A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

"I've heard how this ends, it turns out the secret code was the same nursery rhyme he told his daughter!"

Saw Zodiac last night. Good movie, though at 2 hours 45 minutes I'm a bit Ruffaloed out.

Anthony Edwards has a fairly large role as Inspector Toschi's partner, Bill Armstrong. This may or may not be Edwards' first big role since ER, and frankly I'm too lazy to look it up. I feel pretty safe in saying that was probably the last major part most moviegoers are familiar with.

Now then, whenever I finally get around to writing my epic masterwork about why going to the movies these days is roughly as pleasurable as having a Russian strongman massage your taint with a giant emery board, I'll have a section on audience members talking. And I will maintain at that time that the absolute worst people to see movies with are old people.

You see, young folks can generally be intimidated, and those with crying kids or talking on phones are on the outs with the majority of the population anyway, but old people...old people simply don't give a shit.

The group of four sitting behind me last night were certainly thrilled to recognize so many stars on the big screen tonight. "He's from ER," they helpfully informed me. One lady did me the favor of reminding me where I'd seen the main suspect earlier in the film. And, of course, one of the men wondered aloud (and I do mean loud) if that was the same person who played Spider-Man in the role of San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith.

I am a man of restraint, eroding though it may be, so at no point did I leap to my feet, point at the offenders like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and scream, "Yes! Anthony Edwards played Dr. Mark Green on ER. No, Jake Gyllenhaal did not play Spider-Man, that was the other guy. But here's the thing: these are all ACTORS. They play different roles in different movies because that's their JOB. It would be like me walking behind you at Luby's and yelling, 'There! That's the old bat who cut me off on Richmond the other day! Doesn't she look different with a wig?'"

But no, it wouldn't matter. They'd just sit there, chatting about that nice young man who was in Wonder Boys while enjoying the Social Security payments I'll never get to see. Meanwhile, the police would be laying into me with truncheons outside.

You can see I've thought this through.

"Slow down, you maniac! Show some respect for a coffin full of bricks representing a young man lost at sea!"

The Wife occasionally mentions I have "anger issues." My standard response is that I have absolutely no issue with my anger. In those...exceedingly rare instances when I get pissed off, I express it openly and - on occasion - loudly. I sure as hell don't have an issue with it.

Even so, I can certainly agree that it's not in my best interests to order anything from RoadRage.com. The message cards are reversible (for reading through a rearview mirror) and feature (sort of) polite and vulgar versions. This is my personal favorite:

Living in Texas, I can't recommend the use of cards saying "I'm Following You" or those simply depicting a handgun. People here have been killed for far less. And how exactly is paging through a book of flip cards while driving any less irresponsible than driving poorly in the first place?

Whatever. I could use the "Get out of the fast lane, moron" card about ten times a day.

"And every night the monkey butlers will regale us with jungle stories."

Or, you know, stab us in the throat (via MetaFilter):

In a revelation that destroys yet another cherished notion of human uniqueness, wild chimpanzees have been seen living in caves and hunting bushbabies with spears. It is the first time an animal has been seen using a tool to hunt a vertebrate.

Many chimpanzees trim twigs to use for ant-dipping and termite-fishing. But a population of savannah chimps (Pan troglodytes verus) living in the Fongoli area of south-east Senegal have been seen making spears from strong sticks that they sharpen with their teeth. The average spear length is 63 centimetres (25 inches), says Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University in Ames, US, who observed the behaviour.

And the method of procuring food with these tools is not simply extractive, as it is when harvesting insects. It is far more aggressive. They use the spears to hunt one of the cutest primates in Africa: bushbabies (Galago senegalensis).

Bushbabies are nocturnal and curl up in hollows in trees during the day. If disturbed during their slumbers - if their nest cavity is broken open, for example - they rapidly scamper away. It appears that the chimps have learnt a grisly method of slowing them down.

Was it really necessary to point out how cute the bushbabies are? Would it be more acceptable if they were killing warthogs?

Using spears, eh? Y'all know what comes next, I trust:

Mixed blessings

Our local Kroger has been sprucing up lately, apparently to make itself more palatable to all the folks who are moving into our neighborhood and tearing down 60-year old houses to put up overpriced money pits. Aside from some cosmetic changes (and a tortilleria, perhaps to ward off future H.E.B. incursions), I've noted one distinct improvement. Namely, the addition of these to the beer aisle:

The Stone Brewing Company is one of the many reasons I want to move to San Diego.

Of course, there can be no sinug without suffering, as Spalding Gray once said. So they also had to make space for this:

The Wife was raised in Western Pennsylvania, so she knows better than to go near that abomination. Where's the damn Yuengling?

"Do you know what happens to a toad when it's hit by a tornado?"

"The same thing that happens to everything else:"

The worst-case scenario for a large tornado striking Houston makes a hurricane look like high surf.

