It's been hot. Damn hot. I'd say Africa hot, except in Africa, it rains every once in a while. It's been so hot it can't rain. All the moisture builds up and thinks about dropping--then it evaporates. The heat kills it, and it's still hot. This could be affecting my thinking. It could be making me and a vast majority of this town a bit delirious.

I tried to have a rain drink ceremony yesterday. It's a lot like a rain dance ceremony, but not as strenuous. This post-modern version of an ancient ceremony doesn't seem to work very well. I did get a little drunk, but it didn't rain. Maybe it has to be cumulative. I may have to try again today.

Speaking of repeating, the movies are all about sequels this summer. I know there are sequels every summer, but it seems like almost everything in the theater this summer has a number at the end. We're recycling ideas at a faster rate, I guess. Y'know, progress and all that. T3: Again With The Terminators is possibly the most egregious violation of creative recycling I've seen in a while.

I'm kind of assuming everyone who wants to see this already has. For the rest of you: don't go. And here's what happens: it is the same movie as T2 except the world is not saved at the end. It ends with nuclear holocaust. So, in essence, it negated the entire second movie (which was much better--I watched that one again last night) and bummed out an entire movie-going public already shell-shocked by a war half a world away.

Americans are the assholes all over again.

And we're still the assholes in real life. The Prez lied about intelligence, got someone else to take the blame and then said the intelligence doesn't matter. The war was all about making life better for the Iraqis. We didn't go into Iraq because they have weapons of mass destruction. We didn't go in because they're reconstituting a nuclear and chemical weapons program. We went in because the Iraqis were suffering under Saddam, and we're such a nice country for helping out our...neighbors.

Funny, Bush hasn't mentioned all the oil in Iraq. Because when you come down to it, I do believe Bush's reasons for going into Iraq had nothing to do with the fabled WMDs. He's not lying about that. But he realized about a year ago that he needed a better reason to blow up a country than revenge and oil. He gave us one, everyone fell in line and now, well, that entire movie has been negated. I'm sorry, not movie. Policy. I'm getting these things mixed up, I guess. The Prez does realize his bullshit hurts real people, right? He does know it's not a movie?

Kobe Bryant is an asshole, too. He cheated on his wife (who just had a kid a few months ago) and might have even raped a girl. I say might because the lines in this are always blurry when it comes to famous people with lots of money. The girl, who wouldn't have even given Kobe the time of day if he was a regular person, was probably pretty excited to meet him. And Kobe, who from all accounts doesn't do the groupie thing very much, apparently was a bit sloppy about stating his intentions. I'm sure a few million dollars surely could have eased hurt feelings. Now we have to hear about this shit for the next six months or longer.

A few months back, Route 666 (the devil's highway) was changed to some other number that means absolutely nothing. A few weeks after the number changed, a horrific accident occurred on the highway (people still call it the devil's highway, even with the number change). And now, all the Route 666 signs have been stolen from the roadside (just because the highway designation number changed on paper doesn't mean the state ran out post-haste to change the signs on the actual road).

So there are no signs on the highway anymore. Everyone still calls it the devil's highway, and there is still the occasional deadly traffic accident. I thought changing the number was going to fix this. I guess the number of a highway really doesn't mean anything at all. Good thing we spent so much time discussing and passing laws about it. It's not like we have any other problems in our state or country or world to deal with. Assholes.

Matt Worley is an asshole, too. But he's blaming it on the heat. The heat has fessed up to its role in Matt's asshole-ism, but doesn't feel like leaving its post any time soon.