HOLY SHIT!!!! Today is the 95th anniversary of the birth of polka king Frankie Yankovic!

Wow, Sally Shitty Struthers is 6fucking2 today!!!

Whoaaaaa daddy, on this day in 1057 the pope kicked it old school!

Well fuck me silly, on this day in 1586 the first potato arrived in Britain after a long journey from South Africa.

On this day in 1915, U.S forces invaded Haiti and didn’t leave until 1924! And to think, Pat Robertson said that Haitians prayed to Satan to get the French to leave, I wonder who they prayed to for the U.S. to leave?

On this day in 1933 Spain recognized the U.S.S.R. Hmmmm………….you would think that being the largest fucking country in the world would be enough to get noticed.

Holy mule fucking shit, on July 28, 388 at Battle at Aquileja: Emperor Theodosius beats Emperor Magnus Maximis. Jeez remember the days when Magnus Maximis never lost?

In 1906 on this day, the Yankees turned a triple play and beat the Indians 6-4!

On this day in 1742 Prussia & Austria sign peace treaty, but it only lasted for one turn and the whole time Prussia was building up armies and hoping the roll of the dice went their way…………..oh wait, that was the game Risk.

In 1540 on July 28, English King Henry VIII marries Catharine Howard, his 5th wife. He beheaded her before they even made it out of the church. He still had sex with corpse though and beheaded her maid of honor when the Catharine Corpse couldn’t get pregnant.

On this day in 2061 31st recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet will occur, unless the comment stops to take a piss somewhere around Mars.

July 28, 2005 The Provisional Irish Republican Army call an end to their thirty year long armed campaign in Northern Ireland.. What a shame. If they had just held out for another two months they would have won a chance to be on American Idol.

On July 28, 1977………………..nothing happened.

You know, I’ve come to realize that I’ve got REALLY sexy elbows. I’ve got elbows that won’t quit. People are always saying to me “Holy shitsquares, Mike, you have got some damn sexy elbows” or “Well fuck me senseless Mike, you have got a weenus that won’t quit!” See, the weenus is the skin on the elbows but I’m sure many of you already knew that.

I think though this can be the start of a whole new career for me: elbow model! My elbows can be filmed and photographed in all sorts of dubious positions, maybe wearing some new fenagled elbow jewelery. Or maybe I can be in elbow porn in which my elbows finger people. Except it wouldn’t be fingering but instead elbowing. Or maybe my elbows can be stunt elbows in the latest lame ass Hollywood crapfest starting Nicolas Cage.

I guess the sky really is the limit when you have elbows this hot. Oh please, don’t hate me because I have amazingly beautiful elbows. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go put in my two weeks notice at my job.

I had a busy ass weekend filled with all sorts of baby mama drama. Wait. I just remembered I don’t have a baby mama. Actually, turns out, I don’t even have a baby or a mama. Well fuck me. Anywho, Friday night I went to the casino with my boys. Towards the end of the night, we decided to play a game called Mississippi Stud, which I played before when I was in Tunica. I’d take the time to explain the game to you, but its kinda complicated. Plus, in the time its taken me to write this post thus far, I had lost $70 on two hands. Yeah, fuck that evil demon game. That being said, I would love to invent some sort of table game to be played at casinos. Just imagine the money I would stand to lose out on to the casino because I don’t believe in copyright laws.

Saturday night it was agreed that I would go out with the guy I have been seeing who happens to live 70 minutes away in Indiana. That’s right people, I’ve gone through all of the guys in Illinois and now I have to expand out to surrounding states. Well, when I got to his house he explained to me that he was not ready to seriously date anybody. Well that’s fine and dandy and all, but I just drove over an hour and am fucking starving, can we still get something eat? So we did. We also still watched the movie I rented, “Youth In Revolt.” Does anybody else find it odd that even after we kind of broke up we still had dinner and watched a movie? Well now that I know the state of Indiana isn’t working out, I might have to take my quest outside the Midwest all together. Maybe I can try Arizona…………….but I would have to make them show me their papers first.

Sunday was a day I had been anticipating for a very long time. No, it was not because we went to lunch for my sister’s birthday (although I should clarify, it was not lunch for me, but merely brunch as I had breakfast just two hours prior). And no, it wasn’t because I went to a bbq for dinner. It was because my longtime baseball hero, Andre Dawson, finally got inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. I’ll spare you the boredom of the details, but needless to say I was excited and thrilled.

See, I told you I had a busy ass weekend.

I’m part of some gay rights group that lobbies for gay rights. I think its the Human Rights Watch. You may or may not have heard of them. Come to think of it, they do other stuff besides gay rights. Actually, I think they do tons of shit now that I think about it. But, gay rights is a big part of what they do. And when I say I’m part of the group, well that makes me sound all sorts of important like I protest with them or go door to door or make phone calls or beat the shit outta people for them. But, that is not true at all. Well, except for the beating the shit outta people, I do that in the name of the Human Rights Campaign all the time. Did I say Human Rights Campaign? Well shit, I did, it turns out that is their actual name, not the Human Rights Watch. You would think I would make sure I’m getting their name correct before posting about them. Well its too late now, its not like I’m going to actually go back and delete what I wrote.

But I digress. Mainly what I do is donate money to them and when they send emails to me asking to sign petitions to send onto lawmakers. Well, back in May when the House of Representatives voted to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” they had a link so that I could thank my Congresswoman, Republican Judy Biggert for voting to repeal the law.

Today, I got in the mail a letter from her thanking me for my support for the repeal and how she agreed that gays should be allowed to serve freely. I was furious! I specifically DEMANDED that any correspondence she send to me be written in blood and blood only and she had the audacity to send it in ink!

As for the letter, well I’m sure it was just a typical form letter response that went out to everybody who asked her to support the repeal. That being said, its always nice to get a response from a lawmaker and to just know that they are acknowledging you is a cool thing.

As for Rep Biggert, she deserves tons of kudos for voting to repeal the law. She is a Republican and although I don’t know the numbers, I’m quite certain that she was in the strong minority of people in her party who voted for the repeal. Oh, I’m sure I can find the numbers somewhere but honestly I’m too lazy to do the work. Wait, now that I think about it, I can just look at the letter she sent to get a general idea. The repeal passed the house with a final vote of 229-186, no doubt many of those against it were Republicans. And since there roughly 219 Democrats in the House, that would mean she was among about 10 or so Republicans who voted to repeal the law.

Although I’m not positive of your views, I’m pretty sure that the majority of people who will be reading this are for repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and if so, now is the time to contact your senators to encourage them to vote to repeal the law. If you are like me, you might think that just because they are Republican they are automatically going to be against the repeal, but as we learned with Rep Biggert, that i not always the case. You have a chance to help be a difference maker here and although politicians don’t always listen to a few of their constituents, if enough people contact them about an issue, it can have an effect.

I’ve been here on Xanga now for damn close to six years, which is an eternity on Xanga, and  even more rare is that I update on a fairly regular basis. What I don’t understand though is my lack of comments. Outside of one or two or maybe three people who comment on a fairly regular basis, I don’t get many, if any comments. I sometimes go days without comments. I’ve got plenty of subscriptions and friends and I comment on people’s posts on a regular basis, yet I fail in the comment department. What irks me is that I take the time to read every post of some people and they NEVER post a comment on mine. And what is even more weird is that some people will go weeks or even a month without posting but all of a sudden post something and manage to get more comments on that one post than I do in an entire week. I don’t understand that at all.

It’s not to say I write to get the comments or for people to read it because generally I don’t. So why did I even start posting on Xanga? Well why do I do anything…………….to get laid of course! There are actually several reasons why I started it, one of them was to, for lack of a better term, showcase my personality to people. I would go on dating sites and while I was too cheap to pay for the sites, I would include a link to my Xanga so that they could see a picture of me and learn more about me. I also started posting as a way to release some of this creativity in attempting to make people laugh. I also write as much for myself as for anybody else. Actually, when I go back and read this whole paragraph, all my reasons for blogging are for selfish reasons! Yay me! But I do truly like writing and it is also cool to go back and read stuff I wrote years ago or even months ago. And at the end of the year I always can go back and read about my year, which is kind of cool. I’ve always said that I would continue to post even if I was the only one who reads the damn thing.

