… back of my neck getting burned and gritty. It finally quit raining here in Bibleburg and zango! Just like that we’re in the 90s. You know it’s hot when you ask Turkish whether he wants to go outside and he gives you that blue-eyed are-you-fucking-kidding-me look and stalks off for a daylong nap in our bed, under the ceiling fan. I had to run the sprinklers for an hour this morning to keep the lawn from catching fire.

The two or three of you who follow the action here at Mad Blog Media may recall that a sawbones clipped a seborrheic keratosis off my mug a while back and sent it off to the wizards for processing. Word is that the booger was non-cancerous and thus the only physical ailment afflicting Your Humble Narrator is a wicked case of butt-ugly, which as we all know goes from the skin right down to the bone.

No rubber bracelets for that one; sorry. Maybe I should contract with a Chinese outfit to crank out a few jillion LiveUgly® bracelets and sell the sumbitches through Wal-Mart. Talk about your target market.

Random news nuggets with a side of snark for your reading pleasure:

• Give me your furry love: A 45-year-old woman has sex with a 16-year-old boy who enjoys dressing up as an animal. Does that make her a PETAphile? (Thanks and a tip of the chipmunk mask to Charles Pelkey.)

• Sour Vino’: How do you say “My way or the highway” in Kazakh?

• Sweatin’ gravy: If Colorado is the skinniest state, I don’t ever want to go to Mississippi. Hell, from the sound of it, I couldn’t squeeze in if I wanted to.

• Short time, sailor?: The Washington Post gets busted bending over and grabbing its ankles while going commando in a leather miniskirt and 7-inch spike heels. Say it ain’t so, ho’.

A reader advises (thanks, Libby) that comments have suddenly been closed on posts and that nobody can read ’em or make one. I wondered why it got so quiet out there all of a sudden.  I have no idea what the problem is — comments show as enabled in settings, and I even tried overriding in a couple individual posts, but so far no joy. I’ve opened a support ticket at Hostcentric, which is akin to sacrificing a black goat to the Interweb gods, but what the hell? It’s either that or start banging on things with a big fuckin’ hammer.

Michael Jackson seems to keep on being busily and profitably dead without my help, so I went back to work for VeloNews.com and did a few chores around the rancho between bouts of translating poorly from a French wire service while all our English-speakers fucked off somewhere, girding their loins for the Tour.

The garage now looks more like a bike shop than a toxic waste dump. I can walk from front to rear and back without barking a shin on something, and all the two-wheelers are hanging neatly from hooks, barring the Vespa, which has a prime spot on the deck, right next to the lawn mower.

Herself, meanwhile, got all medieval on the backyard greenery after a short bike ride. The June rains have turned the place into something out of “Platoon,” and it was getting tough to walk from the back door to the alley trash can without some vegetable grabbing you by the ankles and whispering, “Me love you long time, GI.”

The Turk, as usual, did fuck-all. Friggin’ hippie. Nobody ever told him that the revolution is over, and we lost.