Things I Hate/Dig/Don't Get

Hate: Fine Print

2009-04-15T13:06:00.007-05:00

Hey, look who's back! It's Mr. Bloggenheimer himself! I actually had someone ask me where I've been for so long (since my last post on 10/31) and I felt all guilty that my legions of fans were up all night waiting for my next post. It's not that I haven't hated, dug, or didn't get anything in the last six months, I just didn't take the time to share it with you. My apologies.

So of course I must resume my silliness with something I hate - fine print. This may seem a bit obvious but my particular distaste for fine print is not that it is required in our litigious society but the way that it is done. I understand that old ladies will spill the super-hot coffee in their laps at the McDonald's drive-thru and will be represented by scum-sucking lawyers hoping to go fishing in the deep pockets of Mickey-D's. I got it. It's 2009 and people want to get rich by buying lotto tickets/winning lawsuits. Whatever - do what you gotta do, people. In fact, I'm thinking of poking out my eyeball with a Sharpie because I noticed that that there was no label warning me not to do it and a decent lawyer could get me a nice little nest egg. I would also be able to park in the handicapped parking spots - assuming I could keep my driver's license.

So my beef is less with the fact that we have to have fine print but does said print have to be so .... fine? I mean, it's almost as if the people at the Sharpie company don't want me to know stuff! Surely, that's not true! Could it possibly be that in the Sharpie fine print, it says "Don't poke yourself in the eye, dumbass, because it'll hurt like hell and, despite getting a parking spot up close, it's just not worth it" and then, when I go and do it, they can say that they warned me and I can sue them all they want but I ain't gettin' a dime? No one is going to take the time to read the fine print (except the lawyers) so those sneaky Sharpie bastards are just waiting to hose me when I take one for the team and poke out a pupil. Bastards!

Ever see an ad for some medicine of some kind in a magazine? Shitsky, talk about fine print overload! There's more fine print than information about the burning sensation that the medicine is trying to fix! I'm not quite sure what qualifies as actually needing to be included in the fine print so I think people just put everything in there just to cover themselves. There's a good chance that I'm not going to use the remedy to my burning sensation to clean my fish tank but the lawyers know that I'll sue the pharmaceutical rep for $3.6million if my goldfish (retail price: 11 cents) starts spending a lot of time floating on his back at the top of the tank. With all that fine print, my April edition of High Times magazine gets pretty hefty!

There's a new tactic that people are using on TV for the fine print. The nice people at Big Company, Incorporated are now trying to incorporate the fine print into the conversations going on in the commercials, thusly:

Guy: Man, I have a bitch of a headache

Dude: I'll hook you up with some Headache-Be-Gone, if you'd like.

Guy: Sweet. I'll take a couple and go drive a forklift.

Dude: My doctor recommends that you take Headache-Be-Gone with food and only when you have had a good night's rest. Also, he suggests that you don't drive any heavy equipment within one hour of taking a Headache-Be-Gone tablet. Occasionally, you might have heart palpitations and hair loss as a result of taking Headache-Be-Gone and your wife may suddenly find you unattractive. You're not pregnant, are you? Because, you shouldn't take Headache-Be-Gone when pregnant. Lastly, Headache-Be-Gone tastes like shit.

Guy: Uh, thanks.... I'll just deal with the pain.

Who has these conversations?! In an effort to eliminate the printed version of fine print, the dumb-ass advertising people have just caused me to change the channel and watch an old episode of The Golden Girls instead of possibly buying their fine product. Kind of back-fired, if you ask me.

Another way to cram the fine print down my throat is to have some tool say the fine print super-fast at the end of the commercial. I assume there is some legal requirement for what has to be included in the fine print and the consumer has to be able to read/hear it easily. Well, I'm here to tell you that this consumer can't understand shit when Mr. Speedy-Talker rattles through the legalese at 100 mph. A variation on this is to actually do this exercise at the BEGINNING of the commercial which kind of catches everyone off-guard. Either way, my ears glaze over and the whole thing is just a waste of time and vocal chords - which is probably what the lawyers want in the first place. Nice work, lawyers. You suck.

Don't get me wrong, people, I'm a big fan of covering my ass, blank checks and loopholes - and that's pretty much what fine print is all about. If I don't cover my ass and you find a loophole, you get a blank check from me if you take me to court. God bless America!

And now I have a headache.

Hate: Other People in Meetings

2008-10-31T10:03:00.011-05:00

As a middle-management lackie, I attend a lot of meetings. At some of those meetings, shit actually gets done but most of them require some sort of follow-up meeting. And, quite often, there is a meeting immediately following the meeting which is sort of a post-meeting meeting to meet about the stuff we just met on. Regardless, it's a damn lot of meetings that take up valuable time that could be better served writing blog posts (because I post SO often) or, my latest addiction, skulking about on Facebook. Dude, we don't have enough time to talk about Facebook but if I had my own company, I would install something in people's chairs that would cause their pants to catch on fire if they ever visited Facebook while on company time because it is such a time-waster!

OK, where was I?

Oh, yeah, meetings. I was originally going to write about a particular guy who just bugs the piss out of me. Let's just call him Talks Way Too Much Guy (TWTMG, for short). I'm not a big fan of people and I'm even less of a fan of people who talk so this guy didn't stand much of a chance of being my best pal in the first place. Got a point to make? How about using only 50 words instead of 10000000?! TWTMG also chews his fingernails. Or, should I say, fingernubs? Now, I ain't perfect (surprising, I know) and I chew my fingernails too but I sure don't do it in meetings! I wait until I'm in the comfort of my own home to gnaw my fingernails until they bleed. Not TWTMG - he'll stick half his hand in his mouth and start chewing away!

TWTMG also taps his foot. Loudly. He only does it every once in a while so he catches you off-guard when he does it. You know how some people get the whole knee going up and down thing? That's not as bad as the one-tap because the up-down thing is quiet. If I close my eyes, I don't even see them doing it. Mr. One-Tap stomps on the carpet in a random pattern so I can't brace myself for it. Bastard.

And then there's Mr. Talk About Something Even Though Everyone Else In The Meeting Is Talking About Something Else (let's just call him The Interrupter 'cause it's shorter.) Like I said, occasionally a meeting will actually produce something of value. The team is working through something and the next thing you know we're solving world hunger. Everybody except The Interrupter, that is. He's talking to his sidekick, Drinking Buddy (with all due respect to Chris Farley and Mike Meyers) about something completely unrelated to world hunger. And then we all have to re-hash everything we just talked about so he can get caught up. Oy! Hey, Interrupter - shut the fuck up!

A variation on the Interrupter is the I'm Never On Time To Meetings Guy - also known as That Asshole Who Thinks The World Revolves Around Him. Look, Asshole, if I wanted the meeting to start at 9:13, I would have told everybody to be there at that time. Usually, though, I stick to the hour and half-hour times. You know, 9:00, 9:30, that sort of thing. When you grace us with your presence at 9:13, you're just as bad as The Interrupter because everybody has to stop what they're doing to go over everything that your rude ass missed for the last 13 minutes. Do us all a favor, if you're going to be more than a couple minutes late just go update your Facebook page instead of wasting my time.

Of course, these days we also have Mr. Cell Phone Bastard. Mr. CPB loves his phone. He's got goofy ringtones that he actually changes semi-regularly. He's texting people and calling people and generally making love to his phone. If he could marry his phone he would. The only thing he is not doing with his phone is setting it to vibrate during meetings! Dude, that's why God made the vibrate feature - so that I could hold a meeting without you disrupting it! Here's a new feature for you. It's called the Cell Phone Up Your Ass feature and it's pretty self-explanatory.

Do NOT get me started on Miss (it's always a chick) Loud Gum Chewer! Hello, do you think we can't hear you just because your cud, I mean gum, is in your mouth?! I know that you aren't really a two-bit whore but you sure look and/or sound like one the way you chew your gum! All the rest of us are trying to conduct a meeting here so please take a minute to not snap, crackle and pop your gum. It would be much appreciated. Also, you probably won't "accidentally" get a dry-erase marker jammed in your eye.

So, unfortunately because of my middle-management-ness, I have to attend meetings all the friggin' time. Sure, occasionally I get lucky and a cute chick shows up but I work in manufacturing and cute chicks are about as rare as an Alaskan governor who doesn't de-rail a presidential campaign. Until that happens, I have to suffer in misery.

That's it for today. Gotta run to a meeting.

Dig: The Nooks and Crannies of the Internet

2008-09-19T07:30:00.015-05:00

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I'm sure ones of people have been drinking themselves to sleep at night waiting for my next commentary on the things in my life that make me happy or miserable or confused. Fear not, for today I am finally getting off my caboose and sharing with you something that I dig. And what is that, you ask? I dig nooks. I also dig crannies. Plus I dig the internet. And together? Puh-lease! It's like when two really good-looking people have a baby and the baby comes out already signed to a modeling contract. Kind of like Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie and not so much like, say, Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley. See, Christie is hot and Billy, well, isn't. For a future post, I might discuss the love life of Billy Joel: He lost Christie but is now married to some other young thing who is also hot. See what being a musician will do for you? Damn Bill Joel to Hell! See also my post about not having any musical ability.

Here's the deal. I'm a lurker. There, I've said it. In certain circles, I could be called a stalker but I prefer lurker - mostly because it's kind of a fun word to say and also because it's not a felony. And what better place to lurk than the internet? I've found that when I surf (do people still use that word?) the internet, I prefer to skip over the "big" sites like yahoo, cnn or google and dig deep into the soft underbelly of the internet. Certainly, cnn.com is fine for major, mainstream information but I can find out the latest on Sarah Palin on about a million websites out there - and I prefer the ones that have photoshopped her head onto bikini-clad, gun-toting bodies. That's what the internet is all about!

So this post was prompted by trading comments with a chick who has a blog in NYC. I found her blog through some comments on another blog and the next thing you know I'm learning all about life in New York City. It was sort of a Six Degrees of Separation kind of thing. This chick is nothing like me. In addition to not having a penis, according to the pics on her blog she is always dressed to the teeth. She is not a middle-management suck-ass in the automotive industry and she does not live in a small town. She does seem to have a command of the language so reading her stuff doesn't feel like heavy lifting. It's a match made in heaven! And the more I read her posts, the more I realized that the reason I kept reading was because I had nothing in common with her except for her ability to communicate at some level higher than my seven year old kid. As much as I like to read all about myself, I'm pretty familiar with the subject matter and I get bored of reading what a great guy I am pretty quickly.

I find lots of blogs and sites through other people's comments and recommendations and the common denominator is that the weirder the content, the more I'm interested. I don't visit blogs/sites of people who post pictures of their kids' birthday parties. Do you know how many pictures there are in Internet-Land of babies sitting in high chairs? There are exactly a shitload of high chair pictures and there is more shit going in the load every day! I'm not interested in people's crafts - unless it's something unique like making furniture out of discarded ball point pens. If you have a site about your nifty needlepoint pictures of your cat, I'll take a pass. I also don't visit sites with too many words. Mr. Short-Attention-Span just can't handle too many words.

The internet is kind of like the Olympics for me. The nice people at NBC heaped hours and hours of Olympics television coverage on us last month. There was also some stuff on non-NBC cable channels. That goofy-looking Michael Phelps was on NBC. The guy who won the trampoline competition was not. (Yes, there was a trampoline competition in the friggin' Olympics!) He wasn't even on the second-rate channel at 3am on a Tuesday. And the dude that won that event sure ain't hosting Saturday Night Live and nobody knows a damn thing about him. He may be just as goofy looking as Mike, but we'll never know. He spends a shit-load of time jumping on the trampoline and he is theoretically the best tramploliner in the world - just like Michael and the whole swimming thing. Where I'm coming from, though, is that Mr. Trampoline Man probably maintains his own website and just by virtue of NOT having nifty little bios about him, I want to know more about him. He's not slick and I don't like slick.

People put stuff on websites because it is important to them and they think others will find it interesting. Yep, Mrs. Smith puts pictures of her brat kid blowing out the candles on his Garfield birthday cake because it is important to Mrs. Smith. Unfortunately for her, though, she is wasting valuable space on the internet because NO ONE ELSE CARES! Garfield sucks and unless the cake is worthy of being on Cake Wrecks, it's a waste of everyone's time to talk about it. Mrs. Smith should be posting pics of the dent in her minivan where she backed into Mrs. Jones at the daycare place and then go on to say what a bitch Mrs. Jones is because she stole her brownie recipe. Follow that up with a dissertation on why Mrs. Jones' kid will never get into a good college because he doesn't know the difference between a square and a rectangle in pre-school and now you're talking my language! A good story always has conflict and what causes more conflict than pre-school angst?!

Now, I am not going to list for you the sweet websites I visit, mostly because they change all the time and I never remember to mark them as favorites or anything. (Before you say anything, yes, I know I can look at my history file...) You can do like I do and click on the names of people who have left comments on this blog (especially this post because it has a lot of comments) and see where it takes you.

And now, just like a singer in a cheesy wedding reception band who is going to switch from the Chicken Dance to "When a Man Loves a Woman", I'm going to bring it down a little. It's a big world out there, gang. I do my thing, you do your thing and most of the time my thing doesn't touch your thing. (Sometimes it does, but I usually have to pay extra for that.) Think about that chick in New York. Walking down the street and taking the subway and cabs and buses and stuff, she probably interacts with a thousand different people just on her way to work in the morning and they're all doing their thing. They're all unique. Each one of them has something interesting going on, even if it's their upcoming doctor's visit to have that thing finally removed from their left butt cheek. And that's the stuff that I dig. If you've got a story about a butt blemish, I want to hear all about it.

OK, sorry to wreck your buzz there for a minute but I had to make my point. And now, before we get out on the dance floor for the Macarena, go here for a blog about bad parking or here for a blog about passive-aggressive notes. It's internet gold and it can only be found in a nook or a crannie.

Dig: Quoting Move Lines

2008-06-27T07:21:00.008-05:00

OK, so I think this is mostly a guy thing. Some chicks quote movie lines to each other but I think generally girls think whipping out the occasional "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like .... victory" (Apocalypse Now) is stupid and immature. However, by now you've probably learned that a lot of things in my life are stupid and immature so this fits in quite nicely. It's also similar to my love of trivia which is also stupid. If ignorance is bliss, I'm one happy camper!

The beauty of quoting a movie line is that there aren't many times when it is inappropriate. Not that I'm against doing inappropriate things, but when someone isn't paying attention in a meeting, how can you not say "Bueller..... Bueller...." (Ferris Bueller's Day Off)? Everyone gets a laugh and I look like Mr. Funny Man and all the chicks swoon for me. What more could a boy want?!

There are a few hazards with this activity, though, and one of them is quoting a movie line that people aren't familiar with. Maybe the line is too obscure or the movie went straight to DVD or something. You have to remember your audience as they always say in those stupid public speaking training sessions. For instance, in the event that the topic of a prom queen comes up in a meeting, you could use "Let's get the prom queen pregnant" (Breakfast Club) at some point but if the dolts in your meeting only remember "Wouldn't I be out-standing in that capacity?" from that movie, your quote will fall flat. And falling flat sucks. People look at you like you are more of a freak than you actually are and there is definitely no swooning involved. However, if someone in the room DOES get the line and comes back with a "You mess with the bull, you get the horns" you have found a new best friend and you can continue to quote lines while de-railing the rest of the meeting. Finally, a reason to attend a meeting (other than the promise of bagels)!!

Another reason to remember your audience is that if you start into a quote session including lines like "Inconceivable!" (Princess Bride) or "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?" (Taxi Driver) with some young punk at work, he/she will most likely not have a friggin' clue what you're talking about. He may even come back at you with a line from Juno or some dumb-ass movie like that. In general, young punks don't know squat and if you want to fuck with them, throw out a "I'm going to kick 100% of your ass" (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and watch their eyes glaze over while all the rest of us cool 40+ year-olds laugh. I'm a product of the '80's so if you want to have kind of a dueling John Hughes movie line quote-off, I'm in.

A variation on the theme of quoting movie lines is quoting song lyrics or TV lines. You never know when a well-placed comment about man-hands (Seinfeld) or a reference to not wanting to go to rehab (that freak Amy Winehouse) will come in, uh, handy. Because there are so many stupid TV shows and obscure bands out there, though, the falling flat thing becomes a little too real. Please do not quote a line from Golden Girls. Please also do not quote a song from Kenny Chesney. Yes, we know that you love them both and, according to TV Guide and Billboard magazine, so do plenty of other people but Bea Arthur is just not quote-worthy. And the only quote I want to hear from Kenny Chesney is why he married Renee Zelwegger one day and then divorced her like a week later. I'm sure it has something to do with her squinty eyes.

So WHY do I dig quoting movie lines? No clue. You would think that I would want to wow people with my own words, not those of Al Pacino from Scarface ("Say hello to my little friend"). But when the time is right for a "You feeling lucky, punk?" (Dirty Harry), I just can't resist. I also use a lot of cliches when I speak and, according to a former boss of mine, cliches are a grammatical crutch of sorts. Whatever. I can live with it. Besides, I don't need no stinking badge (Blazing Saddles).

Now, for those of you playing along at home, I've listed some nifty movie lines for you to use when the opportunity presents iteself. Please note the two quotes with asterisks. Those are a little over-used and further use can sound lame and un-original. Proceed with caution. Also note that there are very few high-brow movies from which I quote lines. What am I going to do - quote that line from Schindler's List about how the ring on Schindler's hand could have saved one more person? Yeah, I don't think so. By the list below, you can see that my brow is pretty low. Enjoy - and now I'm going to go have myself a Royale with cheese (Pulp Fiction).

Wax on, wax off - Karate Kid
Look kids, Big Ben! - European Vacation
It's a Cinderella story - Caddyshack
I wish I was a loofah - Stripes
Try the veal. I'm here all week - Shrek
I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore - Network
* Houston, we have a problem - Apollo 13
Reeeaal tomato ketchup, Eddie? - Vacation
Those aren't pillows! - Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
We're on a mission from god - The Blues Brothers
This one time, at band camp - American Pie
Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life - Animal House
You'll shoot your eye out - A Christmas Story
You can't handle the truth! - A Few Good Men
* Show me the money! - Jerry Maguire
Juuuust a bit outside - Major League

Dig: Being a Tree-Hugger

2008-05-18T19:25:00.005-05:00

Don't get me wrong. I'm no Ed Begley, Jr. (whose ANNUAL electric bill is $200 because of all his solar-poweredness), I'm more of a fair-weather environmental freak. I kind of dig the feeling I get in my belly when I do my little part to protect this big blue marble that we live on. Here are some things that I do so my grandchildren can enjoy hay fever because the goldenrod has a place to grow and the whole place isn't just paved over like a big parking lot:

I pick up litter. Not all of it but if I see a Snickers wrapper on the ground, I might just pick it up. As you know from a previous post, I don't really understand littering so I'm kind of enabling the inconsiderate assholes who throw their crap on the ground. That means you, Mr. Smoker-Man.

