Writer's block and tiny cats

It occurred to me a few days ago that I hadn't posted anything new in a while. I buried that information in the back of my brain for later review and it only just came up again.

I haven't been able to put together anything coherent lately. I don't know why. I certainly haven't run out of things to complain about. Plenty of things irritate me, particularly when I'm hungry.

I'm working on a few good rants, but in the mean time, here are a few things that popped into my head this week. They may or may not be funny. Or interesting.

-When did John Cougar Mellencamp dump the "Cougar" from his name? I think that, considering the pop-culture phenomenon that is the "cougar" he ought to put it back in there. Capitalize on the trend while he can.
-It rained last week. I was looking forward to a good rain because my car is a mess. It rained enough to clean most of the dirt off my car, but not the bird poop. I don't know what those birds around here are eating, but something in their excrement, when mixed with the finish of my Cavalier, formed a powerful epoxy and that stuff isn't coming off without a fight.
I put a feeder in my backyard, and *this* is the thanks I get. Stupid birds.
-My “Check Engine” light has been on since I took my car home from the shop a few months ago. You’d think they would have checked the engine while they were fixing everything else. The light didn’t actually turn on until I’d driven about two miles from the shop.
I’ve decided to “fix” it by putting a piece of electrical tape over it.
-Why does the media always make a big deal about how popular and athletic and smart a missing/killed teenager is/was? Would it be less of a tragedy if some fat, stupid loser was killed by a drunk driver? Is it a matter of not wanting to speak ill of the dead, or do people just not care what happens to unpopular people? Nancy Grace talked yesterday (I changed the channel as fast as I could) about a "beautiful young wife and mother" who was killed by her husband. So would it be okay if she was a single, childless hag? I think to Nancy it would because Nancy doesn't talk about the ugly victims of crime on her program. Ever. If Natalee Holloway had been hook-nosed and greasy-haired and overweight, Nancy wouldn't have given the story air time. Neither would anyone else have.
-Last night I saw a commercial for a nasal spray for allergies. To illustrate how pet dander irritates the sinuses, the ad featured a tiny kitten dancing around under a large, disembodied nose.
I know I hate it when tiny cats frolic under my nose. Of course I'm not sure how I feel about the solution offered in another ad: an army of tiny CG men marching a nasal allergy spray towards my nostril. That worries me a little as well. Maybe the tiny army men could take on the tiny cats, and that way I wouldn't have to take any medication.
-Speaking of which, side effects are getting scarier and scarier. One new nasal spray carries with it the risk of a hole in the nasal septum. I'm not 100% certain of the purpose of the nasal septum, but something tells me it's important and that I'd rather just have nasal allergy symptoms than a hole burnt through the sucker.
-Can anyone give me a reasonable explanation for the current pop culture obsession with zombies? I don't know, maybe it's because my father died of brain cancer last year, but I don't understand the appeal of the dead rising in various stages of decomposition with the purpose of emptying our living skulls. Why would I want that on a t-shirt or a mug or a bumper sticker?
Of course, I didn't get the whole pirate trend either and I don't have a compelling reason for that. Although my ex's pirate fixation doesn't exactly endear the pirate movement to me. My ex is ... let's call him a rotten sack of crap and leave it at that, since my mother reads this.
And pirates? Yeah, guess what folks, they still exist, and they commit horrible atrocities. A British man was brutally beaten to death, in front of his wife, by pirates. Maybe we shouldn't glorify that, okay, Disney? Johnny Depp? Y'all got it?
-There was a big to-do on the news about how swine flu deaths now number 100 or something like that. Yeah, okay, that's sad, but do you know how many people die every year of the regular flu? 20,000. Why aren't we keeping tabs on that?
-I'm sick of hearing about how Mancow Muller has decided, after experiencing it, that waterboarding is torture, for the sole reason that when I hear the name "Mancow" I get this nasty mental picture of a grotesque man-cow hybrid. Can we just call him by his real name of Eric and leave it at that?
-Why do they spend ten minutes discussing the heat on the news? We live in Phoenix. It gets hot. That's not news. If the heat is news to you, maybe you ought to finish moving your belongings out from under that rock before you worry yourself with the news. Phoenix is hot. It's always been hot, it will always be hot.
And you know what? It hasn't been as hot as it usually is! That's news. Shove that in your pipe and smoke it, Royal Norman.
And, finally ...
-Words I do not ever want to hear again: bromance, sexting, waterboarding, BFF, swine flu, twilight, Jonas Brothers.
Thank you.