After approximately 2,500 posts and almost seven years of work, CBK.com is finished. 

I would like to thank Thos and Dominga for all their help over the years with the site, all the guest contributors over the years, and of course all the readers. I've thoroughly enjoyed the experience. 

I think when Dr. Steve died, I sort of lost focus here, and it's time to move on. I'll be re-posting some of the better pieces published here at my whimsy, but the OC is done. I'll keep the site online for at least another year, but it'll probably come down by 2012. 

Again, thank you for reading CBK.com. 

DWH sent me the tale of his burned Beetle...

The VW was the only car I could repair myself, and by a stroke of pure irony, it burned because I provided all service and maintenance.

After initiating a fuel filter service project, I drove another vehicle in the family fleet to acquire parts.  Though an ongoing legal dispute casts controversy on whether or not I gave notice of my VW's "in service" status, a family member decided to borrow the car and traveled only a short distance down the driveway before the Super Beetle transformed into a super flaming homer, rendering me carless until I entered into the lifelong bond with the Honda mafia. 

Other notes:

A hill on Kings Road in the Valley provided the max speed test for my VW.  Though top speed lists as 81 mph, I could touch 87-90 on a cloudy day. 

Because of his Yar, I imagine that CBK appreciates the joys of driving, let's say "confidently" in a small vehicle. 

Push starting in rare but necessary times was genuinely fun.

Third gear had the best range of mph, accelerating nicely for a 4 cylinder manual transmission.

Rather than the bug, I almost ended up with a 1950s GMC pickup that required lots of restoration.  Would love to have one of those now (fully restored), but could only shudder at the investment of time and money, two things on which I was low at the time. 

VW's modern line of vehicles experience low-ish quality ratings, yet customer satisfaction remains sturdy.  Some say that brand power (with a historical power-nod to the Beetle) adds to the perception that VW creates great vehicles, even if that is objectively not the case. 

This is Jeff Hobbs & The Jacks doing Comfortably Southern, probably the best Southern rock song you’ve never heard. The song is a memorial of sorts of Kraig Hodge, the late brother of my friend Kevin Hodge, who was one of my best friends in high school.

There was a time in Stillwater-OK that Jeff played Willie’s Saloon every Wednesday night, just him and guitar and his songs, and this was his best, but it wasn’t his only great song. His album ‘Comfortably Southern’ is quite hard to find, but if you can find it, it’s worth it – aside from the nascent personal connection, it’s one of my favorite of the last decade.

FWIW. 

My mom sent me an email from Sans Souci asking “Where is cbrookskurtz.com?”

As a smartass-jackass, I replied “It’s at www.cbrookskurtz.com.”

My mom’s not much of an Internetter, but I understand her point ie wtf?

==

REK said in his most famous song that the road goes on forever but the party never ends. I’ve heard the song so many times that it doesn’t even resonate. I don’t see my digital life as a road, nor do I see my life-life as a party, so that was a pretty poor way to start things.

For the better and the worse, I’ve been a writer since I was a kid. I’ve produced some pretty good stuff and a lot of bad stuff, but I think Mom’s question has merit. Since 2001, I’ve written pretty-much everyday, and usually about current events, often political. Anyone reading this know I’m a fire-breathing, bomb-throwing Conservative. Talk shit about Sarah Palin to my face, and I’m probably coming back with force. I’m still that way, I just don’t want to write about it here anymore.

However, I think it’s appropriate that the first column I wrote for the O’Colly – way back in ’95 – was one hoping for Colin Powell to run for POTUS.

Oh how times have changed and oh yeah…

This isn’t news.

Also not news is that I’m stopping the OC [Original Content] here at CBK.com this week. I have one chapter of Paving the Road to Serfdom to publish, a few other items will come [DWH is finally going to reveal what the hell happened with his VW Bug] and a thought, a few vidyas, and voila, seven years work complete.

Reflecting – something I never do in public until now – I should have stopped the site when I announced its end. There were some nice comments and a few more emails – that shoulda been that. But, like the companion to a cancerous dog, I’ve kept the poor girl alive a few more weeks for my own benefit, not hers.

What finally got to me was the politics.

I love politics, but I’ve tired of writing about the subject. Maybe that will change, maybe it won’t, either way, I honestly don’t care. I’ve set out my arguments for what I believe, what I think, who I like, who I don’t and my sadness at where I see the country going. I’m not a blogger and I’m not a known commodity in the interesting herd of Conservative thinkers. More importantly, I can’t abide any form of groupthink, or at least I can’t contribute to it. I’m not a contrarian, per se, but I’ve always been uncomfortably with saying here-here.

