Oh, Wikipedia, how I love thee.

I can type pert near anything into you and you spew out copius amounts of useless informations that my brain thrives on. I wanted to read about my favorite candy bar ever in the whole world, Twix, and I'll be damned, you delivered the goods. Hey, Wikipedia, I'd like to know about Skittles. Wow, look at that! I've always wanted to know what happened to Stompers. Damn, I loved those things. Want to know more about meatballs? Wikipedia has got you covered.

This morning I challenged Wiki to learn me about one of my childhood heroes, Mr. Rogers. Needless to say, it definitely Wikied my Pedia. While reading about Fred, I was shocked to learn that "McFeely", the last name of the white haired Speedy Delivery dude, came from Fred's very own name. Assuming it's a last name, does this mean Fred was a name hyphenater in real life? If so, I suppose he shortened things up as to not give the impression that he and the Speedy Delivery man were shackin' up. That ain't how a mild-mannered Reverend wants to be represented, know what I'm sayin?

What I found to be most interesting was that before he was the big mac daddy at PBS, Fred went to Canada with an understudy who went on to become known up dare in Canada as Mr. Dressup. Evidently Mr. D was a Canadian version of Mr. Rogers, and rather popular with the young canadian chillens to boot.

Mmm... nice! Mr. Dressup? I'll say! Look at those snappy duds he's sportin'. We all know that Canada is a smoldering hotbed of comic genius embers, so I wonder if this guy was a goofball. I wonder if he spoke with a thick Canadian dialect like the one I loved so when watching You Can't Do That on Television and Mr. Wizard's World on Nickelodeon in the 80s (hmm, there's more stuff to look up!) I need to go find me some Mr. Dressup footage on YouTube or something to check this guy out.

This brings up a valid chicken/egg question. It mentions that Rogers and Dressup were homies, but whose show was first? It's unclear to me, and it only makes me wonder even more. Why did Dressup stay in Canada? Did he and Fred have a torrid love affair and break up? Why are the shows so similar (it mentions some of Dressup's songs were later used by Rogers.) Why did he pick "Dressup" as a name? Did he start the show by dressing up, unlike Fred who would come in and dress down into a thin colorful sweater and pair of blue and white sneakers? Judging from Mr. D's pic, if that's his version of "dressing up" I'd love to see what he looked like prior to that.

My inquiring mind wants to know. It's time to scour the internet for some answers and Mr. Dressup footage. I hope I'm not disappointed with my findings. I mean, I hope we weren't just fed a load of recycled Mr. Dressup crap when watching Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. GAAAHD that would suck.

But before looking into this, I need to get back to Wikipedia and see what there is to read about cheese food.

My newest internet pet peeve

Those fucking semi-translucent Flash advertisements that ever so inconveniently slide themselves on top of the page I'm trying to read. By instinct, I try and scroll down past 'em, but the little bitches follow right along, bouncing all the way down until I find the miniature "x" box to click and close 'em.

Whomever created this mess deserves to have a pack of jumbo Oscar Meyer all-beef franks forcefully inserted into their number two area, and then bashed in the skull with a pillowcase full of soda pop cans (a la Sean Penn in the epic masterpiece Bad Boys.)
I just don't like being force-fed ads like that, especially when 99.9999% of them are for shit I could care less about. If someone would please invent a program that prevents these from interfering with my web browsing fun time, that would be terrific. I'll give you a $5 McDonald's gift card.

Okay, my advertising rant is over now. Move along, move along...

I, Micycle Tricycle, am hanging up my fart belt for good.

Goldie and I had a fantastic "little" (some fifty plus folks came) party over the weekend to celebrate our bitchin' new pad we moved into over the summer as well as a belated engagement party of sorts. I would like to take a moment to thank everyone reading this who:

• stopped over and Wang Chunged with us
• put a dent in the keg and the wading pool of food that everyone brought
• signed the wall of shame
• took the chance to mingle with total strangers
• listened to my bandmates and I slosh through a few tunes (and even applauded afterwards.. wow)
• Thank you so much for all of the bottles of wine. Not too many people labeled them, so we're not sure who half of them are from. Great googley moogley - there's prolly more than a dozen bottles there. And we'll be sure to put them to good use.

There is a select group of those who couldn't make it out and said they would... hey man, it's your funeral. You missed the Doodie The Clown, famous for twisting inflated condoms into lifelike sloths. You also missed The Great Zamboni, the world renouned poodle trainer and his 5 dogs who jump through flaming hoops whilst blindfolded and barking the theme to Sanford and Son. One dog caught fire, and she tasted hella delicious - "Zeese eese why I allvays breeng 5 doags," he said. "Eef vun burns, choo haff a decent meal for zee crowd and zaire's steel 4 doags left!"

This was the first time that direct family members from her side and mine got to meet in person. Everyone got along just peachy and laughed and had a good time.

Now onto the rest of my story.

Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I seem to be incapable of farting. I try and I try, but to no avail, it just doesn't happen. I want to fart. Seriously. Farting is funny. To me, there's nothing more comical than a well-timed and executed fart. Oh, what I would give if I could simply just float an air biscuit while waiting in line somewhere or at Blockbuster video when somebody was kneeling down at 2nd shelf level reading the back of a DVD box.

To kick things off at the party, my mum brought over a bubbling cauldron full of her delishish shloppy joe meat. There it sat in her electric pan: oodles of perfectly browned ground beefs swimming in a pool of mysteriously spiced, savory orangish dark-brown liquids. When my sis opened up the door to her car and I reached in to obtain the pot of slops to carry it upstairs, two things crossed my mind: 1) Yum. And 2) Maybe tonight will be the night?

I carefully brought it up, set it on our American Idol tablecloth, and plugged 'er in. Mum then brought up yet another cauldron, this one full of homemade baked beans. Oooh yes. Tonight was going to be the night, alright. I had my giant bottle of Tabasco sauce slightly chilled and at the ready.

As the evening commenced, I had me some slops completely immersed in Tabaska sauce. And then 2 bowls of baked beans. I warshed it all down with cup after cup of delicious keg beer and waited for divine gaseous intervention. I had a pile of my sister's awesome spinachk dip on the side, and some butt-tayta salad to boot.

Nothing.

An hour or so later, Iced Ink drummer Barry and his wifey-poo Lindsay strutted through the door. Barry brought his incredibly delicious and perfectly almost-too-spicy homemade bean dip, and Lindsay had a jar of her intense cosmic homemade salsa which was so yummy that when combined with Barry's bean dip, I began hallucinating and wanted to break into a frenzy of violent bliss after I ate a plate full. It was that damned good. Those two folks are a spicy condimentary match made in heaven.

I topped it all off with 2 of my mum-in-law-to-be's delectable holier-than-thou Cajun Mary Meatballs. It was the perfect icing on the cake. Everything I needed for the ultimate butt trumpet symphony had been consumed. There were Flavorgasms aplenty. I was certain that trouble was a brewin' downstairs in the walls of me belly, and this really got my hopes up. Tonight's the night, I kept thinking. I began to perspire and became anxious to get a-gassin'.

Nothing.

The party was over, and I put all of the foods away. There was a pretty big serving of baked beans left that didn't fit into the Tupperware, so down my hatch they went in a last ditch effort, complete with a hearty splash of Tabasco. I waited patiently for at least one little toot while nursing my last beer.

Nothing. Not even a mild cramp. I thought maybe I'd wake up in the wee hours with a crazy stomach just ready to blow the roof off of our place, but nope.

Nothing.

And so today, I am officially retiring any hopes of ever farting again. I used to when I was a wee lad, but I seem to have lost the ability over the years. It just wasn't meant to be. Some people can't see, some can't hear... I can't gas.

Next time you've got access to foods that you know will cause a serious ruckus strictly in the farting sense, be sure to have a little extra for me, if you will. And keep your hands off of that damned vial of Bean-O, if you will. If you're going to do it for me, I ask that you do it all the way.
I, Micycle Tricycle, am hanging up my fart belt for good.

Thank you and goodnight.

Suuree, or something like that

Newspapers age to yellow and the tree leaves do the same,
Work time spent a-working, spare time spent on Scrabble games
I ponder where my life is going and things like armpit stains
And what I may have missed when I stopped watching "Growing Pains"

Another bowl of cereal and another sandwich lunch
Another seedless grape is plucked and eaten from the bunch
Life, it carries on and soon the day turns into night
I look up in the sky and see the moon and planes in flight

There's one thing that I know will always be there in the news;
One thing I can count on. One thing that we'll never lose.
It's covered non-stop in the mags and on the internet
More so than the weather report and how rain gets things wet.

This topic that's at hand is weighing talking heads at large,
Everybody knows, even the homeless girl named Marge.
This one thing that I'm talking about involves a girl named Katie,
and the fact that I don't give a shit about her and Tom Cruise's baby.

Word.

tap tap tap.. Is this thing on?

My, how time flies! I took a break from this here Blogspot 'bout 6 months ago to go a little more full time on my MySpace blog. I started to miss my Blogspot page recently and figure it's about time to get back to my roots.

For those of you who haven't hit up other said blog lately, there's been some pretty neat changes in my life since I was last here. I'm getting married to a hot momma next year. She has neat hair, cool glasses, wears Chuck Taylors, and likes to joke about poop and farts. That's pretty cool if I do say so myself. I also put up a website for my acoustic guitar musics... and finally had CDs made to sell. I've been a busy little monkey!

It's good to be back.

What I did for my summer vacation.

In the words of one of my favorite writers out there, Mr. Jim Anchower: "Hola, Amigos. It's been a while since I rapped at ya." Labor Day was yesterday, which tends to signify the end of summer.

And so another fine summer has come to a close. Another State Fair has come and gone. The school buses are back slowly rolling down the side streets once again, lights a-flashing and STOP signs popping out of their sides until the coast is clear and we can drive on without running over children.

We do this out of the goodness of our hearts, so that those children, too, can suffer like we did back in the day when we were serving our 13 years of edjamacation and waiting to grow up. Some day they'll eventually grow up too and get stuck behind school buses on the way home from work not running over the kids getting out of those buses. It's all about keeping the chain of involuntary education unbroken.

Yes... another fine summer has come to a close. The leaves are beginning to turn yellowish and reddish shades of green, a telltale sign that the trees will soon be bald. The mornings are cold and crispy. It's time to put away those all-white outfits for yet another winter, lest you want to be shunned by the fashion savvy folk for sporting such garments after Labor Day. (The double-V in "savvy" is dedicated to you, Scrabble Queen.)

At any rate, I hope you all had a fantastic summer. I know I did, and I'd like to share with you some of the highlights:

• Attempted to train sunfish from Lake Calhoun to re-enact Season 2 of Sex and the City. Sadly, the project was canned after receiving a cease-and-desist order from HBO.
• Ate a lot of ice cream. Whenever we'd go grocery shopping, I'd bring a spoon with and just load up on whatever I had a hankerin' for at the time.One Saturday, Goldie and I ran a lemonade stand! We made $13.22. That's nearly 4 Happy Meals!Cooking tip: during periods of extreme summer heat, frozen pizza is much more cool and refreshing when you skip the part where you bake it.
• Collected flattened, dead, dried up frogs from roads and found creative uses for them (coasters, elbow pads on shirts, coin purses, frog jerky)
• Learned while moving into new apartment that you can't fold a pane of glass
• Stole a Metro Transit bus, gutted it out, and filled it with 4 giant tubes of 4x4-foot saltines.. those always reminded me of cracker boxes and I've always wanted to do that. Next summer I'm stealing a giant satellite dish and filling it with soup for the crackers.
• Challenged a McDonald's employee to sell me a burger patty with cheese on it for 11 cents or just an empty bun for 78 cents. Regular cheeseburger = 89 cents. Double cheeseburger = $1.00. If you do the math, this makes perfect sense.. but that's not how they McOperate.
• Naired the hair out of my nostrils. Not a good idea; those hairs are there for a good reason.
• Developed homemade Etch-a-Sketch out of ant farm. I bought some high tech remote controlled ants at Radio Shack (one x axis and one y axis) and put the two controller knobs on the base of the ant farm.

In all, it was a fantastic summer, and I hope you all had one at least as half as exciting and fulfilling as mine. I would like to thank Goldie, my family, our pizza oven, my bandmates, Rockstar: Supernova, Chef Gordon Ramsey and Hell's Kitchen, and anyone else who helped make the summer of '06 one of the best. I would like to thank the bees and mosquitoes for keeping the annoyance factor to a minimum, although I know you bees are just getting started... so let's put a hold on thanking you just yet.

I would like to NOT thank my job for making me get up early 5 days out of every week this summer. I would like to not thank the Minnesota State Fair Amateur Talent Competition as well for not finding my performance of the Dog Seed Shuffle "Amateur" enough. I have something on a stick for you, and will gladly tell you where you can stick it, if you know what I'm sayin'.

Here's to a kick ass Fall!