I recycle newspapers, bottles, cans, etc. That's kind of a gimme. Everyone should do that especially if your friendly neighborhood garbage man provides one of those nifty blue container things to put the Target ads, Spaghettios cans and skim (I'm trying to watch my girlish figure)milk jugs in.

I use those funky fluorescent light bulbs at home. Those bastards are expensive but they do last a lot longer. I've been using them for a couple of years now and have yet to replace one.

I use those re-usable canvas bags for my groceries. This one kind of puts me over the edge, I think. I actually bring my own bags with me to the store like a true granola-lover - and one of them is even made of hemp! Unfortunately, I forget to do this sometimes so I still throw away a lot of those damn plastic bags. I have to admit, though, said damn plastic bags are good for throwing away diapers with poo in them. They're not necessary for diapers with just pee but you really don't want a diaper with poo living in your garbage can for a whole week unless they are sealed up sufficiently like the Anal Retentive Chef would do.

I turn off the light in my office at work when I leave it. According to a website that I think did actual research on the subject, if you're going to be gone from your office for more than 15 minutes, you should turn off the light. My co-workers used to make fun of me but after I popped one of them in the nose, they stopped. If you're a cube-dweller your life sucks anyway so you have my permission to run all the electrical appliances you see fit.

I use my own mug at Starbuck's instead of using yet another paper cup. I win three ways on this one. First, I'm not using a paper cup (which isn't even recyclable because there is a small amount of plastic in it). Second, I actually drink less VentiNonfatNoWhipMocha because the mug is a grande size, not venti. Third, the nice people at S'buck's take a cool ten cents off the price for using my own mug! I'm huge! I must confess, though, that this little token of eco-friendliness comes at a cost. See, that mug I'm using is made out of dead dinosaurs which sacrificed themselves to become oil which could be turned into plastic which eventually became my mug. Not very granola-y. For that matter, when I wash said mug, I use electricity to run the dishwasher and natural gas to heat up the water to make it clean. I may have to rethink this one...

I only use cold water to do the laundry. I suppose if I actually worked for a living and my clothes got real dirt on them I might need to use hot water but I'm happy to report that the dirt and odor associated with being a middle-management slacker comes out just fine with cold water!

So those are the things that I do to reduce my carbon footprint - whatever the hell that is. In the scheme of things, I'm pretty much doing the easy stuff which is kind of how I live my life. Even though I drive a Toyota, it's not a Prius - and I don't carpool even though there are a handful of people who work in the same building as me that live within a 5-mile radius of my house. I also still get two newspapers a day even though all the news that I need is available on line (stopping the newspapers might be next environmentally selfless act, actually).

I'll keep you posted on my progress on adding a 200' wind turbine to the top of the house and convincing the family to only flush every other time.

Hate: The Number of Words on the Shampoo Bottle

2008-04-22T14:31:00.005-05:00

I debated about posting this in the Don't Get section because having a whole bunch of words on the shampoo bottle just doesn't make sense to me. However, my confusion over the whole issue soon turned to hatred and I'm pleased with my decision to share with you my hatred (not confusion) for the number of words on the shampoo bottle. You could say I Dig my Hate, which could quite possibly put this whole post in the Dig category. Or, you could just agree with me that the whole thing matters about as much as anything related to Jamie Spears' underage pregnancy.

In case there was any doubt that this slacker is a morning person in any way, shape or form, let me kill that rumor right now. I hate getting my lazy arse out of bed in the morning. If I was told that tomorrow at 7:15, Pam Anderson would be backing up a Brink's truck full of money to my front door, I would set my alarm for 7:06 so that I could hit the snooze alarm once before Pam knocked on my door. Upon receipt of said cash and perhaps a quickie (and I do mean quick!)with Pam, I would go right back to bed and enjoy my new found wealth at a more civilized hour like 10:30.

And yet the shampoo people expect me to read their stupid bottles in the shower. Inconceivable (that's a Princess Bride reference for all you Andre The Giant fans out there)! I'm lucky to make it into the bathroom every morning without shedding any blood from my kneecaps or shins and you think I care if my shampoo is gentle enough for me? Gentle, schmentle! Dude, I've used the bar that sits in the nasty soap tray thing far too often to worry about if the shampoo is for dry hair or oily hair. How about one that's just for hair? Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Usually, the label on the front of the shampoo bottle uses a whole bunch of words like rejuvenate, gentle, fresh and clean. Apparently, all shampoos perform these tasks on your hair whether you have oily hair, dry hair, permed hair, colored hair or generally fucked-up hair. I'm convinced that the only thing that makes one shampoo different than other is the shape of the bottle. It's all in the presentation, you know, and a gallon jug just don't look as nice as a lavender-colored bottle with a nifty little flip-top thing on it that is impossible to open with wet hands. I guess the color of the stuff helps to differentiate one shampoo from another although there aren't really that money colors either. You have a few shades of blue and green and white but not many blood-red shampoos out there. There's a look for you!

OK, back to the number of words. Lots of shampoos have a conditioner that go with them. They're a system. God forbid you wash your hair and not use the associated conditioner with it! What are you, a heathen?! And so the conditioner bottle and the shampoo bottle are designed with the same colors and shape and top and crap until the only difference is that one says shampoo and the other says conditioner. Again, unless Pam hops in the shower to read the labels for me (pause here to wrap your brain around that for a minute) after she delivers my money, it's a real pain to sort through all the nifty adjectives (fresh, clean, etc) to get to the one word that is really what I'm looking for.

So that's the front of the bottle. Lots of words and the one I'm looking for (I'll give you a hint - it ends in "poo") is buried under a bunch of stupid-ness.

The stupidity continues on the back of the bottle. Do I really care what the ingredients are? Aren't the ingredients really just "shampoo"? I know there is other crap in there but quit wasting my time and your ink with telling me all about it. I don't care. Lastly, we must discuss the directions on a bottle of shampoo. Yes, I'm sorry, we must. Many a lame stand-up comedian (or blogger) has built an act (or blog) around those goofy directions to Lather, Rinse, Repeat. However, you would be hard-pressed to find such beautiful simplicity on a bottle of shampoo today. You would long for such simplicity while lathering up your 'do. No longer do you Lather/Rinse/Repeat. Now, you Apply shampoo to wet hair, Massage into the scalp, and Repeat if desired. Who repeats? Whose hair is so frickin' dirty that they must repeat? If you need a shower so bad that you must repeat, you should probably be out shopping for a hat instead of fouling someone's shower stall!

Remember when there was a big push on to have generic products in the store? The packaging was black and white and the beer said "Beer" on it and the ketchup said "Ketchup" and the Dorito-like nacho cheese-flavored chips said "Nasty Tasting Pseudo-Doritos"? That's kind of the direction I'm going here, boys and girls, plunk down a black and white bottle that says "shampoo" and I'm a whole lot less inclined to screw it up and I'll have that much less bitterness in my life. And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sit patiently by my front door for Pam to show up.

Dig: Old School Saturday Morning Cartoons

2008-03-16T19:04:00.005-05:00

You know how much I dig TV. Despite stupid game shows, I take great pleasure in sitting in front of the boob tube letting my mind turn to mush. Don't get me wrong, there ain't much on the old telly that does much to make me smarter with the exception of some of the stuff on the Discovery Channel ("Bone Marrow is Your Friend!"). And what makes your mind mushier than a quality Bugs Bunny cartoon?!

So I'm 40. I've got all kinds of responsibilities with kids, dogs, cars, house (singular) and my on-going efforts to keep them fooled at work. But let's go back to those carefree days when I was about seven, shall we? I do my thing in first grade all week long and go to bed Friday night with nary a care in the world. And then Saturday morning comes, the clouds part and the angels sing - to the tune of the Looney Tunes theme song! Pour me a bowl of FrankenBerry cereal and begin the slightly racist, highly violent entertainment! See you at noon!

Because of the aforementioned kids, I could still watch plenty of cartoons. My kids know that the cartoon channels are 29, 63 and 65. They sure don't know which channel is C-Span but, for that matter, neither do I. And let me tell you something about the cartoons that are on these days - they're kind of freaky! The artwork is really pretty cool and there are boatloads of references that only parents would pick up - just as much, if not more so, than the old Merrie Melodies cartoons of old. But they're not quite as innocent as the ones I used to watch...

So, let's review a few of my old faves, shall we?

Bugs Bunny is the man. He has a devil-may-care attitude, gets all the chicks and makes Elmer Fudd look like an idiot all the time. Heck, he even had that sweet job in the army checking to see if any of the missiles were duds by hitting them with a hammer. And how about all that pain and misery he put Daffy Duck through? That's good stuff! Rabbit season? I think not!

As we've discussed before, I have zero musical ability. Bugs, however, could play the piano with his hands (feet?) AND with his ears! Certainly, if it weren't for Bugs, I would never have been exposed to opera in that old classic, The Barber of Seville. The scene where Bugs shaves Elmer's face with the little lawnmower just kills me!

Let's move on to the Road Runner. Bugs had his Elmer and the Road Runner had Wile E. Coyote. What a great name! That poor son-of-a-bitch sure got screwed by the Road Runner, didn't he? Just how many anvils are out in the middle of the desert, anyway? And who is the mastermind behind the quality products at Acme? One of my favorite aspects of the Road Runner cartoons, though, was the ability to defy gravity all the time. How many times did Wile E. suspend in mid-air long enough to hold up a little sign and then have his body stretch all out before plummeting to his "death"? Now that's entertainment!

