Don’t you DARE call it “ping pong”

When Anne and I get together with her family, especially her brother Tom and his wife, we inevitably end up playing some ping pong. The version of this game that we play deserves to be called “ping pong” because when I play it, I look like a ding dong.

This video is a collection of ten of the best table tennis shots from 2012. I personally think these guys are superhuman or something. It’s incredible.

Check out the dude who uses a crutch. Whoa…

Video after the jump.

Eff this effing stuff, indeed

Larue Ford is an Arizona woman who was trying to move back to the Midwest, Indiana specifically, to be near family. However, she was unable to get a job as a driver because of an upaid ticket in Berrien County, Michigan. She paid the $444 ticket but, because of a bureaucratic foul up, she still couldn’t get it erased from her record. While in the Berrien County Clerks office, she finally learned they had screwed up and forgot to collect a $50 “reinstatement fee”. Ford, who has a masters degree in social work was told to appear before the judge when she returned to pay the $50 fee and, on the way out of the Clerk’s office, muttered “fuck this fucking shit”, a pretty understandable grouse considering all they had put her through.

They arrested her and she spent the Christmas holiday in jail for “contempt of court” despite the fact that she had never actually been in court.

More of this story embarrassment to Michigan after the jump.

Hypocrisy is rarely so clearly on display

Last week at his press conference (where, by the way, he didn’t take a single question), National Gun Fetishists Association (NRA) Executive Vice Chair Wayne LaPierre castigated the federal government for its inaction on forming a national registry for the mentally ill.

It’s an appalling demostration of hypocrisy given that what he didn’t mention is that his group has been actively fighting AGAINST a similar registry of gun registrations in this country.

Michigan Republicans owe me $57.50

My kids are in town today and we decided to drive to The Henry Ford to see The Hobbit in 3D and Imax (squee!) It had been snowing and blowing for a couple hours and there were three inches or so of snow on the ground. The road in front of our house was pretty slick but I knew that, once I got on I-94, the main highway into Detroit, I’d be fine. It’s a main artery, after all, with heavy truck and commuter traffic.

We got 5 miles down the highway and decided that it was simply too dangerous to continue. We saw three accidents with cars and trucks in the ditch, one all the way into the woods on the side of the road.

For three inches of snow.

My rant after the jump.

Aye, aye, aye…

Gun fetishists are in complete freakout mode right now because they realize that the rest of the country is no longer buying their tripe about the evil unconstitutionality of controlling guns and ammunition in this country. They are so mindless about this that they have latched onto one of the weirdest reasons imaginable for not passing any gun laws.

I’m going to try to explain this but, I’ll be frank, their “logic” is anything but logical. If you don’t follow it, that’s completely understandable.

He meant to (not) do that

Remember the horrifying graphic from Mitt Romney’s transition webpage that showed him as “President-Elect”?

Given his complete lack of qualifications for being president and the fact that he was so completely out of touch with most Americans, the very idea of Romney as “president elect” was enough give Democrats heart palpitations.

As it turns out, at least according to the story that’s being spun by Romney’s family and campaign officials, he didn’t really want to run for president anyway. It was something he did because he got talked into it by his son Tagg and his wife Ann.

Just another trophy to add to the shelf. Another item for his curriculum vitae. But not something he really wanted to do.

More analysis after the jump.

“Two North” is a story about one Christmas when my mom was spending time on the psychiatric ward of our town’s hospital after trying to commit suicide to escape a physically-abusive husband. I was thirteen. It was a cataclysmic event in our lives but it brought us together into a two-person tribe like no other event ever has in my life.

My wife’s cousin, an editor (e.g. “Flags of Our Fathers”), has convinced me to use it as the launching pad for a book about life with my mom. I have yet to find the time to do this but that book is still inside me and waiting to get out. It’ll happen.

I offer this story to my friends here at Eclectablog on Christmas as a tribute to my mother, a woman who went from a pregnant sixteen-year old to an executive for the Chrysler Corporation in the short span of twenty years.

Much of who I am today is because of her and the lessons she taught me.

Read it after the jump.

Thanks, everyone, for everything

From our house to yours, have a Merry Christmas!

Sunni Bear the pitbull, aka BSBOL (big squishy ball of love)