breeze," by Seals and Croft?  Ringing any bells?  What about Christopher Cross' "Ride Like the Wind," with some outstanding backup vocals by one Michael McDonald?    Oh-- what about "Hello, It's Me" by Todd Rundgren?    I think you should go over there right now and check out the playlists on the 10 CD set, and I think you should actually play all of the clips, and maybe then you will agree with me that more awesomeness has never been aggregated into one place.  This is a genre of seventies music that we started out calling "Lido Rock," but now we've been referring to it as "Wow, this sucks-- turn it up!"  This is the music from when we first became cognizant of music,and (for better or worse), this stuff is what was on the radio.

Anyway, I run downstairs and I'm all "I'm totally buying this box set!," to which Stephan objected because a) I buy too much stuff from infomercials, and he made the valid point that I still haven't cooked anything in my Grill XPress, and b) we already have alot of these songs, and probably just needed to sit down and make a playlist out of them, and figure out which ones were worth buying.  He also made the totally valid point that "fully one third of the songs on that box set make me ashamed to be alive." 

To illustrate one of these songs, please let me turn your attention to the musical stylings of one Rupert Holmes:

Oh yeah, that's the song "Him," which you could probably have heard in your mom's Chevelle on the way home from school in 1979.  Rupert Holmes is also the genius behind the "Pina Colada Song" where the two people take out the classified ads, and find out that they answered each other's ads, and they laugh about it and we all have to go home and put our heads in the oven.  So, of course-- Stephan was right-- 1/3 of the songs were songs like this one, and "Lonesome Loser" by the Little River Band, which I think I first heard on 8-track my dad's Corvette when he came to pick me up for my weekend custody visitation.  So, that's how old I am, and I just don't care who knows it.  Becuase now?  We have cut out the truly awful, and added some better songs that Time Life overlooked (like, where is Stevie Wonder in this list?), and have created the most awesome soft rock playlist in the world, and it is all we are listening to.

It includes:
"Daniel" by Elton John (though I really prefer "Levon," if I"m being honest)
"Minute by Minute," by the Doobie Brothers
"Blinded by the Light," by Manfried Mann's Earth Band
"Sister Golden Hair," by America
"Year of the Cat," by Al Stewart

See, these are actual cool songs, some of which I forgot about.  Some of them just remind me of my childhood, but who cares?  Mostly they stand the test of time.

It does not include:

"Key Largo," by Bertie Higgins
"Baby I'm -A-Want You," by Bread
"Longer", by Dan Fogelberg, who we have already discussed wears women's underpants and needs to be held.
"Baby Come Back," by Player.  Just--oh my god.
"Sad Eyes," by Robert John.  Again, wow.  This one goes beyond funny to just plain bad.
Oh, and "Wildfire?"  by Michel Martin Murphey?  About the pony that busted down his stall?  Definitely in the "makes me want to kill myself" category, so it's not on the list, though it IS fun to torture people with.  "She'll keep riding WIIIIIILLDDDFIIRRREEEEE!!!"

Anyhow, I think you should use these spectacular playlists to make your own 1970's flashback list.  We made ours for about $40 in iTunes, and have been rocking out ever since.   

I have made a list of all the songs we cut, and will be returning to them periodically.  Because, I'm sorry, "I'm Not in Love," by 10cc, is just too funny to let pass by without a mention.  So earnest!  So many beards and so much body odor!  The talking woman in the middle!  Oh.  My.  God!

Please, feel free to chime in with your seventies favorites.  We are open to add to the list, but probably not with REO Speedwagon.

Blindfolded Rubik's Cube Guy Blows My Mind with Mad Skills

Here is some video I took in a bar in San Francisco last weekend (a different bar, in case you're keeping score) of a guy solving a Rubik's Cube while blindfolded.  He and his friend were Rubik's Cube RACING, and without the blindfold, apparently this guy can solve it in 90 seconds.  SECONDS!  With the blindfold, he averages about four minutes.    I guess the secret to this is that all the colors have different markings, and if you practice alot, you can memorize how they feel.   I'm not even going to try to guess how long that took.

I know what you're thinking-- if this guy has the time to develop this skill, he must never get laid.  In fact, that is what we thought.  But, apparently the whole "Blindfolded Rubik's Cube Solver Guy" thing is working for him, because his friend said he was doing just fine in that department. 

You probably can't hear it over the regular bar noise, but right in back of me was a Scottish woman who kept going "Ack, that is SHITE-- he needs to get a REAL HOBBY!" As if blindfolded Rubik's Cube solving was something that she knew how to do, and she was so over it. 

PhoTrade Photo of the Day!!!

I think today is the day I'm going to finish my NaNoWriMo novel (one day early, because I'm an overachiever like that), so I'm putting up another photo.  Incidentally, I just started using PhoTrade, which is this awesome photo sharing site where you actually have the possibility of getting paid for your photos (as well as earning ad revenue for people looking at them.  More on the awesomeness of this idea, and how cool it is that they not only invited me in, but made this photo their "PhoTrade Photo of the Day," when I come up for air.  For now, check it out at:  http://photrade.wordpress.com/, or check out the photos we have up so far at:  http://www.photrade.com/lorinyc