Tom and Jerry sucked.

There were a few minor players that I enjoyed, though. Pepe Le Pew ("le pant, le heave"), Foghorn Leghorn ("Fortunately, I keep my feathers numbered for, for just such an emergency"), Droopy ("Hello, boys"), Marvin the Martian, the Tasmanian Devil and even that bulldog on the construction site who befriends the kitten (no voices, just music). These guys added a little variety to the falling anvils, mis-firing shotguns and Acme Electro-magnets with their own brand of violence. They didn't have the same stereotypical references to the Japanese or Native Americans as Bugs did but, in hindsight, they were still plenty offensive.

Do NOT get me started on anime as an art form. They don't even have anvils!

So, there you go. If you want to make me happy (and I'm sure you do) just hook me up with some Frankenberry cereal (I'll settle for Cap'n Crunch with Crunch Berries in a pinch), crank up some old Bugs Bunny cartoons and don't disturb me until the last boulder crushes Wile E. Coyote!

Don't Get: How Dog Show Winners are Determined

2008-02-22T09:38:00.003-05:00

God bless cable TV! With a million channels to choose from, you can sure stumble onto some random, obscure stuff can't you? There are now a boatload of home makeover shows and two boatloads of cooking shows and reruns of every sitcom from Sanford and Son to Alice. And then mixed in there is the occasional dog show. I think the cable TV programming people figured if Redd Foxx (love the spelling of his name!) could still command an audience, so could a schnauzer being dragged around a ring by a lesbian dog handler in sensible shoes.

You've stopped for a minute or two on the riveting coverage of the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, right? They're big deals in the dog world. They take place in Madison Square Garden and stuff and if you're a dog dude/dudette, it's the pinnacle of showing Fido to the rest of the world. Of course, the dogs aren't named Fido, they're named Champion Lobuff Hollyridge Kisskadee (that's a real name from this year's show!). And these dogs ain't exactly out rolling in dead squirrels or even fetching a frisbee in your back yard with you. Instead, they're busy being groomed and coiffed and having more money spent on them than most people spend on their kids. You know darn well that everything in the lesbian dog handler's house is dog-related: wallpaper, doormat, throw pillows, coffee mug, toilet paper and generally all kinds of chachki.

So that's fine - you're psycho about dogs and you drag said dog to the dog show and parade him around. Whatever. But I don't know how anyone can tell if one dog is better than another. Who even knows the criteria? The announcers apparently know because they make comments like "Look at that Corgi's attitude - clearly this dog is made for __________ !" To me, it doesn't really matter what he dog is so clearly made for. I'd just kind of like to know if it's going to hump my leg and if it's going to be all yippy and stuff. Same goes for a Lab of any kind. Exactly what is the proper length for the ear to kind of flop over? Again, the announcers, judges and lesbian handlers must know because supposedly one Lab is better than another and is going to be awarded Best In Show. However, I'm going to make a bold statement here and suggest that perhaps the announcers SHARE WITH THE AUDIENCE exactly what makes one yippy little fuzzball different from the yippy little fuzzball next to it in the lineup!

Ever watch Texas Hold 'Em on TV? If you're not a gambler, it's about as much fun as watching grass grow but if you like playing poker, it's a good time. The thing about all the poker shows on TV is that even though there is some lingo and jargon that you have to learn, at least there are some nifty graphics and hidden cameras and stuff to let the viewer know who has the best hand. Because of all these cool features that the TV people have added to involve the audience, I can see that the Vietnamese guy with the pair of queens is probably going to beat the Vietnamese guy with the pair of nines. Now compare that to what the audience knows about the dog being pranced around the ring. The audience knows that it is a .... dog. If it's a male dog, the audience sees the dog's ENORMOUS nuts because I swear the camera guy makes sure to get one good nut shot of every male dog just to make me feel inadequate but beyond that, the announcer just lets us know that what we are looking at is a Shih Tzu and that last year he came in second place and is really trying to take Best In Show this year. Huh? Exactly what is the dog doing to make himself a better dog? Last year he was a dog and this year he is ...... still a dog. Maybe his nuts got bigger, I don't know.

And then the moment of truth! Of all the Sporting Dogs or Working Dogs or Toy Dogs, there is one Best Dog. And hell if I know how that dog is determined to be the best friggin' dog in the joint! The Best In Show (BIS) dog sure as hell better not let those stinky-ass dog farts that are so, so nasty! What the BIS dog should do is fetch my pipe and slippers and bark when a bad guy comes to steal my plasma TV. That's my definition of a BIS dog.

This year was a big upset because a lowly beagle won (BIS). You know all those lesbians in their sensible shoes were aghast at the idea of a dumb-ass beagle beating out their precious Lhasa Apso. Take that, lesbos! The only way a yippy little fuzzball like a Lhasa Apso is going to be BIS is if there is a "Works Well to Clean Hardwood Floors" category.

Come on over to my casa sometime and meet my dog. She's part chocolate lab and part something else. Her hair kind of stands up on the back of neck that makes people think she is mean but she's not. She loves to swim and chase a tennis ball and frisbee all day long and then shake all the water off herself onto you. She'll sit when I tell her to - most of the time. That's her in the post about my hatred for Tupperware. She's no BIS, but then again, I'm no lesbian.

Hate: Not Having any Musical Ability

2008-02-08T15:57:00.005-05:00

You know how some people can sing and play the piano or guitar or cello or flute or the sousaphone or even the cow bell? And it sounds like music? You know - those people that actually have a right side of their brain? Yeah, well, I'm not one of them and it kind of sucks. I couldn't sing my way out of a paper bag. I couldn't carry a tune if it had a handle. I can't play the spoons, let alone a sousaphone! So I'm kind of jealous of people who can actually make music that doesn't sound like a cat being strangled. Not that I dislike the sound of a cat being strangled but it just doesn't have the same appeal as a good Eddie Van Halen guitar solo.

Mind you, it's not for lack of trying. My mom used to give me piano lessons when I was a wee lad. She would knock on the door pretending to be the teacher coming to the house (she was a little out there sometimes) and I can still picture the red book of beginner lessons that she would "bring" with her to the lesson. She'd try to teach me middle C and sharps and flats and stuff and it just didn't sink in. I was more fascinated with the cool metronome thing - it made better music than I ever did! Anyway, I'm clearly scarred emotionally by this experience with my mother and someday when the police psychologist is trying to talk me down from the ledge it will all make sense.

But my mom refused to give up on me and forced me into band starting in the 4th grade. I knew there was no way I could tackle anything more melodic than a tambourine but, get this, I couldn't even master the drums! Now, in 4th grade band, the drummer isn't exactly wailing away on a drum kit a la Tommy Lee so for me to suck at just keeping time on a bass drum is pretty frickin' pathetic! And so, like any true champion, I quit. Somewhere, Pavarotti breathed a sigh of relief that some dumb kid in America wasn't fouling the world of music.

My last effort to create any music was to purchase a harmonica. How hard can it be to play a harmonica?! One of the reasons that rock and rollers give for joining a band in the first place is to get babes. I'm all for gettin' babes so imagine the chicks I could get by whipping out my trusty harmonica while sitting around the campfire! Turns out that the harmonica makes one note by blowing and a different note by sucking. Who knew? So, because the chicks prefer actual music than just miscellanous notes strung together and, considering that I hate camping I wasn't hanging around campfires any too often, the harmonica did little to increase the number of notches in my bedpost. The only blowing and sucking going on was by me and it was only adding to the noise pollution in the world. Bugger!

Thus, I am frustrated that I can't get on stage and play the opening guitar riff from Satisfaction. Look how sweet Keith is looking in the pic above! Who wouldn't want to look like that? I'm forced to limit my screaming/singing/air guitaring/drumming to the confines of my car where no one can get hurt. I used to sing a little bit of The Doors to my youngest to try to get him to sleep but now that his eardrum is fully developed he tells me to just read a Dora the Explorer book instead. Just because my daughter can play Three Blind Mice on the recorder, she thinks she can tell me to stop singing Radar Love! If she's not careful, I'll bust out my harmonica and "play" Amazing Grace and show her just how awful I can be! Damn ingrates!

I know that you are thinking that I could tackle the whole music thing as an adult instead of a snot-nosed kid. You're thinking that music lessons as an adult might be more productive than music lessons as a kid, right? I would be more patient. I would understand the theory and not just remember that my right index finger has to go on the key in the middle of the keyboard. I could be like Grandma Moses and take up music as an adult instead of trying to be like Mozart who wrote symphonies at age five. Sure I would. And monkeys would fly out of my butt.

So instead of actually creating real live music, I must fantasize about standing on stage with 50,000 adoring fans waiting for me to lay down some righteous tunes with my guitar/phallic symbol. I'll throw in a few windmills like Pete Townsend, maybe sidle up to the lead singer like Little Steven does with Bruce Springsteen and to top it off, I'll light my guitar on fire like Jimi Hendrix! The place will erupt with awe and admiration of my musical genius! How does he do it?! Good looks AND musical ability! I'd love to give him obscene amounts of money to play at my private party honoring the invention of the bikini where he will, no doubt, be surrounded by hordes of bikini-clad babes!

Or I'll just continue to be a middle-management corporate suck-ass with no musical ability. Either one. Sigh...

Don't Get: Releasing a Statement

2008-01-09T09:43:00.001-05:00

With all of the silliness going on in the world today, lots of people/governments/companies "release statements". Roger Clemens says he didn't do steroids so he releases a statement about it. Britney (I'm not going to include her last name - you know which trailer park drunken-ass slut I'm talking about) releases a statement about her kids or her booze or her crotch or something. The US navy released a statement saying that some Iranian warboats (Iran has warboats?!) acted in an "aggressive manner" so the US fired on them. People are releasing statements all over the joint and I'm just not sure why. Or how. Who do you call to release a statement? Is there a hotline? What if I have something important to say and I don't have one of those red hotline phones - how will the world hear my statement? My boss's boss's boss would say "let's unpack this" to understand it a little better. I hate that saying.

First of all, who is worthy of releasing a statement? Or, as Elaine Bennis would say, who is "statement-worthy?" Certainly, if you are a bigwig in whatever category you want to place yourself, you get to release a statement. Presidents, Popes, CEO's etc. Those are kind of the obvious ones that everyone would agree on. But how about the CEO of the company that makes the thread in the elastic of your underwear? Good elastic in my tighty-whiteys is pretty damn important to me but for those of you who prefer to go unencumbered by underwear, you probably are a little less concerned about it. Keeping your house in order down there isn't a big deal for you, apparently. But, for me, if Mr. Underwear-Elastic-Thread has something important to say, I'm all ears. For you commandos out there, not so much.

Celebrities are releasing statements all the friggin' time. By my use of the word "friggin'" in the previous sentence, you should take that to mean that I could give a rat's hairy ass about what most celebrities have to say. This applies to dumb-ass athletes as well as dumb-ass entertainers. Do I care whether or not Roger Clemens was on the juice? Only if it somehow helps me get chicks or make a mortgage payment or something. Do I care if Jennifer Love Hewitt's big caboose is a size 2 or not? Only if it means that she'll get naked to prove it. About the only time that I would like to hear what a celebrity has to say is to hear some dirt about another celebrity. Kind of like Kanye West saying that George Bush hates black people. That was classic! Especially the look on Mike Myers' face when he said it!

Just like the lesser-known CEO's out there, there are way too many people who are classified as celebrities. Just because you appeared on a TV show or a movie, doesn't mean that anyone cares about what you have to say. All of the Brady kids are entitled to release statements, but not Cousin Oliver! And neither do Chris and Tracy Partridge. Reuben Kincaid totally gets to, though.

So now that we are all clear on the "who", let's talk about the "what". Below are some topics and whether they are statement-worthy:

Cure for cancer? Gotta go with yes on that one.

Cure for being fat? If you don't know that Big Macs make you fat, you have bigger issues.

Big blizzard coming? Yep. Gotta know if I'm going to end up in the ditch or not.

Antarctic ice melting due to global warming? I have one word for you: "No shit, Sherlock!"

Lindsay Lohan back in rehab? See above.

Oil prices hit $100 per barrel? No. Don't piss me off any more than I already am.

Jen Love Hewitt is a size 2? No, unless the follow-up statement is "JLH gets naked"

See how easy this is, people? If it doesn't affect me, I don't need to know. Sure, I'm not too keen on the polar ice caps flooding my basement but am I supposed to send the ice from my handy-dandy icemaker in my fridge to the South Pole to help with the whole melting thing? I can do that but you might need to help a brother out with the postage.

Lastly (whenever someone says that, I'm always so frickin' thankful that they're finally shutting their pieholes!!), exactly HOW does one release a statement. To whom do I release my oh-so-important message? Do I write a letter to the editor? Do I contact my congressman? All the folks who do this on a regular basis have "people" to do it for them, but somehow this crap has to get into Us Weekly, right? Do the dumb-asses at Us Weekly call up Lindsay and ask her if anything new is going on? How come no one calls me? I got shit going on in my life all the time. In fact, just the other day, I bought some peanut butter! Based on the inane press releases that I see on a regular basis, surely someone wants to know about the massive PB shortage at my casa.

Boys and girls, with all the options for news sources these days we have just way too many people who think they have something important to say. The problem is that it's mostly dumb-asses saying it and we all know that a dumb-ass just ain't going to say anything worth listening to. To fix the situation and to rid our world of dumb-assedness, I suggest you release a statement saying that you wish all the dumb-asses who are releasing statement would just clam up. And then when you figure out how to do it, let me know because I've got a lot to get off my chest!

Don't Get: Why Some People Include Their Picture in Their Advertisements

2007-12-14T10:24:00.001-05:00

Great title for a post, huh? Rolls right off the tongue!

So who does this? Who are the people that include a picture of themselves with their ad? Realtors do it. Car salesmen (yes, I know there are actually car saleswomen in the world, but I don't care) do it. Sometimes even hair-cutter-people (I refuse to use the word "stylist") do it. There aren't many purchases that are bigger in life than your house and your car so I can maybe understand why realtors and car salesmen do all they can to get their percentage of the sale. But does it really matter what the car dude looks like? I suppose he is trying to endear himself to me in his ad when he says "Big Joe won't say no!" with a big picture of himself in his sport coat and cheesy pose. I further suppose that most guys part with their money a lot quicker with a Pam Anderson look-alike than a Ruth Buzzy look-alike. So maybe this is where my cheapness overrides my guy-ness because, in the end, I'm just looking to dump my P.O.S. for as much as possible and drive off in a new ride for as little as possible. You could have long, crinkly hairs growing out of a mole on your nose but if you get me some free floormats, I'm all yours! No offense, Pam, but with easy access to pics of you when you were a few years younger, it's going to take more than a low-cut top to get me to spring for the completely unnecessary undercoating option.

So how about realtors? I gotta sell my shack and I need someone to get me top dollar and overlook the black mold and cracked foundation. Should be no sweat, right? Let me tell you what I don't need. I don't need someone to look good in a suit and use phrases like "open floor plan" and "better than new". What I need is someone to sell my crappy house to an unsuspecting sucker. If you can do that wearing a pair of cut-offs and a Motley Crue t-shirt with bed-head and an open sore on your upper lip and still make enough dough for both of us to treat the family to dinner, then sign me up! If George Wendt can get me an extra $5k on my house over George Clooney, then I'm going to have to kick People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive 2006 to the curb!

So who should have their pictures in their ads? Not many people. It don't matter what you look like as long as you is qualified to do what it is you do. Comprende'? I don't mean to sound all preachy and turn this into a whole "it don't matter what you look like as long as you is qualified to do what it is you do" thing, but shitsky, why do I care what my brain surgeon looks like? I'm glad to see that there aren't many brain surgeons advertising on billboards to drum up business but nobody really feels it necessary to post his mug in the waiting room either. Imagine, if you will, getting the news that you have a big crusty thing in the middle of your brain that needs to come out:

Referring Doctor: "Dude, you need to see a brain surgeon, toot-sweet!"

Dude: "Gotcha, Doc. Know any good ones? Someone that went to Harvard or something?"

R.D.: "Harvard, Schmarvard! I suggest Dr. Prettyboy because he has dreamy blue eyes!"

Dude: "Well, now that you mention it, it does feel like he is looking right into my soul..."

R.D.: "That's the spirit! I'll call his Parole Officer, I mean Secretary, and hook you up!"

Call me crazy but I would like to see Dr. Prettyboy's transcript beginning with second grade and interview several neighbors and ex-girlfriends before I want him poking around in my melon. Only after an exhaustive psychological work-up and a round of Trivial Pursuit would I let him remove my crusty thing.

How about plumbers? Kind of works the opposite way, doesn't it? If I saw an ad for a plumber that DIDN'T show the crack of his ass, I'd keep on looking. Same with a computer repair guy. Not so much the butt-crack thing but if he didn't have tape on his glasses, a whole bunch of zits and a peachfuzz mustache, I would have to question his abilities to fix my whatchamacallit.

Look, there are too many people who get by in this world just based on their looks. We all know how much I hate the talent-less Tyra Banks and if Shania Twain didn't look so friggin' hot in those ridiculous outfits, she wouldn't sell a single record. Anyone know how many tennis tournaments Anna Kournikova won? I know it ain't many but she still gets lots of attention and way too much money for endorsement deals.

So, realtors and car salesdudes - you leaches can just keep your pictures to yourself. Plumbers and IT nerds - let's see some buttcracks and peach fuzz so I know if you are worth a damn!

Hate: Tupperware

2007-11-16T19:13:00.000-05:00

See, this is how twisted my little life is. I am tormented by Tupperware. Brightly (gaily?) colored, innocuous, inanimate plastic bowls have me all in a lather. It's no wonder I drink so much....

One would think that there is nothing to hate about Tupperware. One would think that Mr. Tupper was really on to something when he invented those plastic, re-usable containers to hold last night's meatloaf, wouldn't one? Well, I'm here to tell you that one would be wrong to think that. If one had any sense at all, one would come to the conclusion, like I have, that Mr. Tupper has invented something so evil and diabolical that dogs around the globe are cursing Mr. Tupper's name for a lack of table scraps.

Let me explain my hatred.

My biggest beef with the whole concept is that only a small percentage of Tupperware actually gets used. According to no research whatsoever, only 6.8% of all Tupperware containers ever get used for anything. And I'm not just talking about for storing the leftover lasagna that no one will ever eat. I'm also talking about using it for catching that last little bit of water stuck in the drain pipe when you are cleaning out the hairball in the trap under the sink. I'm talking about not even being used to stash away the kids' Legos that hurt so friggin' bad when you step on them in the middle of the night. The biggest reason for not being used (again, based on pure conjecture on my part) is because you can't buy just one of these damn things. You have to buy a combo pack consisting of twelve different shapes and sizes. You only need one but The Man is forcing you to buy more than you need! Damn him and his marketing degree!!