To be clear, I support, the Tea Parties, Palin, Limbaugh, the Cheneys; I support Life, Liberty and z’Pursuit of z’Happiness, and I do support the ‘rights’ of animals and the right of homosexuals to marry, just not by judicial fiat. I despise the crew in power, I want Palin to be POTUS and I want the rich to get richer, and the poor to get richer too – I’m a capitalist, baby, ain’t nothing going to change that. Although I’m a born hedonist, I imagine that I’m more Conservative than I’ve ever been – I also think that there are enough good writers writing about such things.

And as I’ve said many times before, the first rule of good living is to work like you’re not guaranteed a job, and avoid people who avoid working.

Furthermore, some of my favorite people and dearest friends happen to be liberals (or liberal-inclined to put it nicely) and I don’t have the stomach to write horrible things about how they see the world. A friend of mine agreed to edit a project for me, and nicely noted that I have a habit of calling people who disagree with me terrible and such – there are people who can do that and do it well, but I’m no longer capable of doing it.  

I’m more Conservative than I’ve ever been, but fuuuuck, life is too short.

In short, I’ve thrown my nickel into the fuckitbucket and have decided to move to the lighter side.

I was talking to Jennifer tonight, and she pointed out that my last column at the O’Colly, re-published here a couple days ago – was funny, something my writing hasn’t been in a long time. I don’t consider myself a humorist, but I used to be funny – in-person I still am, but my writing ceased being funny a long time ago, and I should have given this up then. For those relatively new to this, I made my name by being funny. Beats the hell out of me, too.

As I genuflected over the past year about where this was going, one thing I noticed that it wasn’t funny anymore, and often, it was maddening. My friend Seth pointed out to me that my writing had grown much more political over the last couple years, hit on something I’d not considered – friend or not, there’s only so much of having your beliefs labeled as infantile before it gets old.

So, if you’re still around, there are a few bits and pieces to pick up, but the end is pretty much now. I’ll send out the valedictory on Friday, along with a link to the new place (the link will be short-lived) and away we go. I love this place, but I hate this place.

True-dat.

This will be the last day of the cheeze-whiz ... we have a couple days left, so with a bang we'll go. This song was on my senior video, along with Van Halen's "Right Now" and I assume Boyz II Men's "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye." 

Frankly, this chapter is misplaced. It's the only one I'll remove if the book ever publishes, but it won't so I won't have to worry about it. Yep - misplaced, But movie-lovers will enjoy it.

Click to read more ...

First, this one, thank you Flo Rida...

And now this one, by only quasi-annoying early 90s band Cracker, here live in SanFran:

CBK.com has about a week left, darnit. 

Chapter five is short, and applies the 2008 Venezuelan referendum that was barely defeated to American society contemporaneously.

Click to read more ...

Pres. Obama skipped the Intergalactic Boy Scouts of America Jamboree, and instead appears by talking picture box. This wasn't well-recieved, at least in this part of the crowd. Obooma?

'Thank You' is Alanis Morrissette's best song. It's not her most popular, and it has the minor visual infamy of its embedding-disabled video showing a buck-nekkid Morrissette for 260 seconds, arguably the worst video of the 1990s. As I'm winding down the OC here, I'm all about the thank-yous. 

Anyway, I've never been a fan of Morrissette's. In 1995, Jagged Little Pill was everywhere - like Hootie and the Blowfish's Cracked Rear-View and then, in the spring of 1996 the national birth of No Doubt, it was impossible to go to a party without hearing Morrissette's "angry" stuff instantly and often. I wrote a column at z'Ocolly noting that as Morrissette gobbled up awards that spring, she always lamented awards being handed out be never failed to show up and collect one. I was clearly being a hater. 

Alanis (I can't write her last name in good faith again) got her start on "You Can't Do That On Television," and then in a moment of what I assume was corporate synergy, was repackaged as an angry-angry cracker-girl who would indeed go down on you in a theater. Before the dust settled, Alanis sold a staggering 16 million copies of Jagged in America alone, and globally, it's racked up 33 million copies sold. 

There are very few people capable of handling that kind of success - Alanis apparently is one of them. On an 18-month tour that started in clubs and ended in arenas, she was apparently exhausted by the end and did what all famous women do when burned out - she started yoga. Her time in India, if memory serves, was the source for 'Thank You,' a rare song of hers I love for both the lyrics and the melody. 

As a final note, I can't not discuss 'Ironic,' the song that spawned a trillion terrible jokes about Irony. The best part about Ironic is what I close with, which is this, including The Best Quote Ever Aired on Non-Live Television - "It's like meeting the girl of your dreams and finding out she's five." I rest my case: