Swag Update

It's been a banner week for swag here at Monkey Central. Suzy sent me a swag package that I've already shown you in another post and then the other day I got this super cool postcard from Delia Guzman:
That's Natalie Wood walking that dog so joyfully. How did Delia know I had a major crush on Ms. Wood when I was younger?

And today the hits keep on coming. I got this book
from Lisa (The blogger fromerly known as D Cup)! It's a super cool vintage pop up book. It's not culturally sensitive but it's keen nonetheless. Thank you ladies for all the swag, you are too kind!

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Now, for those of you who have not sent me any swag, what the hell are you waiting on?

Stars in my eyes

My blog bud from across the pond PJ saw fit to bestow another award on me. She named me one of her Blog Stars. How sweet is she? She seems to like my naughty jokes, my insane posts, and my blog as a whole, I wonder how she feels about the anus as a hole though. I've been a long time fan of hers and I could not be more grateful for this honor, it means alot to me especially since it comes from someone who I like so much. PJ, if you ever get to my part of TN, then you better come over for supper so I can cook for you.

The nice part of these blog awards is I get to now pass this award on to five others who I feel are my blog stars. Ready? Ok then, here we go:

1) Beth at Cup of Coffey gets one for her concert reviews, for her Friday mix tapes, and for her comments. No one rocks it like Beth rocks it.

2) Katie "Jewgirl" Schwartz gets one for being the funniest, Jewiest, craziest gal on the planet. Her menses reports crack me up and if I ever need a laugh I just click on her vagina poll from this past summer, I howl every time I read it.

3) Angry Ballernia gets one for being such an angry poignant smart funny highly entertaining twentysomething gal. On her off days she's better than most of us but don't tell her I said that or it may go to her head.

4) My little blog sister Fran of FranIAm gets one for being such a blog force for good. In a few short months Fran has taken the blog world by storm by being nice, compassionate, and so darn good that it makes me feel bad that I'm such an evil cranky bastard monkey sometimes. She's inspired an army of followers and readers and I hope she'll lead them well.

5) If Fran is my little blog sister then D Cup is my female blog alter ego, so she gets my final Blog Star award for writing such great political posts, for sharing such funny and touching stories about her family, and for just being a stand up chick in a world gone terribly wrong. I confess to checking her blog several times daily hoping that she'll post new content, what can I say, I go for the boobs but I stay for the commentary. You had me a double D, madam, you had me at double D.

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I hope these women will pass this along to others and not let it sit and get all moldy. All six of you ladies rock my blog world and I'm ever so glad that you do what you do.

Happy Birthday D Cup!

I think it may be D Cup's birthday today. These five busty gals and I are going over to wish her a happy one. Maybe you will too when you get the time! I may go into a diabetic coma what with eating all the cake for Barb's birthday and now D Cup and then mine's coming up in 9 days. October born people rule!

You better watch your back D Cup

F Cup is gaining on you.

You want scary?

This is feckin' scary. Many thanks to Madam D Cup for her post about it. She said it better than I will so go read her post here. As an added bonus she used that great tinfoil underwear picture again!

I am pregnant with gratitude

Becca at No Smoking in the Skull Cave awarded me one of these

I am incredibly honored since she is one of the reasons why I began blogging in the first place. To recieve an award from someone as truly creative as she is leaves me almost speechless. If you want to see creative go to her place and look at her sketches and if she'll let you, dig through her archives and look at all her great writing and photos. Her series on under appreciated movies is astounding as is her Colin Farrell's House Party. Becca is the dream friend I always wanted and now I have, so what if we've never actually met and that we live hundreds of miles apart. I love everything she writes, photographs, sketches, and posts and I love it that she thinks highly of me and my blog o' terror.

From the bottom of my heart Becca I say, "Thank you!"

Now the other thing about getting this award is I get to turn around and give it to five bloggers. And to you five bloggers who are about to get this award from me, I don't care if you do memes or not, I want to give you this because you are funny, provocative, smart, talented, and a must read everyday. Now on with the my choices:

D Cup at Politits. No one writes about family life, popular culture, and politics more creatively than her. She is my hero and when I grow up I want to write like her and to have as rabid a following as she does.