More hatred comes from the mis-match between lids and containers. You think losing one sock is bad? I challenge you to match up all the Tupper-lids with all the Tupper-containers in your cupboard. It can't be done. For that matter, I challenge you to not get klunked in the head when you open your Tupper-cupboard and all the Tupper-pieces fall out on top of you like the ping pong balls used to do to Mr. Greenjeans on Captain Kangaroo. If you tell me that all of your various Tupper-pieces are neatly organized, I'll call you a dirty liar and never speak to you again.

The problem is compounded because there are some other bastards out there who have gotten onto the bandwagon and are selling competing brands to Tupperware. I'm not going to dignify them by mentioning their names here but, just like Kleenex being synonymous with "facial tissue", they will never be known as anything other than Tupperware.

And then the compounding is compounded because the pseudo-Tupperware doesn't "mate" with the real stuff. Got an off-brand container? Don't try to force the real Tupper-lid onto it -it just ain't gonna fit no matter how many times you kind of run your thumb around the edge trying to make it snap on there. So now I have 48 containers of various sizes and 57 lids of various sizes and none of those blasted pieces fit together and all I'm trying to do is get a stool sample from the dog to take to the vet! What am I going to do - walk in to the vet's office with a mis-matched lid/container combo that allows the whole waiting room to enjoy the aroma of Fido's little present? I don't think so! Let me have a little dignity in my life!

Let's be honest here, boys and girls. If you didn't eat the lima bean casserole last night, what are the chances that you will EVER eat it? If you feel like you need to Tupper-ize your leftovers out of guilt and because there are kids in Africa starving, just get over it. Throw the crap outside to the raccoons and squirrels if you aren't going to eat it. Before you call the ACLU or PETA or 60 Minutes on me, I'm not equating starving African kids with raccoons - I'm just saying that by the time those nasty lime beans make it to Ethiopia, they are going to be more heinous than they are now so don't lose any sleep over it. How many times have you wondered what that funky-ass smell was coming from the fridge only to open up a Tupperware container and find a brown, fuzzy substance the likes of which you haven't seen since you moved out of your college apartment? And isn't it easier to quickly put the cover back on and quickly throw the whole stinky mess away? Yes, I believe it is.

Even with the price of oil going up, you know darn well that the Tupper-people are making a boatload of money on this stuff. However, if we all join together and pledge to stop using all of the various Tupper-like products out there, the world will be a better place. We'll be swimming in cupboard space, the raccoons and squirrels will be well fed and our stress level from trying to match up square lids with round containers will go down to nothing. Lastly, and perhaps most important, we can stride with confidence into the vet's office holding Fido's stool sample in a Ziploc bag where it belongs.

Hate: The Shenanigans That Goes On Behind the Counter at a Fast-Food Place

2007-10-18T09:50:00.000-05:00

You know that saying about getting what you pay for? Couldn't be more true in the world of Big Macs, Whoppers and Chalupas. Sure, the food is tasty what with all the fat and sugar and everything but let's just say that the folks who are serving these delicacies to you aren't exactly this year's finalists on Top Chef. When you are getting hooked up with a burger, fries and a big sippy-cup full of Coke for about five bucks, you gotta expect that something else has to give. OK, maybe a few things have to give - considering that the artwork usually looks like it came out of a Super-8 hotel room that had to be renovated after a hooker was killed in a scuffle over a dime-bag. But we're here today to talk about the tom-foolery that happens behind that magic dividing line called The Counter, not the paintings on the wall.

Since I'm a regular at these fine establishments, I get the chance to watch the crack team of Food Service Professionals quite often. During the normal eating times, the folks usually just do their thing. They take your order, they punch some buttons, they "cook" your stuff and they slide the tray with that paper placemat thing on it towards you full of fatty goodness. No sweat. You pay your $5 and you go on your merry way, one clogged artery closer to death.

However, I've noticed that when you visit for a mid-afternoon snacky or a late-morning pick-me-up and the place isn't quite so busy, those rascals behind The Counter can lose.... focus. For instance, it's during these quieter times that an innocent customer can sometimes listen in on a recap of the weekend's parties that the the teenage crowd attended while their parents were out of town. One minute, Ashley is serving up your combo meal and the next thing you know she is regaling her friends about how many beer bongs she did and how it had never come out of her nose before then. It's like Ashley forgets that people can actually hear and see stuff that goes on behind The Counter. Ashley, I just need my grub. I don't really want to hear about your recent experiences at the Piercing Pagoda!

Even the manager can get a little un-professional when he/she thinks no one is listening. When discussing food, I prefer a tight ship over one with leaks in it. Leaks let in germs that even a big dose of Special Sauce can't kill. I like to see the manager dropping fries in grease, assembling happy meals, and generally making sure that Skippy The High School Kid gets my order to me in a timely manner. What I don't like to see is Sporto The High School Kid Who Is Also The Manager get caught up in the discussion about the Algebra test on Friday. If indeed the manager is an adult (i.e. someone that actually uses the health benefits portion of the McDonald's compensation package), it's not just un-professional for him to be talking about the prom, it's a little creepy. That's why Mondays are bad days to go to these joints - too much reviewing of the weekend's events. I suggest Tuesdays when the full burden of the working world has subdued those poor bastards enough that they have become the French Fry jockeys that I'm looking for.

And how about when one of the high school punks is visited by another high school punk. Punk #2 may or may not be employed by the fast-food place but, either way, unless you actually remove all of your clothes in an effort to get noticed, the punk/friend will get far more attention than you will. Remember, Sporto behind the counter ain't getting paid on commission so he is more than happy to let you stand there, wallet in hand, while he blathers on to his little friend about the algebra exam in third period. And if it's some chick who is distracting Mr. Hormones behind the counter, you are better off raising a calf of your own, slaughtering it, grinding it into hamburger and grilling it on the barbecue that you built yourself, while tending the potatos that will be used for french fries.

Lastly, and this may seem nit-picky, but I don't want to hear laughter coming from behind The Counter. Laughter from someone who is touching my food makes me nervous. Laughter might mean "Ha Ha, I just dropped that good-looking guy's Chalupa on the floor" or "Ha Ha, Have you ever put a Chalupa down your pants?!" or "Ha Ha, Hey look, everyone, I'm wearing a Chalupa for a hat!" I generally like a good joke, but I prefer some decorum when preparing my Value Meal. Eating junk food is serious business and, unless Chris Rock is now flipping burgers, I don't want to hear any funny business coming from the land of stainless steel. Let's everyone just calm down and no one gets hurt.

So if you are one of the zillions of people around the world who get a discount on your McFat Burger because you work at one of those joints and wear a paper hat and/or hairnet, please keep it down behind The Counter. Us poor bastards who have fallen prey to your siren song are living on borrowed time as it is so please don't make our lives any more miserable. While it's true that your life isn't exactly a bed of roses (see hairnet comment above), don't drag me down into McHell with you.

Dig: Greasy Spoons

2007-09-20T14:13:00.001-05:00

Just about anyone you ask would confirm that I'm cheap. One of the main reasons I'm cheap is because I don't have much money in the first place. Of course, "much" is a relative term, so I don't expect a lot of sympathy for those of you who truly don't have a lot of cash in your back pockets. However, you rich bastards sure could help a brother out once in a while!

OK, so I'm cheap. And I'm generally not very pretentious. Despite my Starbuck's and foreign car snobbery, I'm really a down-to-earth kind of dude. I'm a good guy - just ask me!

OK, I'm cheap and a regular Joe. Got it. So that's why I dig a good greasy spoon over a high-falutin' (sp?) eatery of some kind. As much as I dig filet mignon and lobster washed down with an Absolut-and-tonic (with lemon, not lime please), followed up with a slice of strawberry cheesecake, I get a little buyer's remorse as I'm loosening up the belt by a couple of notches.

So, because I like to think that I'm providing a little public service, here are some rules of thumb that will let you know if you are in a good greasy spoon:

The longer the counter at the place, the better the food. If it's just a couple of seats long, it's just a token gesture and the place probably actually cleans their griddle.

If there is a lot of formica, vinyl and chrome, you know damn well their club sandwich is going to be great. However, if the vinyl isn't cracked, the place is probably owned by a guy who doesn't even work there, in which case the place will suck.

When you open the bathroom door, does it bump into the toilet? If so, they will have the best cherry pie in town.

The cook (not "chef") wears a white t-shirt with stains and a white apron with stains and the sweat from his brow is one of the main ingredients in all of his dishes.

Seriously, when was the last time you had a bad meal at a diner? Ain't nobody going to get all creative with chipotle at a place called "Bud's" so there are no surprises. What do you think is going to be on your ham and cheese sandwich at Bud's? I'll give you a hint - there's something from a pig and something a cow. You want more than that? Don't worry, Nancy (Bud's daughter who is working her way through school) will ask you if want "everything" on that before she puts the little slip of paper in that spinning thing that holds all the orders. Chips or fries are 99 cents extra and they come in the "basket" if you are really hungry.

Now compare that to when you ordered the Chilean sea bass at The Bistro. Besides that it took for-frickin-ever for Brooke to get your drink order and then re-appear a while later to take your dinner order, it was a little over-cooked, wasn't it? And you didn't know that it came with leeks, did you? Would you like to see the dessert tray? Sure, it all looks great but after spending $50 on a meal that will only carry me until breakfast tomorrow morning, now I can only afford a Snickers bar so I guess I'll pass on the White Chocolate Mousse. Despite Brooke's cleavage, the whole experience has a way of making me feel a little bit empty.

Those expensive joints make a bit of a show of dropping off the bill (bomb?) on the table because when you're plunking down that much money, it's like part of the entertainment. There's a nifty little folder thing that has a little pocket for your credit card and the waiter may have written something gay on the bill like "Thank You". Not so at a good dive. After a big-ass burrito and a cold pitcher of beer followed by a stick of gum, your waitress slides your bill (1/4 the size of the hoity-toity place and yet my pants are just as tight) across the formica with the same fanfare that is usually seen while changing the paper at the bottom of the birdcage. Thanks? I don't think so - she has to get a plate of mozzarella sticks to table 4!

A good diner doesn't have filet mignon on the menu. And if they did, you wouldn't get it because you know it would suck. That's like ordering eggs benedict at a breakfast joint with a long counter and a bell that rings when you walk in the door. Don't be an idiot. Their eggs benedict sucks. If you want a big plate of scrambled eggs, sausage and toast for $4.95, though, you've come to the right place. Your mom never made you eggs benedict so you must not need it.

So there you go. Don't be a pretentious bastard. The next time your tummy is grumbling, go belly up to a lunch counter someplace and enjoy the sweet smell of burning grease and get a little ketchup on your shirt as it falls off your cheeseburger. And send all the money you saved by not going to an over-priced place with tablecloths to me.

Dig: Trivia

2007-08-16T08:55:00.000-05:00

I love useless little morsels of information. Don't bore me with the stuff that might make a difference in the world - leave that to someone else who will do nothing with it. I will do nothing with the little stuff. I'm all about doing as little as possible and I feel a little less guilty about it if it's not really that important.

Trivia is often confused for factual information. However, presented properly, trivia quickly reveals its true useless nature. Allow me a for-instance:

Fact: Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president.

Trivia: Abraham Lincoln never put syrup on his pancakes.

See the difference? Who cares that Abe was #16? That piece of information doesn't generate more stimulating conversation. But when you spill the beans about his dislike for syrup, well now you're talking about a weighty issue! What about butter? What about waffles? Who doesn't like syrup on their pancakes? Why didn't he do something about that nasty mole on his face? See how much more interesting this is?

Here's another one for you:

Fact: Tina Louise played Ginger on Gilligan's Island.

Trivia: Tina Louise originally thought that Gilligan's Island was going to be focus on Ginger.

Everyone knows that Tina played Ginger. Not trivia. Probably not everyone knows that, despite the show being named after GILLIGAN (!), Tina thought the show would be about her. That's much more interesting. Did she mis-read the title of the show and thought it said "Ginger's Island"? Did she think that hitting on the Professor week after week would be enough to carry the show? Despite a killer bod, I just don't see it happening. And don't get me started on that slut Mary-Ann!

Trivia abounds in our little world. Song lyrics, movie or TV lines, dates in history and gobs and gobs of it in the sports world. All beautifully useless! Name the last three Americans to win the Tour de France. Who was known as the Desert Fox? What movie is "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" from? You, too, can be that annoying guy at the water cooler (do offices still have water coolers?) with all the chicks hanging off of you because you know who Erwin Rommel is. See how trivia can change your life?!

Count the number of trivial pieces of information in this sentence: "U2's 'Pride' was written about Martin Luther King who was shot on April 4 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis after MLK visited some union garbagemen who were on strike." The correct answer is 857. Is that what you got? You didn't? What kind of dumb-ass are you?! Again, on the surface, this is just a bunch of facts strung together, but when I call you a dumb-ass for not knowing all of them, it becomes trivia and makes you want to punch me in the nose. Regular facts don't cause normally passive people to strike out against others. It's only when useless information is presented in a smart-ass fashion does violence break out. And isn't there a lesson to be learned there, George W. Bush? And, just like the topic of Mary-Ann, don't get me started on labor unions....

I have to admit, though, that the sports trivia can get to be a little much. I was watching some lame sports trivia game show on TV the other day and these dudes knew everything about everything! It's one thing to get all jazzed up about a particular mainstream sport, but when you're rattling off the scores in the semi-final matches of the badminton world championships of 1964, there is no doubt that you also live in your mother's basement and sleep in pajamas with feet in them. How about if you focus all your brain power on curing cancer or something instead of being the mayor of nerd-ville?

One of the beautiful things about trivia is that there is a pretty good chance that the little factoid is complete bullshit. If you want to waste your time checking out Abe's breakfast condiment preferences, you go right ahead. In the meantime, I'll be over here hitting on your girlfriend. Same with Ginger - who cares if it's true?! The more inane (trivial, you might say) the snippet of info, the better! For example, did you know that a mouse's weight is equal to the square root of the length of it's tail? If you want to challenge me, just get out your little ruler and find yourself a mouse and ask him/her to hold still while you measure and weigh him. All I have to do is say I read it (or wrote it, whatever) on the internet and it instantly becomes legit. I have one word for you: Wikipedia. Who checks on that stuff? If I added some lies to an obscure enough entry, it will be spread around the world as fact in no time. Here's one for you: Jared (that irritating guy from Subway) used to be a woman. The next person who reads that in Wikipedia will be asking him to be the spokesman/woman for the Transsexual Times because it MUST be true if it's in Wikipedia!

Along with presenting trivia to your unsuspecting friends comes a certain amount of smugness. It doesn't matter to me if you aren't interested in my useless piece of information - I just like to feel superior knowing something that you don't. Did you know that Elvis had a twin brother who died at birth? You didn't? How can you not know that? What kind of dumb-ass are you? See how great that is! I feel better about myself already! I'm sure all my friends think that my brain must be running at about 113 % capacity even though they say that we usually only use 10%. They probably all think that my superior intelligence is due to my second toe being longer than my first toe. Which, of course, is completely true because I read about it in Wikipedia.

So there you go. I dig trivia. I love knowing that U-Mich beat Stanford 49-0 in the first Rose Bowl. I love knowing that Lee Iaccoca was the guy who developed the Ford Mustang. Basically, I just dig any sentence that begins with "Did you know that...."

Here's a good one to send you on your way: Did you know that Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name was Moon? And now I'll be here by the water cooler waiting for the chicks to hit on me!

Don't Get: Why Cars Don't Cost A Zillion Dollars

2007-07-19T07:31:00.000-05:00

For those of you keeping score at home, I work in the upside-down world known as the automotive industry. In my little corner of the world, we make parts for the interior of the vehicle (not "car") like seats and stuff. It's a bit of a parallel universe to the real world where logic rules and people actually do things that make sense - except that it's the opposite of that. In my world, the sky is green and the grass is blue. Where the dog pees on the grass is still that same dead-grass color but other than that, it's the opposite.

The company I work for is pretty big so we supply stuff to all of the car companies out there. Certainly, the US automakers are the most screwed-up (getting in bed with the UAW will do that to you) but the other ones have their moments too. And since I'm writing this on my work computer on company time I don't want to bash my company, just the ones that we make parts for!

Here's a for-instance for you: There's a term around here called "in-vehicle position". It means that you might be able to see a defect if you hold a part at a certain angle in certain lighting, but if you look at it in its intended position in the vehicle, you wouldn't be able to see it. Let's suppose there's a flaw of some kind (maybe like a red dot on a cashmere sweater?) that is a little tricky to see. So, now picture a bunch of nerds waving a stupid sun visor around looking for the right angle to see a little bump that the owner of the car will never even notice. Heck, even if the owner does see it, they'll just chalk up the defect to crappy US craftsmanship and move on to swearing at the guy who just cut him off. But, because that bump is not "supposed" to be there, you gotta shut the line down, call the nerds, throw some parts away, re-build those parts, e-mail the customer, and generally alert the media all because of something that the dude driving the car will never see! So how much does all this running around cost? I have no idea, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot - all for a stupid visor, not even the engine or transmission or something a little more critical to getting from Point A to Point B.

OK, now all of these parts have to go together in the vehicle, right? Seats, the "overhead system" (that's the "ceiling"), the floor console and the "IP" (that's the instrument panel - known to everyone in the rest of the world as the "dashboard") - it's all gotta fit together. Well, the requirements for the gaps between this stuff is all technical like "plus or minus 0.5 millimeters" and all of us ying-yangs in the industry go to great lengths to make sure that the gap is not 0.6 millimeters because God knows you can't have that! So we build gages, have meetings, make phone calls, measure stuff and then re-do everything because that's what it says on the blueprint. I have one word for you: blueprint, schmueprint! How about if we use a real world test like there can't be a gap big enough for a french fry to fall down behind the cupholder. For the price of some potatoes and a deep fryer, we could test parts all day long! If we're feeling generous, we could install a ketchup dispenser on the assembly line and the nice people putting this stuff together could have a little snacky-snack while they're working. Edible quality control! Brilliant!