Spinning at 225 mph, the tornado touches down in southwest Houston, skirting the Astrodome and barreling through parts of River Oaks, Montrose and the Heights before exiting the city's northeast edge.

At the end of its run, the tornado will have killed as many as 23,700 people whose residences and business cannot withstand the deadly wind.

That's the conclusion of severe storm researchers using new data to model the effects of large tornadoes striking U.S. metropolitan areas such as Houston, Chicago and Dallas. The researchers say there is little data to know for sure how many people would die in urban structures in a large tornado.

River Oaks? Montrose? What kind of contrarian tornado aims at the wealthy areas of town? Do we really believe a twister would deliberately avoid the fine trailer parks just to our east? Or the low rent housing in our southern neighborhoods? Why must the beautiful people always suffer?

Such a thing has never happened in Houston. But if it did, it could become the deadliest natural disaster ever to strike Texas, perhaps even eclipsing the 8,000 dead from the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.

With a hurricane, people have advance warning, and the gridlock associated with Hurricane Rita aside, generally can get out of the way.

The warning time for tornadoes, is measured in minutes rather than hours or days. The average tornado moves at about 30 mph.

Because the odds of a killer tornado are relatively remote, Houston emergency planners are correct to focus their efforts on hurricanes rather than tornadoes, said Bill Read, meteorologist-in-chief at the Houston/Galveston office of the National Weather Service.

"It is challenging enough for those in emergency preparedness to get people to be concerned about floods and hurricanes -- both of which have a proven track record in our city for taking lives and destroying large amounts of property, without specifically going after a long-track F4 scenario," he said.

The tornado that hit New Orleans earlier this month has gotten everyone a mite squirrely. Yes, if an F4 tornado touched down in metro Houston and stayed on the ground for any length of time, it could be devastating. So could a nuclear airburst over downtown, a category 5 hurricane coming up the Ship Channel, or Martian canisters dropping onto the Galleria. Short of buying an NOAA radio (which you probably ought to have during hurricane season around here anyway), I don't know that we need to panic.

Or distract ourselves further from the Anna Nicole Smith hearings.

Bumper crop

I spend a lot of time on the road these days, so here's a related quiz. Of the following crappy bumper/rear windshield stickers I saw Monday, which is the most obnoxious and why?

1.

2.

3. The last entry was simply 8" high letters on the rear window of some guy's pick-up that spelled out "Panty Dropper," implying that the generic looking F-150 in question causes women to step out of their undergarments. I laughed so hard at the balding jagoff driving I thought he was going to follow me home and...I don't know...drop his panties or something.

"Then he'll tell us about his second terrible lapse into homo-sin-uality."

"Burton will also tell us about his most recent lapse, and the one he has planned for August, which should take him to Rio De Janeiro."

One of four ministers who oversaw three weeks of intensive counseling for the Rev. Ted Haggard said the disgraced minister emerged convinced that he is ''completely heterosexual.''

Haggard also said his sexual contact with men was limited to the former male prostitute who came forward with sexual allegations, the Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur told The Denver Post for a story in Tuesday's edition.

''He is completely heterosexual,'' Ralph said. ''That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing.''

Remind me to try this angle next time I'm in Vegas: "Honey, my sexual contact was limited to the one stripper who came back to my room from the Cheetah Club. I remain convinced I am completely faithful."

They'd never find my corpse.

As for Haggard, this is actually a pretty grim situation. The guy is so deep in denial I honestly can't see it ending anywhere but at the end of the rope. How big of a loss to humanity as a whole that'd be is…arguable.

I guess.

Haggard resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals last year after allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced. He was also forced out from the 14,000 New Life Church that he founded years ago in his basement after Jones alleged Haggard paid him for sex and sometimes used methamphetamine when they were together. Haggard, who is married, has publicly admitted to ''sexual immorality."

Haggard said in an e-mail Sunday, his first communication in three months to church members, that he and his wife, Gayle, plan to pursue master's degrees in psychology. The e-mail said the family hasn't decided where to move but that they were considering Missouri and Iowa.

Another oversight board member, the Rev. Mike Ware of Westminster, said the group recommended the move out of town and the Haggards agreed.

''This is a good place for Ted,'' Ware said. ''It's hard to heal in Colorado Springs right now. It's like an open wound. He needs to get somewhere he can get the wound healed.''

Translated: "He needs to get somewhere the hell out of Colorado Springs so we can start removing his name from all NLC-related materials and avoid those awkward instances when we bump into him at Gerland's."

Ted, I hear the Bay Area's nice. And we have some lovely areas around Montrose right here in Houston. Either would be perfect for convalescing from your so-called (self-inflicted) "wound."

Idiosaurus Rex

I don't care that there are ten minutes left. I'm going to go watch the episode of Rome we're recording on the other TV. How Lovie Smith hasn't put Griese in over the Worst Super Bowl Quarterback of all time is beyond me.

Even more infuriating is that Flanders is going to get a ring because nobody slipped a mickey in Grossman's Gatorade at halftime.