Evil Spock at The Needs of the Few. I read his missives and I think to myself, how will I ever write as well as that? And then I remember that blogging is not a competition but I'm still jealous of the evil one.

Bubs at Sprawling Ramshackle Campground. I love how Bubs writes about his family, his cocktails, his love of Elvis, his job, and how he also tosses in features like Weenie Waver Wednesdays and Florida or Germany? I'm not gonna mention how much I like him because he sends me pictures of him and his lovely daughter holding Crunky bars. Maybe one day Miz Bubs will consent to hold some Crunky and I'll be able to complete the Bubs family trifecta.

Mad Haiku. Whats not to love? Cool collage art and haikus about everything. I'm convinced he's a feckin' genius.

And last but definitely not least, Missy from Minnesota, what is it about gals from the North country lately anway?

She's got two blogs. This one and this one. And I love them both.

So all five of my choices thanks to you for all you do and you can pass the honors along if you like. You are all great in your own way. However, the rest of you mugs on my blog roll had better shape up and start writing even better stuff than before. Who knows, maybe one day I'll toss you an honor on my way to the top.

It will never sink in

I was listening to This American Life in the car the other day and I heard yet another media type slam bloggers and blogging. He was interviewing some other equally clueless guy about something and this interviewer said, "Surely you know about the bloggers, they write and write, and write on their blogs. God knows why though since they don't get paid for it."

I thought to myself, "The corporate press does not and will not ever get it." With their corporate worldview and mentality the only things worth doing are those that you get paid for. And the only voices we should listen to are those of the stooges who are being paid to tell us things.

Well sorry old dude, I got news for you, you and your corporate media pals have had your run and we don't pay much attention to what you are being paid to tell us anymore. I get my news off the net these days and I have for quite some time. Since all news is delivered through someone's filter I'd rather get mine from websites that cater to my political leanings. I could care less about Wal-Mart or Bank of America and what they sponsor on your news shows. I'll stick to getting my news from Raw Story, Think Progress, Huffington Post, The Nation, Mother Jones, and when I want commentary on the news stories of the day then I'll turn to my blogging buddies because after all they are more like me than you multi-millionaire talking heads are.


Blue Gal puts things into perspective in one post better than you TV guys do in 24 hours, D Cup breaks things down in a paragraph or two better than you guys do in all those newspapers, Dr. Zaius tells me more with a photoshopped picture and a comment or two than you guys ever did. And since they live out here in the real world with me I'm gonna stick with them.


I had little respect for this douchebag to begin with but when he cried about bloggers being taken more seriously than him, I lost what little respect I had remaining for him. Sure Brian, you spent your life in journalism but you know what else? You been paid to do the news. I'd rather get my news and opinion from someone who is not beholden to GE or Microsoft or Coca Cola.


It will never sink in on their dinosaur brains that we write our blogs for ourselves and if others read them and get influenced by what we write or get active in their community because of what we write or we decide we are fed up and we are gonna make the changes we want and not the changes the multi national corporations want us to make, then that's a good thing. If I can make one person see the light and they do something to help someone else, to help stop climate change, to help get a progressive elected, to stop shopping at Wal-Mart, to help bring single payer universal health care to this country, then I've done something pretty fucking good. They'll never understand why we stopped listening to them and why we started to make up our own minds.

I may be a cranky middle aged white guy but I am sick and tired of rich white guys on TV telling me what I should do, how to think, what to buy, where to shop, and who to vote for. I'm sick and tired of them slamming us for having the gall to not listen to them and to think and organize for ourselves.

The honors keep rolling in

PJ in the Uk has bestowed on me this honor:

You ge one of these for making comments on other people's blogs. It shows that you read them and that you are a good egg for leaving a nice comment every now and again. It also shows PJ has excellent taste in who she likes because I was tops on her list of people to get this award, I'm not bragging, it's just a fact so nah nah nah.

I'm not sure how many folks I am allowed to pass this honor on to but I'll stick to five since that seems to be the popular number on teh internets these days.

