Bridgette left me at home alone last night with the boy and a short list of chores. Among them was to finish the laundry, and to assist me she left me a helpful note of the items that should not be placed in the dryer, lest they shrink. Certainly this was a reasonable request for any adult with a well-managed beard and Master’s Degree.

Of course, I blew it. A few hours after she left, I pulled her shrunken workout pants out of the dryer (the ones she expressly stated not to put in the dryer) and let slip a choice phrase from my college years.

So a hearty, ironic congratulations now goes out to me for destroying my wife’s pants and failing to execute her clear, concise request. I have effectively demonstrated my need for her to nag me about simple chores, so for the time being my childish bristling will go unwarranted. If there’s anything worse than being nagged, it’s acknowledging the demonstrable fact that I need to be nagged. This is just lovely.

What’s also lovely is that because of my foolish error, my wife will be spending $25 or $30 on a new pair of workout pants, money that is likely to come out of my monthly strobe light budget (I’m converting my garage into the Chamber of Epilepsy). If the next few weeks suck, I have only myself to blame.

Excuse me now, won’t you? I’m going to go sit in a bathroom stall for a while and look at my knife.

Today is Presidents Day, where we honor Abraham Lincoln for slowly plunging a dagger between Jefferson Davis’ ribs to bring a just end to the War Between the States. Also, the other presidents are honored.

As a history teacher by trade, I would like to imagine that this blog can serve to educate as well as offend. For this reason, I offer you today this index of great presidential-themed posts from the JLP. Be they sullen, silly, or substantive, these posts highlight the history of our gloriously inerrent presidents.

Presidential Spotlights from the JLP Archives
George Washington
John Adams
Martin Van Buren
John Tyler
James Buchanan
Abraham Lincoln (and Lincoln’s dead body)
Rutherford B. Hayes
Chester A. Arthur
William McKinley
Theodore Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Harry Truman
Gerald Ford
Ronald Reagan

As a parting gift, please enjoy this free download of These the President’s Be, easily the weakest track off our 2004 EP of goofy songs, Good Times & Pumpkin Pie!

Yesterday, a friend suggested that my blog posts have recently taken on a dark, sour overtone.

After I told my friend to shut up and mind his own business, I wondered if perhaps he had a point, so I went back and re-read my posts from the last few weeks. There was a violent Wendy’s-related entry, a misanthropic post about you being ugly, a bitter rant about the bullet hole in our garage, and so on. So while my friend’s comment may have been accurate, I would suggest that they’re really no different than usual.

What is this person expecting out of my blog, anyway? Has this blog ever been particularly warm-hearted? Blogs themselves have become passé, so I use this site to entertain myself by riffing on the dozen or so disturbing, obsessive themes I’ve always written about, interspersed with the occasional book or music review. I’d like to think the audience for this blog has weeded itself out by this point (with the exception of my animal hoarding posts, which people continue to come across and get outraged about). In short, if you’re waiting for the JLP to become edifying, then you might as well start loading up your shotgun and find a comfortable recliner.

(See, there’s an example. I don’t even know what exactly that last comment means, other than it’s off-putting and anti-social. But I like how it sounds, and I get to chose to include it in my post because this is my blog and I pay for the domain.)

Perhaps the content has turned darker lately because of the pressures of being a new dad and my career and our delicate family finances. I usually end up writing these on bleak mornings at work between a million other responsibilities. I also know that if I don’t crank at least three of these out a week, then Tom Hipps starts riding my ass in the comments section. Trust me, there’s nothing I appreciate more than some ungrateful jerk looking for me to spend my precious free time churning out blog entries for his fleeting amusement.

So to my friend, perhaps my blog has become a grim, immoral place. Perhaps that’s how I like it. Perhaps if the Godfather’s Pizza by my house hadn’t closed, everything would be okay, but we’re in a recession and everything sucks right now because Godfather’s is slowly disappearing. Seriously, what do I have left?

On an unrelated note, please enjoy this video footage of me delighting in my son.

Great news, everybody! ‘90210′ star Ian Ziering is engaged!

Even better news! Ian Ziering is alive!

Our old rapscallious friend Steve Sanders is finally tying the knot after years of being recognized as a vaguely familiar wisp of our collective memories! Way to go, Ian!

You might have recognized an bronzed, hairplugged brute claiming to be Ian Ziering in a recent season of Dancing With the Stars, but I remain skeptical. How could Ian Ziering have more hair and whiter teeth today than he did when he started portraying the salacious Steve at the tender young age of 35?

Do you remember the episode when Steve was jocular and flashed a winning smile? That was probably my favorite.

Anyway, good work, Ian Ziering. Someday, when your bride has come of age, you’ll have to sit her down and show her a few episodes of 90210, and tell her about the 1990s. Then you could lean in and tenderly kiss her, all while Jason Priestly watches from the closed-circut camera feed you had installed for him.

Cheers!

Cold enough for you?

Blast, it’s cold outside! It’s colder than a witch’s mammary gland! When that frigid air hits your lungs, it feels like Reggie Jackson taking his 35oz. Louisville Slugger to your ribs! It ain’t natural!

It’s so cold out, it makes me want to curl up under a blanket and watch CBS’s crime procedural Cold Case, starring that ashen-faced lady from my nightmares.

Because of the frozen temps here, my car was running at perhaps 60% efficiency this morning. It was like at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when the Enterprise is trying to get away from the Genesis project explosion but they don’t have warp power until Spock sacrifices his life for the good of the crew. That’s exactly what it was like as I drove through Brooklyn Center.

I hate these Minnesota Januaries. Everything is cold and depressing and my sullen misery only grows deeper with each drunken pelvic thrust from New Orleans Saints fans.

Something’s got to be done about this! Who’s up for a suicide pact culminating in a blazing bloodbath in a Culvers parking lot?

Back in 2004, I wrote a smug little post about Brett Favre having tossed up an idiotic interception at crunch time in the playoffs.

In 2008, I took more digs after it appeared that another foolish interception in a Packers loss in overtime of the NFC Championship game would be his last throw as an NFL quarterback.

Then tonight, with 19 seconds to play in a tie game and the ball on the Saints 38 yard line. Favre rolled out to the right, and instead of taking the 5 or 6 yards of open field, he threw a stupid pass back into the middle of the field to hand the ball and the momentum back to the Saints. On a night when the Vikings had dominated every statistical category except the all-important turnovers, their two biggest players couldn’t carry their water, and all my years of mockery washed back over me like a tidal wave of urine from drunken Wisconsinites.

Now I lay prone, soaked in bitter irony and long-prophecied sorrow. I will fight my way through this unhappy night and arise tomorrow a new, stronger man. Though this blog’s bad karma hath wrought a severe punishment upon Vikings fans, I will continue to carry on writing distasteful blog entries that nobody enjoys reading. I am oblivious to the lessons of defeat, much like the liberal wing of the Democratic party.

So tonight, I say, “See you in hell, Brett Favre. I no longer hate you, but neither shall I ever again snuggle into your whiskery affections.”