I got the finest piece of fan mail that I have ever received today. From a gentleman who refers to himself as, "Stu Dent." It reads:

Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 16:03:34 -0800 (PST)
From: "Stu Dent"
Subject: About your site
To: fatnathan@yahoo.com

Yeah, you don't need a web page. It is useless. Your a city slicker piece of poo, you bird brain. Kiss my country ass.

You too can insult me! Just send it along to fatnathan@yahoo.com.

I can feel it coming on. The snot, the fatigue, the headache, the soreness, the blah is creeping up on me. Tomorrow it will be a full-fledged cold I am sure. I know that I am getting sick because I am not hungry. I have no desire to eat dinner tonight. That never happens.

But I have no time for sickness, and no patience for it either. Also, I cannot stand to use sick leave for sickness. Sick leave is for work on the house days or hang out with Miss J days or play in a golf tournament with my pop days. Some day soon, sick days will be for taking Wylie fishing. That will really make me happy if he takes to fishing.

I used to love to fish. I had a really cool boat. It was a 14-foot flat-bottom aluminum boat with a livewell and a foot controlled trolling motor. It had a 9.9 horsepower Evinrude with the souped up carburetor that bumped it up to closer to fifteen horsepower. I would take it out most every Saturday morning during the spring and summer fishing season.

Here is the secret: I am a horrible fisherman. It was rare that I would get skunked, but it was common for me to not catch enough to keep. Also, although I had a great boat, I did not take very good care of it. I really did not know how. So I would get stranded miles from the launch ramp with an engine that would not start and not enough battery to get me back with the trolling motor. But none of this deterred me from going to the river on Saturday mornings. There is something about getting out there where it is quiet and trying to think like a hungry fish that centers you, clears your head.

And if you do catch a mess of fish, and you have the endurance to clean them after a long morning on the river, and you have the further endurance to fry them up with a mess of taters and onions, then you are in for a treat. There is no meal as satisfying as a summer evening fish fry with cheap cold beer and fresh fish and family and buddies. That is fellowship with humanity the way God intended.

The last time I took my boat out was just a few weeks before Wylie was born. Earlier this summer when we moved out of our house, I realized that I had not used the boat in years. I needed some cash to make the move happen and my neighbor was interested in buying me out, so I sold it. It made me sad, especially considering that I bought it from Miss J’s grandfather, who was so proud for me to get it. But it was ridiculous for me to let it sit in my yard and rot. Furthermore, I did not want to move it. I had plenty to move.

Maybe someday Wylie will take to fishing. I sure hope so. If he does, I will save up and get us a new boat, maybe something a little larger that can handle a little bigger water. Then we will get up together on Saturday mornings and dig worms. I’ll back up the truck and he will tell me when I am close enough to hook up the boat trailer. We will listen to classic country in the truck and ride with the windows cracked to feel the crisp pre-dawn air. The boat will hit the water as the sun tops the horizon and we will quickly motor to a quiet hole and worry that we are to late, that we have missed the feeding frenzy.

Then after a couple of hours with no luck I’ll hear myself twenty-five years ago calling from the back of the boat. “Dadoe, I’m bored. Lets go home.”

Commenting is back up. Talk to me people. It does get lonely in here.

OK, last try. I am going with a new comment hosting service and hope to have it online soon.

My sis has posted an autobiographical sketch she had to write for a grad school application. It is very interesting, at least it is to me - you know, 'cause I am in it.

Is there anything more interesting than a 500 word blog post about shoes?

My old house was 5.5 miles from work. The new house is 4.7 miles from work. It used to take me about seven minutes to get to the office in the mornings – now it takes me anywhere from 25 minutes on a low traffic morning, to nearly an hour on a thick fog, multi-car accident morning like we had today. That’s right, nearly an hour to go 4.7 miles. The way I figure it, I could have walked to work quicker today than I drove. This is the rare down side to the new house. Another down side would be the fact that we can’t afford it.

We moved out of our other house at the end of July. It would be several weeks before the new house was available to us, so we had to place all of our things into storage and live with Miss J’s parents. As we have completed remodeling projects, we have been moving our things into the new house very gradually. All of the furniture and major items are in place, but there are still quite a few boxes lurking in the storage unit. At the least, these are things that we need less than once every four months. Mostly, they are things that we should have thrown away years ago. But there are some exceptions. Things that we have needed over the last few months, but knew they were buried deep within the bowels of a rented garage.

For example: my shoes. I only kept out two pairs of shoes for this ordeal, one pair for wearing to work, and one pair for working around the house in. They are now tattered disgusting rags. I need my other shoes.

You need to understand something about the way I operate to fully get this. I have developed a habit when it comes to shoes. A ritual, if you will. That is, I find a pair of shoes that I like, and I wear them every single day until they give up the ghost. I have two pairs of shoes that I have never worn. They were given to me by my mother and my wife at various times. They are nice shoes and I like them. They are just waiting for their moment to come up in the rotation.

That moment is now, and they are hidden in the storage unit somewhere.

Yesterday afternoon I brought home two truckloads of mysterious boxes. Back in July, we only had two or three days to pack and move, so they were labeled and packed somewhat haphazardly by a collection of the friends who love us most. Going through them was a jolt of disgust (why do we have all of this crap), disappointment (where are those things I have been missing), excitement (wow, I forgot all about that book), and amazement (why would you pack a radio in one box and its power cord in another). Through it all, no shoes.

This morning while getting ready for work, I was just about to put on my rotten loafers when I thought, “I never did see the bottom of that box over there.”

Sure enough, there they were. Finally I can go to work without being embarrassed about the sad state of my feet.

Jonah Goldberg has written the shortest and best piece of his career, and it was written for the Times of London of all publications. You have to subscribe to see it on the British site, but NRO has helpfully reprinted it here. Give it a read; it will only take a few minutes.

I have finished the last of the major remodeling on our new house. Well, I have done all that I am going to do right now. I love my new house. It is looking great, but it has kicked my butt.

Here is the quick list of what we have done in the last three months.

Tear out old funky carpet.
Prime and paint every room, including ceilings.
Repair sprinkler system.
Scrape the nasty, moldy, glued down padding from the concrete slab in our bedroom.
Chisel away and inch of grout from around the baseboard area in our room.
Build a wooden subfloor that floats above the concrete slab in our room
Build two closets in our room. (It was formerly a den)
Lay laminate flooring in our room
Lay vinyl floor in laundry Room
Lay laminate flooring in Kitchen
Replace five light fixtures
Replace all electrical outlets

This is not to mention moving all of our stuff and living in the house while we did all of this. The first month that we were in our house, Miss J, Wylie, and I all slept on the floor of his room on three one person sized mattresses. The only furniture in the house was our TV and VCR, which sat on the floor. I have not taken a single day off of work to accomplish this. This would all be impressive if there were not so much left to do. But for now, the repair fund has run horrifyingly dry. It is time to move on the other, cheaper things.

And I think it is time to start paying a little more attention to the blog. When I first started this thing, I felt bad if I went a single day without posting new original content. This is not to mention all of the news links and such that I posted. Currently, there are so few posts that you can see September on the front page.

So I will make a new commitment. Hold me to it.

Concerning comments: I have decided that free comment hosting services are not worth messing with. They slow your site to a crawl and are down more than up. I welcome all comments and will gladly post them unedited. Just send them to me at fatnathan@yahoo.com. If I miss them the first time, be patient with me and send again. I get about 200 spam messages a day in this account. Sometimes the baby goes out with the bathwater.

Could this:

NICOLE KIDMAN TO RECORD LP WITH LENNY KRAVITZ

Be the worst thing to happen to rock and roll since this:

Ahh, the ever-cynical and sarcastic speechwriter. Gutsy and not afraid to speak up or clash with authority, his dry wit is amusing. But under it all he's just a big teddy bear... and the world's biggest Yankees fan.


:: Which West Wing character are you? ::

I am anxious to get back to you. I love my friends who read this blog. If you are someone who I talk to regularly, then you know that I have had a most interesting end to the summer. I sold my house, had a deal fall through on another house, lived with my mother-in-law for three weeks, and then moved into a 65 year old fixer-upper. Since then, my time away from work has been consumed by remodeling. I hope to have time to detail all of my adventures soon.

Also, I have joined a kick ass new band and am preparing to rock the central Arkansas area, so I have that going for me.

Stay tuned. I love you all.

Rest in peace Mr. Cash. There will never be another.

Accdording to Drudge, Mel Gibson has gotten a big thumbs up from the Vatican.

More golf punditry from PGA expert, the Fatpop:

OK, I got a beef with the PGA Tour. Today Paul Azinger shoots a nice little 68 to put himself one shot off the lead in the Canadian Open. I realize the Canadian Open has no hope of being confused with the U.S. Open, but still a national championship is a national championship. Back in the early 70's they made a big deal out of the Canadian Open when Lee Buck Trevino sandwiched a victory there in between one at the U.S. and Bristish Opens. He was supposedly the first guy to hold three national championships at the same time.

Nonetheless, here is my beef.

Azinger's 68 was very quickly turned into a 70 when a TV viewer called in a penalty on Zinger's caddie! YES! HIS FRIGGING CADDIE! Fred Funk was playing a chip shot (that's right a mere chip shot) that had no hope of going in the hole when Zinger's caddie pulled the pin. The ball rolled exactly two more full turns after the pin was removed and yet still lacked a good four feet making it to the hole. But the rule book states that the flagstick cannot be removed (unless one calls for it to be "tended" before playing his shot) until the ball stops rolling. Appearantly Funk did not call for the stick to be tended. However, no one, I repeat, NO ONE even noticed at the time of the supposed infraction. That is, except some legalistic nerd who happend to be watching golf while he was catching up on his knitting. (Probably some Hot Springs Village jerk who originally hails from Chicago !)

In fact, my problem is not with the rules engaging nerd. My problem is with the spinless PGA Tour officials who were stupid enough to take the guy's call, and then were inept enough to exact the penalty AFTER Azinger's round was completely finished! Zinger had to be called into the TV trailer and shown the infraction on tape. Being the man that he is, Zinger accepted the penalty with much grace and said, "Maybe this will make me work harder tomorrow." But how would you like to be Zinger's poor caddie who pulled the boner in the first place? He may well have just cost himself and his boss several thousand bucks.

Why is it that golf is the only sport that allows this? Rules officials are on the spot and should have to make spot-calls just like all other sports officials. Umpires, referees, etc. all make calls in a moment and often make the wrong call. That is just part of sports. You get some of the bad calls - you lose some of them. They all even out in the end (unless of course you are Texas playing Arkansas at Austin.) Remember when the kid reached over the right field seats at Yankee Stadium a few years ago during the world series and garnered a home run that wasn't really a home run? We all saw it! Why weren't we allowed to phone in and have the call changed? I will tell you why! Because there is no call-in in baseball! Or football. Or tennis. Or bowling. Or hockey. Or any other sport for that matter!

The PGA Tour needs to grow themselves a set and make a rules change. Just like a guy has only five minutes to search for a lost ball, and only ten seconds to wait for a putt hanging over the lip, there ought to be a time limit on rules decisions. Why not do like baseball? When an appeal call is made in baseball it has to be made before the next pitch is delivered to the plate. Golf should have a rule that says appeals to rules breaches have to be made before the player puts his ball into play on the next hole. Once the drive is hit on the next hole, the matter becomes moot.

If you don't believe me, ask Paul Azinger!

I realize this topic has the potential of being over-blogged by my fellow part time scribes and I, but it is what is on my mind. Michael Novak has written the most thorough and balanced review yet of Mel Gibson’s The Passion. It is a long read, but worth it if you are as excited about this film as I am.

I love looking at my referral logs. How else would I find out that if you search google for Vin Diesel's Penis, this blog is the 7th link that is returned to you.

In one of my more instrospective moments, I was given the clarity to finally describe exactly what is love.

My old buddy John has created a new blog called The Back Porch that he has invited several of us to hang out in, including his mother. To christen the new site, I have written it a poem. Like all of my work, it is uncomfortable and somewhat sad. Of course, art is a reflection of the artist.

Matt Drudge has seen Mel Gibson's The Passion, and he speaks very highly of it.