Two knuckles on my right hand have been red and flaky and itchy for several weeks now.

I do not want eczema, and frankly I do not want any other diagnosis consistent with these symptoms.

I wish to explain that I have already got numerous diagnoses of diseases and syndromes. Each time I acquire one I need to read at least one and probably more books about it, worry somewhat, and either change my lifestyle or take medications or both. This has become burdensome as my bookshelf is full of condescending books written by registered nurses, I now take four prescription drugs, and I have given up numerous pleasures.

Please remove the itchy red flaky situation from the knuckles. If I require any more diagnoses of syndromes or diseases I will contact your office directly.

Thank you in advance.

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog has the first good long clip from Christian Science Puppet Guy, aka David Nkrumah Liebe Hart: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/05/didactic_christ.html

For those who haven’t seen his cable tv public access show, this will initiate you into the magic of dilapidated puppets singing religious outsider music with many fine video effects and other delicious treats embedded in it like nuggets of dried vegetable matter in a fruit cake.

Warning: this shit is fucked-up.

From the patio tonight.

No digging takes 24 hours! You have to show up and do Shovel 101, and then drink. And then you pour some water on the concrete and stand around and bullshit and drink. And someone pees on it, you know that slows it up. And you put a lot of water around and you drink some more. And just as the boss shows up you swing a mattock at the wet stuff.

So I used to get diet pills from this doctor in Clifton New Jersey, because I wanted to deal dope. You know, I was working for Reuters in Manhattan and living in New Jersey, paid the mob to get a cheap apartment. This guy had all these fat ladies showing up and he was giving them pills: pink pills, blue pills, grey pills. The pink ones were soft stuff, the blue ones were for lunch! and the grey ones were pretty heavy shit. He had these ladies taking a pink one with a grey booster and then a blue one and another blue one, it was crazy.

So my buddy and I were going to try them to see what that was like. We were both Vietnam vets, jam the morphine in your leg and get in the chopper and let’s fly. This guy, he once put some rhino trank in his eye and was in the fetal position for 12 hours. You get it. So we took a pink one and well, whatever, nothing much. Then we took a grey one and a day and a half later we’re still jaw jaw jaw jaw fucking jabbering. And those ladies were taking five, six, seven of them a day? I had a fishbowl full of them. He kept giving me more because I wasn’t losing weight.

…Anyway yeah, Lisa. About 15 years ago, a bartender introduced us. She was selling these steam cleaning things, you know how they send teenagers to your door to sell you a vacuum or some shit and they’re persistent, yeah she was doing that selling steam apparatus of some kind, carpet cleaning, for restaurants. And she was a very persistent person, sold a lot of these, she was making a lot of money. Everyone kept telling her to slow down on the speed, but she didn’t. I think she’s in somewhere again, or still.

Won’t this new Caspian oil pipeline make us dependent on the fragile and authoritarian regime in Caspia?

Starting with the genuine problem of this one:

My boss’s boss just informed me that our build to the live site tonight is going to be “wack”.

Thank goodness I’m having a good sushi dinner beforehand.

Develop Your Child’s Citizenship and Patriotism.

Before you purchase that fly pair of shoes with the cool Asian characters on it, you might want to look through Hanzis Matter to make sure they don’t say “Self Doubt” on them.

One of the patio characters is Medicated Bob, otherwise known as Religious Bob or Blue Guitar Bob. He’s been a regular for years. Bob is a forty-year-old schizophrenic, beefy and tanned, who always wears religious t-shirts. His cycle begins when he’s well-medicated and he sits and reads placidly. Later on he stops taking his medications and he gets a bit preachy, and then a bit more preachy, and then really loud. At the end of the cycle he stops making sense at all, harangues people and shouts, and is finally asked to leave. His third nickname comes from a time when he had a blue (fake) cutout wood or cardboard guitar that he would play and sing along with tunelessly. One time when friendly_bandit was working at the newsstand Bob came up and started screaming out the names of the porn magazines until he was asked to leave. “Plaaaaybooooy! PEEENT HOOOOOUSE!! HUSSSTLAAAAAR!!!” You get the idea, I think.

Bob returned to the patio again today looking rested and well, no doubt on the early part of the cycle. As he was leaving I encountered him out front. “Hello!” he said, “I don’t think we’ve ever been introduced. I’m Robert.” I introduced myself in return and shook hands. He seemed to recognize my name. “Say, I’d almost think I went to elementary school with you.” “What school?” I asked. “Woodland.”

I asked him his last name. “L_____”, he said. “Yeah, I remember you! You were the speed reader in sixth grade!”

Holy fucking shit. The stocky schizophrenic in the religious t-shirt in front of me was Bobby L_____. The kid who was a scary fast sprinter, prankster, a bit aggressive and mean sometimes but mostly okay, just another normal kid. He and I and James and Jamie played tag a lot in fifth grade, and hung out eating Chef Boyardee ravioli and explaining sex to each other in sixth grade. I hadn’t seen him since. Until, of course, I spent the last 7 years seeing him on and off and having no idea it was the same guy.

What the HELL happened to Bobby? WHAT THE HELL?

A giant dominatrix teddy bear wearing a leather mask and brandishing hand-cuffs has been banned from sober Zurich’s street display of man-sized model bears, the project’s artistic director said Tuesday. While tourists pose for snaps next to a brightly-painted and benign array of models such as the ‘schoolteacher bear’ and the ‘skier bear,’ ‘Baervers’ — a pun on the German for perverse — has been deemed too steamy for the financial capital’s streets. The bear appears here in a yard in Zurich, May 24, 2005.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050524/od_nm/swiss_hardcoreteddy_dc_1