I’ve just finished listening, for the first time, to the new Weezer album.  First impression is a certain relief that every track is listenable.  The last album had three good-too-great songs, but I cannot bear to listen to any other track on it.  That was a first for me with any Weezer album.

Anyway, there was something about those songs that failed (for me) that I recognize in some of the songs on this album.  It’s as if Cuomo had some concepts for a change in song-writing, and on Make Believe he hadn’t worked it through properly, and now he’s managed to make it function.

There is a certain amount of bombast in the first couple of songs here, but I like it.  It reminds me a line from a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion song: “This is the part of the record where I’d like everybody to throw their hands in the air . . . and kiss my ass, ’cause your girlfriend still loves me.”  It brings the rock.

Tuesday was a chilly day, with the temperature in the forties, and an obligingly cold rain soaked the Resident Dogs on our evening walk.  By the time I took the Short-term Dog for a walk it had stopped raining but it still felt like winter to me.  Yesterday was warmer and dry so I went for our evening walk in just shirtsleeves.  We passed a woman walking her dog, and she was dressed as if it had been the evening before, with cap and gloves and sweater.  She even complained to me about the weather, and looked at me in disbelief when I said I was glad it was warmer.  Perhaps her time is out of joint, or else it takes her longer than most to notice weather shifts.

On the way home we passed a house where a man was sitting on his front steps, working on a drawing.  The door behind him was open and a stereo was blasting Portishead for the neighborhood to listen to.  Now I thought the only people who blasted Portishead were gay teenagers riding around in their cars with the stereo up very loud.  I’ll leave that as an open question because I’m quite fond of Portishead, despite not ever having been gay, and despite that when I was a teenager I had no car to drive and if I had been blasting music from any hypothetical car stereo at that time, it would probably have been Iron Maiden.

There are pros and cons to a weak dollar, but if it gives the Belgians an opportunity to elevate Budweiser from its current position as the King of Lye-flavored Urine Substitutes, then one might say that the good our attenuated currency has brought outweighs the misery it causes our intrepid tourists abroad.

That said, having grown up watching the purchasing value of my father’s salary in the currencies of our host countries swing with rate changes, I can say the debate about the dollar’s slide of recent years lacks historical perspective.  This kind of analysis should be required reading for those who claim the world’s reserve currency is in its death throes.

That doesn’t mean that remedies of our current account deficit and national debt aren’t required.  They may even be urgent in some cases, but we’re ill served by panic and Chicken Little punditry.

Mrs The Fyd’s anniversary gift to me was to present me in glowing terms to the internets.  In return, I promise to raise Mrs’ allowance.

I will point out that I only speak French to the dogs because they are Canadian.

Jim Corr is self-evidently a cretin and I should not assist in propagating any cretinous musician’s political views.  However, a certain common element to his ravings struck me as worthy of comment.  This is the use by these cretins of jargon to give their idiocies a patina of authority.  In Corr’s case he refers to a “false flag operation” like he’s some expert in spycraft and disinformation.  He’s not; he’s a thick musician who’s been impressed when he’s seen the phrase on whatever lunatic troofer websites he frequents and thinks his using it in turn will impress his audience.

Rosie O’Donnell blathered on about a collapsed building having “defied physics”.  The only way a collapsing building defies physics is if it actually falls upward.  O’Donnell thinks that she has some inside secret to engineering objections to the collapse of Building 7, but actually she’s just an idiot who’s mindlessly parrotting something she read on a website and that impressed her febrile walnut of a brain.

Tom Cruise said once that he had “studied the history of psychiatry”.  No; more likely Cruise once read a wee pamphlet prepared by one of his fellow loony cultists.  Said pamphlet was prepared by dredging Dianetics for LRH’s loony views on psychiatry, then boiling those views into a short form that could be understood by the stupider celebrity Scientologists.  His “study” of psychiatry was the equivalent of a child studying the back of a breakfast cereal box.

We are now fostering a golden retriever/cocker spaniel mix named Samantha Jo.  That is a stupid name, so I have renamed her Jo Jo Peanut Butter Pants.  She is the sweetest little dog who has some unfortunate allergies that the medical folks at the Oregon Humane Society are trying to pin down.  Meanwhile, to get her away from the stress and sadness of the shelter and to help her heal so she can be adopted, we are housing her with our dogs.  She gets along great with all creatures, it seems, even Boris the Intense Lab, except when he’s being an asshole.  When he forgets that he has to be a jerk, they play well together.

Of course, not only do we have three dogs to deal with now, but Guest Dog is coming for a short stay today.  So four dogs and five cats (all of whom are wondering why the fuck the humans keep letting more dogs in the house) and two humans will fight for their share of resources, and since the little African Dwarf Frog died the other day, Jesús the Siamese Fighting Fish is all alone again, the only resident of the house insulated by a thin wall of acrylic from all the fur, the fur.

Due to my peripatetic upbringing, there are gaps in my cultural knowledge so far as it concerns 70s & 80s American film and televison.  Mrs The Fyd is alternativly appalled and amused by this.  Sometimes this shortfall in my education gives her the fits and so she insists I make up a specific lack.  One of the most significant of these lacunae has been my near-complete lack of knowledge of the film The Goonies.  I believe we were in the States the summer it came out and I recall the Cyndi Lauper video, but that’s as close as I ever came to viewing it.  To gauge by Mrs The Fyd’s reaction to learning this, you might think the ship of our marriage had been in danger of foundering, the keel of our matrimony to be shattered on the reef of misaligned cultural referents.  I myself felt I might have benefited from avoiding this particular bit of Americana, and was happy to continue in my blithe ignorance.

Until yesterday.  I have now seen The Goonies.  I am now allowed to call myself an American.  May God have mercy on us all.

Being at work today, and only having basic cable at home anyway, I was unable to watch today’s Champion’s League final.  I followed the match via BBC live update and that was enough to nearly give me a heart attack.  Since my father was watching it, being retired and having more cable than I, I called him right afterwards to make sure he hadn’t had an aneurysm.  All is well.

I know I’ll be putting on my Manchester United jersey when I get home this evening.

Mrs The Fyd was born and raised in Hawaii.  Not only is this a foreign country, it is also a foreign clime and the torpor thus generated has led its culture to develop on a different track from that of the North American continent.  It would be vulgar to state that their version of the English language has become bastardized, and to declare it a pidgin might be considered condescending and require one to attend sensitivity training.  So let us just posit that it is a frank demotic useful for the tasks of sugar-cane cutting and coconut harvesting and hula dancing (Mrs The Fyd is a long-time student of that primitive art), and the charming idioms of its provenance that creep into Mrs’ speech rarely fail to provoke a smile on my face.  Mrs recognizes this indulgence and is grateful for my patient forbearance and my willingness to guide her toward proper speech.  However, like many of her kind, she can be stubborn and resistant to progress.  Recently she has refused the right path and insists that “pointer finger” (how rude) is an appropriate substitute for that digit we all know as the “index finger”.  She has tried to sway me by supplying example after example of that crass phrasing in popular discourse.  I contend that the rantings of hip-hop starlets and middle-school Chomskyites are not infallible precursors of rational language change, and I will refrain from their vulgate.  I have no doubt that the masses delight in such deviancy, but you won’t find that finger up the Queen’s bum.

Sunday, whilst perusing the funny pages, I reluctantly passed an eye over the Wizard of Id.  I doubt that the phrase’s conquest of that particular forum guarantees its future acceptance by learned folks.  So, Mrs, Parker and Hart are the last goddamned people I would bring to your defense and I warn you that you bring yourself into disrepute by associating with such types.

Speaking of sweltering climes, I’m sure that the temperature dropping from 96 on the weekend to 59 today cannot be good for the inner ear.  It will be good for everything else in Portland, though one might suspect that the throngs of Obama supporters will still appear to be addled by heat.

With regard to presidential candidates, I find keeping this concept in mind to be useful.

We had Guest Dog staying with us this last weekend.  Guest Dog gets lots of compliments when I take him on walks.  The other evening we passed by a couple of pre-teen girls playing in front of a house. 

1st Girl: It’s a wolf!  No, a husky!

2nd Girl: No, it’s a German shepherd!

1st: Husky!

2nd: German shepherd.  Hey mister, what kind of dog is that?

Me: He’s part husky.

1st: Ha!

2nd: He said he’s part husky and part German shepherd!