So the folks I want to honor for being such nice folks for reading and commenting on my little blog are:

1) D Cup at Politits. She's always makes me smile or laugh or makes me grateful I know her when I read her comments on my blog. She is da bomb in my book.

2) Beth at Cup of Coffey. Beth is a newish blog buddy of mine and I really dig the fact she found me and comments so much.

3) Samurai Frog. He is my brother from another mother and he's a damn fine amphibian to boot, if it was not for him I would not be running for President.

4) Bubs at Sprawling Ramshackle Campground. Bubs is one of my other brothers from another mother.

5) It's a three way tie between Greensunflowers, the hippest nurse around, Freida Bee, who doesn't love a gal loves Dennis Kucinich and Annie Sprinkle?, and Splotchy of I, Splotchy, the man's gentle humor on his blog and his comments on mine crack me up.

The rest of you give good schmooze, but the bloggers I singled out take it to a whole new level.

Lighten up, it's Tuesday! (All Female Edition)

It's not that you boys didn't amuse us here at el Casa de Monkey in the past two weeks, we just wanted to send some link love out to our favorite females and current crushes out there in blogland.

So without further bullspit, here is a sampling of the stuff some gals wrote that made us laugh out loud in the past few weeks:

1) I'd be careful what I said too if I had a blogger mom that wrote this well and was as smart as this one.

2) Here's a double dose of rich gooey Jewy goodness courtesy of my new Jewish princess blog crush, Katiegirl. She claims ownership of the "c" word in this first post and then in a post about her monthly "monthly" she calls it a name I've never heard it called before, oh well it's hers and she can damn well call it what she likes. Sorry Sarah Silverman, Katie is the Jew gal for me now. Unless you lift that restraining order and answer my thousands of calls, letters, text messages, and smoke signals that is. Oy, what's a goy boy got to do get some JAP love these days anyway?

3) Finally! Someone who is as fearful of the giant robot master overlord invasion as I am! You are not alone Miss Kelsi, I'm with you babe. All those years of watching bad sci fi movies will finally pay off when the robots attack.

4) Speaking of Miss Kelsi, I found her blog one day when I was looking for pictures of crazy looking cars for a post about my interview with Sam Brownback. I liked her stuff so I blogrolled her and I read her blog regularly now. In her blog roll I noticed this blog and I've been hooked ever since. Meg is my other new blog crush. When not writing about her aversion to group sex or interviewing her liver, she's appearing in the knife pictures that make Lindsay Lohan look like a spoiled little drunk coked up starlet. Keep on rockin' in the free-ish world Meg!

5) Just what guys everywhere needed, dating tips from Angry Ballerina. Ignore the pissed off Terpsichorean lass at your peril gentlemen, I however will not.


6) Any gal who makes poo jokes is a friend of ours forever.

Ladies, we thank all of you for making us laugh in these troubling times. I tip my fez to you all.

Keepin' it clean for you, the unwashed masses

For some reason I thought of this post by D Cup when I saw this video.

Hey D Cup...

...buy The Boy this game. He'll love it, trust me.
(Via Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday)

It used to be just us...

...who thought that the Idiot in Chief would pull something in 2009 in order to stay in office but today we saw this on Politits:

When Dubya finally decides that he won't be leaving office and that something catastrophic has happened and he has to declare martial law, it won't be the troops who enforce his newly issued edicts. Nosireee.

We have always hated to imagine the the awful prospect of another four years of those venal bastards ruining our country and another four year of those idiots raping Iraq and Afghanistan and killing thousands upon thousands people in their insatiable lust for power, oil, and the love of Jeebus, but we honestly thought that it was just our paranoid little monkey brains that cooked up that little recipe. So thats what makes D Cup's post so troubling. If we think about that nightmare scenario it's okay, it's just our little problem, but if others are imagining it as well, then we better batten down the hatches and Katie bar the fucking door because it just may come to pass.

Holy crap, we were reasonably optimistic this morning until we saw someone else shared our fears of BushwithoutendAmen. Now we feel like doing this: