Ordained Alligator Removing Pastor

Glamberts,

If you arrived at the Razor in search of my commentary on the ongoing "to shave or not to shave" feud between Adam Lambert and I, you must only scroll down a few inches. That post, from yesterday, is entitled @adamsrazor vs. @adamsgoatee.


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While scouring the headlines for blogworthy pieces yesterday, I found a story about a lady in Central Florida (Alexis Dunbar) who, over the weekend, was surprised to find an alligator in her bathroom. You can read about it here. From the article we learn that, "Her boyfriend propped a small table by the bathroom to keep the gator inside until an officer from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission showed up to take him away. "


It's a crying shame that Ms. Dunbar is not a member of Rock Sink Baptist Church in Old Town, FL. If she were, it would've been unnecessary to call the FFaWCC. You see, the minister of Rock Sink Baptist Church, Terry Cranford wears at least three hats. He is the pastor, minister of music, and head alligator remover for his congregation. As far as I can tell, he is the only Southern Baptist minister who is an ordained Alligator removal expert.


As it happens, I lived across the street from Rev. Cranford when I was a child. It would be an understatement to say that I was terrified of him. As long as I live, I'll never forget when he was studying for his final exam in Baptism. There was a shortage of new believers in the area and Rev. Cranford desperately wanted to practice his technique. When none of us kids would agree to be dunked by him, he caught an alligator and was practicing baptisms on it in his bathroom.



Mrs. Cranford, patient though she may be, was immediately forgiven for the things she said/thought when she saw what that poor gator did to their bathroom. The beast tore down their shower curtain, knocked the commode off the foundation, and was in the process of removing the door from its hinges when Mrs. Cranford arrived home.


The resulting conversation between the soaking wet Rev. Cranford and his wife went something like this:


Mrs. Cranford: "What have I told you about bringing alligators into our home?"



Rev. Cranford: "Don't worry honey! I've just about baptized all the sin outta this one! Couple more dunks and he'll be redeemed."


Mrs Cranford: " A couple more dunks and there won't be anything left of the house!"


As I'm sure you can imagine, we kids in the neighborhood gave the Cranford house a pretty wide berth. In addition to preaching and alligator wrestling, Rev. Cranford also enjoys singing all 4 verses of "Just as I am" and collecting "Love offerings". Quite a well-rounded fellow...


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A personal note to Rev. Cranford:


Perhaps there are some drawbacks to "knowing, and being remembered by, this smart-aleck kid".


I hope you like cramps,


Adam

@adamsrazor vs. @adamsgoatee - Baby-faced Blogger vs. Baby-faced Superstar

Today I offer, to the best of my ability, the complete detailing of my recent encounter with an anatomical part of a former American Idol runner-up, specifically Adam Lambert's goatee. The media coverage of our heated battle has ranged from insufficient to inaccurate and in an attempt to set the record straight, I offer this:

While I have not closely followed the career of Adam Lambert, I certainly remember when he competed on American Idol. Further, not long after his song "What do you want from me?" was released, I was in a hotel lobby in Malaysia and overheard the girl working the desk singing a wonderful rendition the song. So as far as I'm concerned he's an international superstar. His sexual orientation and glamorous makeup are a bit unconventional where I come from, but I salute him for his individuality.

This paragraph contains information that I did not know last week, but learned as this drama unfolded. I've presented it to you here so you can fully understand our e-feud. In an effort to mix things up a little bit, Adam Lambert recently grew a goatee. As soon as this goatee was announced on Perez Hilton, his faithful fans stormed out of their closets and rioted in their local hipster-boutiques. Not all of his fans were thrilled with the goatee. In fact, many were quite passionate about their dislike for it. Within a matter of days, his goatee took on a life of its own, to the point where Adam created a separate Twitter account, @adamsgoatee where the goatee tweets in the 1st person. Here are two photos of Lambert, with and without the goatee. You are invited to form you own opinion.















So Friday night, I met Christena at Outback for dinner. Old fashioned Slicers might think that after nearly 5 years of dating, I would finally be comfortable enough to pick her up at her house so we could ride to the restaurant together. Alas, I've found this particular dating method a tad to, shall we say, restrictive. Far better to take separate cars. In the event the meal goes horrible wrong, as is often the case with me, I can just high-tail it outta there and avoid an awkward drive back to her place...

Upon exiting the restaurant and walking out to my car, my phone notified me that I had been mentioned on Twitter. As I'm sure you can imagine this is highly unusual. I have a limited number of followers and just use it to announce that a new article is up on the Razor. I've only been mentioned a couple times in the year or so since I set it up. The text of the mentioning tweet looked like this:

AdamAdamAdam3: someone should set up a twitter account called @adamsrazor and pick a fight with @adamsgoatee.

Clearly, AdamAdamAdam3 didn't know there was already an @adamsrazor or he wouldn't have sent out the message, but I thought, "Hey, I don't mind picking a fight with this goatee. In fact, it might be kinda fun". So I sent this message:

@adamsgoatee - I've got my shaving cream lathered up. I'm coming for that furball. #skinwins

I fell asleep before getting any responses, but the next morning my Twitter account was going off like Tiger Wood's text messaging. While trying to figure out what was going on, I realized that this wasn't just any garden variety goatee, it was Adam Lambert's goatee. The weight of the responsibility hit me like a ton of eyeliner. The happiness of a globe full of Glamberts was resting on the success of my mission. Failure to remove the world's most controversial facial hair could have a negative impact on an entire generation.

In an attempt at hilarity, my next tweet was a play on the lyrics from his multi-platinum hit "What do you want from me?". It is reproduced here:

@AdamsGoatee -What do I want from you? What do I want from you? For you to be little black specks in my bathroom sink!
23 Apr Favorite Reply

Sadly, the Goatee has gone into hiding. The last thing the world has heard from it was this tweet, over 48 hours ago:

AdamsGoatee Adams Goatee

@adamsrazor I am a peaceful goatee. sir. No need to fight! Still, #fuzzyforever

Glamberts, you have no need to worry. I am dedicated to your cause. This goatee will be located. It will be removed with a gentle touch, and Adam's face will no longer be concealed by hair. Instead, it will be concealed by copious amounts of make-up, eye liner, and mascara.

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Any Adam Lambert fans that wander onto the Razor are encouraged not to take offense at any portion of the above nonsense. The Razor is written entirely tongue-in-cheek. I hope you take it in the spirit it was poorly written, an attempt at humor.

Sweeping the Globe, Retronyms, and some videos...

World,

Remember when I, in an attempt to be pretentious, used to address my posts to the the Nation? It was a joke, perhaps funny only to me, that I stole from Stephen Colbert, and implied that the whole US was tuning into whatever incoherence I hammered out on here. Well, I should have set my sights a little higher. Over the past few weeks, my international web traffic has far exceeded my domestic traffic. Since I last updated you, I've added hits from Singapore, Malaysia, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria, Tunisia, and Togo! At this time, it is unknown if any of these people will become repeat Slicers. I'll assume not...

Last comment on this topic. In some cases, I can tell what key words people are Googling to arrive at the Razor. Some of the entries are quite odd. How about the person who Googled "Kelli Strowd"? They were directed to my article announcing her faux-pregnancy. Perhaps it was a secret admirer! Or maybe her husband, The Strowd, was doing an E-vestigation on his wife... Rest easy Michael, Googling your wife's name leads not to debauchery, but to the relative safety of the Razor.

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How about some language, I haven't done that in a while. I learned a new word recently, Retronym. It's been around for over 30 years, but I wasn't aware of it. What does it mean? From Wikipedia, a retronym is a newly coined term, word or phrase,that provides a distinction that was previously unneeded. For example, for decades there was a musical instrument called the guitar. No other information was needed. Then someone plugged one into an amp. So the term acoustic guitar, not previously needed, was put into use. Got it?

Which brings me to my point. The Obama Administration, in a misguided attempt at political correctness, has banished the word Terrorism and the phrase "Global War on Terror" from its quite articulate vocabulary. Now we have "Man Caused Disasters" or some such ridiculousness. Imagine my surprise when I found out that when we, along with our European partners, started bombing Libya, were not engaging in War, but in Kinetic Military Action!

In fairness to The President, this phrase originated in the Bush Administration, but Bush had the decency not to insult our intelligence by using it. So what is kinetic military action? Dropping bombs and shooting bullets—you know, killing people—is kinetic. And Non-Kinetic Military Action is messing electronically with the enemy’s communications equipment or wiping out its bank accounts. Cool. Prior to the Internet, we just tried to kill em all, now we can kill em or give them a computer virus, so distinctions must be made... (Various portions of the preceding paragraphs were copied and pasted from here.)

So if we're not gonna have Wars anymore, someone in the bumper sticker industry has some work to do.

• Make Love, not Kinetic Military Action.



• Kinetic Military Action. What is it good for?



• Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of Kinetic Military Action.

Not quite as catchy as the originals, but in a post-modern society adjustments must be made.

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A couple videos. The first one is fascinating. I remember when I was a child and glass was something you looked through or drank from. The future for glass, it seems, is bright, and depending on your want, less clear. Amazing:

Last, I saw a group of grown men playing a wacky little game yesterday. It was a "Tears Challenge". Watch the video below and try not to cry. Whoever makes it the furthest wins. Most people get choked up around the 1:45 mark. I made it almost 6 minutes. It's actually a heart-warming video, but if you can defeat it with a dry eye, I don't wanna be friends with ya.



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Ok one more item. Somewhere back in the archive there is a Razor post that ends with the phrase "Carthago delenda est". Translated to English it means "Carthage must be destroyed". At the time, I was ending all my posts with Latin phrases (it didn't seem so dumb at the time). Generally, the Latin phrase would either be humourous or pertinent to that particular post.

Ancient lore allows that Cato the Elder would end all of his speeches with the phrase "Carthago delenda est" even if he had not been discussing Carthage in the speech. This always got his audience riled up, as the Romans were at war (kinetic, I assume) with Carthage. So I decided to end one of my posts Cato-style.

While reading about Tunisia, and their recent revolution, I was shocked to learn that the Capital of Tunisia is Tunis, formerly Carthage. In a near-repeating of history, had their dictator not left when he did, Carthage would have needed a good ole fashion destroying...

Tech Support?, More Countries, and Venishon's

The last couple times I've attempted to publish a post, Blogger removes all semblance of formatting. No paragraphs, no structure. Just one long stream of mindless drivel. As if this blog wasn't bad enough in bite sized pieces. So I had to go back and edit the post restoring the structure and try again. On the 2nd or 3rd attempt, it would publish in the format I intended (not to say good, but you take my point). Interestingly, my Microsoft Word is currently showing all of the formatting codes whenever I work on a document. Somewhere, deep in the recesses of my mind, I remember someone showing me how to turn that function off, but try as I might, I can't seem to access it. So if you know how to hide the "background codes" in Microsoft Word, I'd love to hear from you.

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The American Civil War started 150 years ago today at Ft. Sumter, SC. FYI...
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While on the subject of anniversary dates, 1 year ago today I was in the country of Malaysia on the Island of Borneo. To read more about these (mis)adventures you must needs only access the Razor archive.

The point? Yesterday someone in Malaysia accessed my blog by searching "prinsip adam razor" on Google. What in the world were they looking for? I'm tempted to run that search myself sometime.

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Also added Dubai and Saudi Arabia to my hit map. Might have to start writing this baby in Arabic soon! Incidentally, I only know a couple Arabic words so my posts would be shorter (Slicers caught applauding will have their hands cut off). I can, however, render the word "kathira" in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Surprisingly, the pronunciation in the two locales is quite different. Sadly, I forgot what the word means...

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Realizing this might be the worst post of I've ever hammered out, I'll end with a humorous story from the weekend. And risk fouling my relationship with Christena...

Christena made plans to meet her friend Kim for dinner Saturday night. I, luckily, was not invited (forced) to attend. Upon concluding dinner, she called me to let me know how it went.

She said they had trouble finding a place suitable for Kim's mother to eat as she is Venetian. (Amy Kennedy, graduate of Dale County High School, spells it venishon, but I digress.) I've known Kim for a long time and had no idea that her mother was Italian, but it would explain a few things about her personality. Italian food in Dothan is of poor quality/quantity so I sympathized with their plight.

While processing this new information, I mentioned that they might have considered Olive Garden. At this point the conversation took an unforeseen 90 degree turn in the direction of hilarity. Befuddled, Christena informed me that Kim's mother, as it turns out, is not Italian. Rather, she has made the lifestyle choice of not eating meat, or any other animal product.

After laughing uncontrollably for a while, soiling myself, and reducing Christena to tears, I condescendingly explained that she was probably searching for the word "vegan", and that as it stood, I'd assumed that Kim's mother grew up in an Italian village where the populace travels around in little gondolas.

Due to the enthusiasm with which I heaped ridicule in her general direction, I've spent the last couple days in Christena's doghouse, subsisting on a diet of tofu, washed down with a tall glass of soy milk.

Delizioso

The Razor Goes Global...

Sorry, I've been trying to keep a low profile these last couple weeks. As you know, there is a little html code embedded in my website that allows me to keep track of where my web-traffic is coming from. In an effort to fuel my ego, I check my "hit map" about once a week to see if I'm getting any unusual activity. I'm pretty sure that I provided the 1st two international hits, having visited the Razor from S. Korea and Malaysia. Occasionally, over the past year, I would get a hit from a foreign country, but my map was pretty blank.

And then, on March 16th, I wrote this. A stupid little post making fun of the Italian Prime Minister and offering asylum to two Middle-Eastern Queens. My map went nuts. I added about 25 countries in less than a week. Some of the countries were not the kind of places where you wanna piss people off... Iran, Qatar, Kuwait, Lebanon, &c. have fairly strict rules about soliciting their women to come live with you, so I developed a little paranoia.

Further, I made it pretty easy to find out exactly where I live...

I'm hopeful that the Italians aren't mad about what I wrote. Surely the mafia has more important things to worry about than me. However, anyone viewing my much photoshopped profile picture might think that I'm actually an attractive guy, so I'm a little concerned that Berlusconi, having already bedded most Italians, might want to sex me up a little bit.

So I have a message for jealous Sultans and libidinous Prime Ministers. We're rednecks down here. We don't take kindly to cranky Muslims or over-sexed elderly Italianos. If you come prancing onto Helms Rd, wearing your fancy vests (suicide or other), prepare to be greeted by buck shot...

To the fine people of Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, Macedonia, Australia, New Zealand, Morocco (finally hit the continent of Africa), Spain, France, Portugal, Ukraine, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, UK, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Barbados (I hope it was Rihanna), India, and Hong Kong, welcome to the Razor, the (now) world-famous-tongue-in-cheek-narcissistic home page of yours truly... I hope you stick around. And translate this nonsense into your native tongues to be distributed among the masses. And send me $100,000 to subscribe to Adam's Razor Platinum.
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Still haven't flushed out the Slicer(s) from Menasha, WI. I'm starting to think that there is a wire crossed on the Internet. I know that years ago when I worked for a company based in St. Louis, my computer in Alabama had a Missouri IP address. So it's possible that whoever is being logged as Menasha, is doing so inadvertently...

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Watched a few minutes of American Idol last night... I haven't seen enough of it this season to comment on the contestants, but I had a couple thoughts on the judges. I really like what Simon has done with his hair and Paula looks waaaaayyyy better. Randy, you're still my dog, but you're not keeping pace.

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That seems to be all I've got for now...