But, it still doesn’t mean that it isn’t a little disheartening from time to time to not see any comments even after I know I’ve written something that was really good. That is not to say that everything I write is good, because certainly, that is by far not the case. There are some posts that I know are kind of lame or bad so I’m not surprised when I don’t get a comment. And I usually try to keep my posts kind of short because I know that most people, myself included, don’t want to read a long, endless post. But it baffles me that I can leave comment after comment on other people’s sites and I update on a regular basis only to have nobody (or nearly nobody) read it.

Friday night I had another date with Nathan. For the first time, it was determined that I would go out by him instead of him coming out by me. See, we live just over an hour apart from each other so its tough to find time to get together. He said he knew of a good Japanese restaurant that was not far from him and since I’ve never had Japanese, I thought it would be cool to finally try some. We went to a place called House of Kobe. After dinner we went for desert to a place called House of Shaq. It was made entirely out of bricks! Heeeeey-ohhhhhh…………..what, not funny? Why does nobody laugh at that damn joke? Okay, so I know its kind of a lame joke, but it’s at least a little funny, worthy of a slight chuckle.

Back to dinner though. The House of Kobe is one of those places where they seat you at a table with other patrons of the establishment and they cook the meal right in front of you. I always like those places, they are kind of fun. Plus, this was a good chance to showcase my goofball personality for Nathan with other people. I’d like to think he was at least a little amused, but on the other hand, I think he might have been mildly annoyed. The meal though was pretty damn good and they give you so much fucking food that its virtually impossible to finish. I’d also like to think that it was Kobe beef that we were eating, but when I asked the waitress she acted like she had never heard of Kobe beef.

Yesterday a I went to a house warming party at a friend’s house. It was hot as hell out and of course very humid but it still made for a good time. I probably shouldn’t write about this, but I’m going to anyway because its too damn funny to skip. There was a younger guy there with his wife and we got into a debate about if there was a White Castle fast food place here in town. Honestly it wasn’t much of a debate. Seven of us said there was while the younger guy insisted that there wasn’t. Hell, we even went as far as show him on our phones the address and location of the White Castle but he still refused to believe it to be true. So I called the place and put it on speaker and asked the employee where they were located and he still refused to believe, saying something along the lines of how stupid White Castle employees are. I admitted that some of them are not all that bright but at the very least, they know where their place of employment is based on the very fact that they were working there. But he refused to budge and the more he sat there the more pissed off he became. It was great! And everybody kept making fun of him because he was so steadfast in insisting that he was right in spite of the fact that he had been overwhelmingly proven wrong. Jeez, if I ever become that stubborn please whack me upside the head.

I’m kinda hungover today. No more post.

I was watching MSNBC on my lunch at work yesterday and they were talking about President Obama was doing some things for AIDS. For some reason, they had a picture of him with an AIDS ribbon next to him and the words BATTLING AIDS underneath him Now I can’t even begin to tell you the many ways this was just fucking stupid, but first and foremost the obvious: he doesn’t have AIDS. If some dumbass had been walking past the screen while it was on but couldn’t hear the sound, he or she might actually think he has AIDS. Of course, said person would have to be a pretty big fucking dumbass to think the President has AIDS. But still, it goes to show you just how fucking stupid MSNBC is. It makes me wonder who the fuck they have proof reading the stuff before it goes on the air and how do I get that job, because if I could get away with putting something like that on the t.v. then there are no limits to the shit I could put on screen.

Although this is probably a bit early, my fantasy football league did the draw for drafts order yesterday. I’m co-owner of a team with a guy I work with, Ken and wouldn’t you know it, we wound up getting the first pick in the draft! Now you are probably wondering who we are going to take. Actually, scratch that I’m sure you don’t give a shit who we are going to pick. But, we are going to have a………..

Wait, let me start over.

Mike and Ken are going to have a one hour special on ESPN titled The Pick on Thursday, August 26th the night before the draft. Mike and Ken will be interviewed by somebody of their own choosing who will toss softballs to them while dancing around the question everybody wants to know: who Mike and Ken will choose with the first pick in the draft!

I’ve got a new picture I’m thinking of changing my profile pic to and this is where you come in. Its tough to find a really good picture of me since I’m so damn hideous and offensive looking, but please let me know which one of these pics are less hideous and offensive. This is important because you all are the ones who have to look at that goofy lookin’ mug when you visit or when I leave a comment. So, will be it picture number 1

This of course is the current pic…………..look away, I’m hideous!

Or will it be picture number 2:

Ewwww……….my apologies in advance for the offensive sight of picture 2.

So you tell me?

Like the rest of America, I don’t give a shit about football or as Americans call it, soccer. I couldn’t wait for the World Cup to end so that ESPN could stop force feeding us coverage. I did, however, read an interesting little tidbit in Sports Illustrated over the weekend that cracked me up. Colombian authorities seized a 24 pound replica of the World Cup trophy. Now I’m sure you are wondering why they would seize a replica of the World Cup. Or perhaps you don’t give a shit. But, check this shit out. The replica was painted gold with green stripes on the base and was mixed with, you guessed it, acetone or gasoline to make it moldable. No, that wasn’t enough of a reason for it to be seized. The main component of the replica was, are you ready for this? Cocaine! Apparently the Colombians have such an excess of cocaine that they can use 24 pounds of it to make a replica of the World Cup trophy. And whoever made it is such a big soccer fan and has so much fucking money that they can waste it on a fucking replica trophy. What next, a replica of the World Series trophy made entirely out of steroids? Americans have long been criticized for putting too much emphasis on sports, but these soccer fans are crazy and go way overboard with their creepy soccer obsession. Riots after games? Killing players because they miss a goal? Making a replica soccer trophy out of your country’s biggest export? Yeah, they are a lot worse than us.

Which brings me to He Who Should Not Be Named, or HWSNBN for short. HWSNBN is a egotistical, narcissistic, self centered, self involved athlete who needed an hour long special to yammer on about how great he was just to tell the world that he will be playing in Miami for the next 6 years. I guess I should do it totally like him and say that HWSNBN told the world that HWSNBN would be taking HWSNBN’S talents to South Beach next year. Now being a big Chicago Bulls fan, I was a little disappointed, but certainly not nearly as upset as the Cleveland Cavaliers owner or the rest of the state of Ohio. I’ve been saying for years that HWSNBN is………….wait, I should do it in the same manner as HWSNBN. I’ve been quoted as saying that HWSNBN is extremely self centered and self involved but even he managed to prove that he is a lot more narcissistic than anybody thought possible.

A couple of years ago I went through a phase where I would occasionally make fun of Pat Robertson because of the unintentionally funny shit he is always saying. And while we can never run out of shit that Robertson has said, even people on the left are insane as well. Case in point, Robertson’s black, liberal counterpart Jesse Jackson (or Black Robertson as I’m gonna start calling him) is making a case to say shit that is just as crazy as Robertson. After the Cavs owner eviscerated HWSNBN in open letter to fans, Jackson had this to say:

Friday night I had another date with this guy I have been seeing. We wound up going to a nice Italian restaurant at the Bolingbrook Promenade which is a large outdoor mall in the area. So anywho I got a pasta dish and he got a seafood salad, which sounded all sorts of good. Maybe I”m not used to fancy restaurants, but when his salad came out we both sat there staring at it in disbelief. This was the smallest salad I’ve even seen. In fact, it wasn’t even as big as my salad that came with my meal. It was a $10 salad which depending on who you ask, may or may not be a lot of money to pay for a salad. Either way, it was crazy how small this damn thing was.

Yesterday was the annual beanbag tournament that my brother’s in laws host every year. I’d take the time to explain beanbags to you, but honestly, I just don’t want to. Partners are chosen randomly by drawing a card. My partner wound up being another gay guy who is very good friends with my brother. Out of 18 teams, I’m pretty sure we were the only gay team there. Not that it mattered. Anywho, sometimes I can be very good at beanbags. Other times, I’m really bad. And sometimes, I’m somewhere in between. The same went for my partner. Yesterday, we were somewhere in between, which is not good enough to win. It was a double elimination tournament which means that you would play a match of best 2 of 3 and if you lost, you would not be eliminated until you lost another 2 out of 3 to a different team. Well, first up we played my best friend and my brother’s mother in law. We won the first game but then got out asses totally kicked the next 2 games. That’s okay, we were still alive. About 45 minutes later, we played another match, this time against a neighbor guy who won the tournament the first year and my sister in law. We won the first game and lost the second game. It came down to a third and final game. I should clarify that we play up to 21. Well, we were up 19-13 and it was looking like my team would advance for the first time since the first year of the tournament 3 years ago. Well, my sister in law managed to get 6 points on her throw and the game was tied. Before I threw against the neighbor guy, I told him that one of us could very well end things right here. Of his 4 bags, 2 had made it in the hole, while one of mine had made it in and I had one last bag left to throw. I had to get it in the hole to avoid us losing, if I didn’t get it in the hole then we would be done. I threw it and it headed toward the whole before sliding just to the left of the hole. With that, we were done. How heartbreaking. What’s worse is that now I’ve got to wait a whole year before I can get a chance to redeem myself.

Eventually, my brother Mark and another friend of ours wound up winning the tournament. We played another tournament afterward for less money and this time I got paired up with my other brother, John, but had the same result, we were promptly eliminated.

As of right now I have sworn off playing in next year’s tournament. But, that might change, I also think I’m going to buy a set of boxes and practice like hell and get really good and win the damn thing.

I don’t know if any of you have HBO, but there is a very interesting and scary documentary that has been airing this past month called Gasland. I could give you a half ass description of the movie, but I feel this little blurb I stole from the movie’s website does it better:

“The largest domestic natural gas drilling boom in history has swept across the United States. The Halliburton-developed drilling technology of “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing has unlocked a “Saudia Arabia of natural gas” just beneath us. But is fracking safe? When filmmaker Josh Fox is asked to lease his land for drilling, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey uncovering a trail of secrets, lies and contamination. A recently drilled nearby Pennsylvania town reports that residents are able to light their drinking water on fire. This is just one of the many absurd and astonishing revelations of a new country called GASLAND. Part verite travelogue, part expose, part mystery, part bluegrass banjo meltdown, part showdown.”

GASLAND will be broadcast on HBO through 2012.

http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/

This fracking is something that is currently being done in I believe something like 39 states, including my own, Illinois, although it is further down south from where I live. Because of the way they are getting the natural gas, it is contaminating the water supply in these areas. And you don’t need a PHD to know that drinking water contaminated with natural gas is not good for a person.

Like many documentaries I’m sure this one is slanted and biased and probably takes quite a few liberties with the truth. Whenever I watch a documentary I watch with the thought that some of it might not be true. 10 years ago though, I worked for a company that did government research on how a military base in North Carolina was contaminated from 1968-1986 with chemicals used in dry cleaning. Part of my job was to find the Marines that lived on this base at this time and interview them over the phone about their children born on the base at that time to find out if they had any birth defects or childhood cancers as a result. As you might expect, I came across a lot of sad stories and emotional parents, as in many cases, they did know about the contamination until we contacted them. I worked on this study for about a year and ever since then I’ve drank bottled water.

Watching the documentary reminded me a lot of that other contamination in NC. I was angered and disappointed that this sort of thing is allowed to happen in the United States; we seem to think that this is something that only happens in third world countries. I’d like to think that the American government would do something to stop this from continuing since its being made public, but I know better; the reality is that these companies own way too many politicians in D.C. to enact any viable change.