And don't get me started talking about the color of stuff. First, there is no such color as "black" in the automotive industry. There are colors like "midnight charcoal" and "ebony" though. Same for "tan". No "tan", but lots of "sand", "pebble", and "baby poop brown". OK, I made up that last one but some marketing department somewhere held meetings for three months to come up with those colors and then probably went on a golf outing afterwards to celebrate their success. Next, you gotta make sure that the parts you make match the little paint chip. To do that, we install cameras and sensors and junk on the assembly line to make sure that the color is just right. Fine, I get it. However, fast forward about six months to a chick driving her nifty new car down the road. As she is putting her makeup on (while driving) and drinking her Starbuck's (mother's milk!) and calling the babysitter (that little slut!) she accidentally drops her lipstick. After swearing into the phone, she removes said lipstick by just kind of rubbing it in with her thumb. All that hard work by the yahoos in the color testing lab went out the window because she could care less if there is a little "Fawn" lipstick on her "Platinum" seat as long as it doesn't leave a stain on her "ass".

OK, last gripe - documentation. I'm an e-mail kind of guy and a bit of a tree-hugger so I don't use much paper. The auto industry, however, apparently thinks that paper grows on trees (get it?!) because every stupid little change requires a friggin' novel that will then sit in someone's desk drawer in a three-ring binder of some kind. Each automaker has their own format for the same piece of information so you gotta do everything 58 times to keep everyone happy. I know they think that the stupid forms will be read daily so they must be kept in an orderly fashion, but that's a bunch of hooey. Once it is written and properly bound with all three rings, it WILL NEVER BE LOOKED AT AGAIN! Paper, binders and people cost money so let's just all knock it off, OK?

My point here, boys and girls, is that cars are cheap even at $20k or $30. Us dolts in the industry get paid a decent wage to go through all the gyrations described above (and write blog postings) and yet cars don't cost a zillion dollars. My other point (two points in one post!) is that it just isn't that important to go to such lengths to make an absolutely perfect car. It costs a bunch of money to do it and most people just don't care/notice. I bet if we forgot about looking for defects that people will never see, cars would cost about $173 and we could all have six or eight of them. When one of them ran out of gas, we could just ditch that car and drive another one. Why pay a ton of money for gas if the car is so cheap (for supplemental reading, please see my previous post about my confusion over the high price of gas)?

Hey, look, I've worked myself right into lunch!

Hate: Feeling Obligated to Talk to People

2007-06-21T14:41:00.000-05:00

I don't really like people. I've said before that they are interesting to observe in their natural surroundings, but for the most part, I would really rather not interact with them. Perhaps feed them and hope for a fleeting stroke of their head as they scurry away after eating from my hand. Maybe capture them in a photograph while they are unaware they are being watched (oh wait, that's a misdemeanor), but that's about all I'm really interested in.

For that matter, I prefer quiet to noise. As much as I enjoy some high-quality '80's hair band rock and roll, Eddie Van Halen can wear me out with his guitar playing. So, for me, people + noise = hatred.

This post was prompted by a trip to the car repair place to get our super-duper minivan a little more super and/or duper. The garage at least offers the service of taking you where you need to go while your car is being worked and they even pick you up when it's done. Nice! Not so nice was the old guy who blathered on and on about stupid stuff in his life as he took me into work. He covered about 22 topics in the seven minutes we were in the car together, including but not limited to:

his upcoming rotator cuff surgery
his previous rotator cuff surgery
the pain associated with his rotator cuff surgery
his wife's hip and knee replacements
his sister's 60th high school reunion
his nephew's career at GM
his vacation to Florida

During his prattling, I felt obligated to see "oh", "OK" and "Really?" because I'm such a nice guy. He also didn't have the A/C on and I was getting all clammy in the car. You're here to provide a service, Gramps, just get on with it. I'm more than happy to stare straight ahead while you chauffeur me around. Feel free to NOT talk to me.

And how about those long elevator rides with a total stranger? Those are the worst! You go in, you press your button and you proceed to watch the little numbers light up as you go up the building. Of course, you're not just going from the 3rd floor to the 6th floor. You gotta go all the way up to 52! Do I say something? What would I say? "Hot enough for ya?" "How 'bout them Tigers?" "Have you seen that fat guy in Accounting?" It would take an exploding thing of some kind to get me to make idle chit-chat with the other person (that's assuming it isn't a babe who is totally hot for me). Excruciating! If my little elevator buddy wants to talk to me, I might just hear him/her out, but chances are that he/she will just bug me.

I'm happy to report that I work in a two-story building so the dreaded elevator stand-off doesn't happen too often. Unfortunately, said building has a couple of long hallways and the chances of walking down one of them while someone else is walking toward you are pretty good. Damn that architect! So, let me paint a picture for you: I'm walking down the hall headed to a meeting or some other useless activity and pretty soon here comes another lackey doing the same thing. If I'm lucky, I'll have a piece of paper in my hand that I can (pretend to) be looking at, thus avoiding eye/voice contact with the other lackey. If that's the case, I can just kind of glance up as we are passing and mutter a "hey" and keep moving. If I'm really lucky, I will be on the phone and maybe just do the quick, upward head motion that is universally accepted as acknowledging the other person's existence and that's about it.

However, in the event that I don't have any papers in my hand and there is no real use for the phone, I am forced into a stare-down with the on-coming lackey. Do I stare straight ahead? Do I look at everything EXCEPT the person coming towards me? What if it's a babe? How do I check her out without being too obvious? Invariably, we get about 6 feet apart (the exact distance doesn't matter, both parties will know when it's time) and we both do the muttered "hey", making only the briefest eye contact. Oy, vey! I've had root canals that are less painful!

So, here's the deal. Unless you're a babe who is trying to get me in the sack (What?! It could happen!), please leave me alone. If you must say something to me, please just say that it's OK for me NOT to say anything to you - because I really don't want to, I just feel obligated to.

Don't Get: Why I Dig Magic Tricks So Much

2007-06-05T07:22:00.000-05:00

I know what you're thinking. You're wondering how in the world I could dig something as cheesy as magic tricks. Other than a mime, who is lower on the entertainment totem pole than a magician? I know, I know. And yet, I'm intrigued.

See, I'm way left-brained. I practically don't have a right brain. Some people won't be surprised to learn that I essentially only have half of a brain, but it's true. I marvel at people who draw lines that aren't straight and are actually OK with it. If I were to sculpt something, I could probably sculpt a really good rectangle. "The Thinker"? Not so much. And I'm much better at painting the kitchen than a landscape. So maybe it's due to my nerdy engineering brain that marvels at the ability of these yahoos to defy the laws of physics. Why, oh why, can't I saw a woman in half (you know, without the blood) when that buck-toothed goon Doug Henning can do it? I work with a guy who does cheesy parlor tricks during happy hour at a local restaurant. He wanders from table to table pulling coins from behind your ear and guessing the card that you have carefully pulled from the deck and shown no other living soul. The condensation from my beer soaks the tablecloth as I watch him cut the deck not once, but twice, and announce for all to hear that I am clutching the six of diamonds in my hands! Good God, is there no end to the miracles that this man can perform?

So as much as I'm amazed at the Happy Hour guy opening up a brand new deck of cards only to find MY card on top of the deck, I practically soil myself at the super-duper elaborate tricks that someone like Criss Angel does. Do you know this guy? He bills himself as "Criss Angel, Mindfreak" and when I grow up I want to be just like him. Got a plate glass window you want someone to walk through? Criss is your man. Got a swimming pool? Criss will walk across it for you. He's big on tricks like putting on a straitjacket, lock himself in a box with some nuclear waste, strap the box to the space shuttle in Florida and then 2.3 seconds later show up at a 7-11 in Topeka wearing scuba gear. He does some out-there stuff and I watch him coma-like when he does is TV specials.

Or maybe I dig magic because of the babes. Have you ever seen the chicks/assistants that prance around the stage with these dudes? And the outfits they wear? I have three words for you: Hot, hot and hot. If these magicians can pull a rabbit out of their hats, imagine what they can pull out of their pants! Of course, I would use my magic for evil. Instead of making the chick disappear and then re-appear in the cage where the lion used to be, I would make her disappear and show up at my place and I'd make a few pieces of her already-skimpy outfit even skimpier.

Maybe the reason I dig magic is because I can't do it myself. OK, it might be a little easier to do than paint something like "Lily Pads" by Monet. That whole painting is made out of a bunch of dots, for cyring out loud (this is my effort to appear cultured)! Can't paint, can't sing, can't play the piano and I can't make Cindy Brady disappear from a big box in front of the rest of the Brady bunch. One might think that I could learn how to shuffle a deck of cards so that the nine of hearts is always on top but I'm guessing that it would be a little trickier for me to whip out a Venus De Milo even though I wouldn't have to spend much time on the arms. And don't even get me started on the whole levitation thing.

So there you have it. I dig magic tricks. I'm just not sure why. One thing I don't dig about magic tricks, though, is when those bastard magicians don't tell how they do stuff. Penn and Teller are good about giving away their secrets but you still need a collapsible knife, some fake blood and some general sleight of hand to do most of their tricks. But who has time to make fake blood? I'd be too busy coming up with ways to use my magic to land some babes.

Dig: Going Inside the Fast-Food Place and Getting Served Faster than the People in the Drive-Thru

2007-05-25T12:06:00.000-05:00

I am the king of the drive-thru. Starbucks, McDonald's, BK (not Wendy's too much) - you name it, I have the remains of food from all of those joints somewhere under the driver's seat of my car. What's more convenient than pulling up to the speaker thing, ordering my fat-laden food and then stopping at the next window to pay for said food and receive the tasty morsels into the comfort of my mobile home-away-from-home? I don't need to step out of my cocoon and I can enjoy Howard on satellite radio while taking a big bite out of a Big Mac. What more could a boy want?

My time is pretty valuable what with making blog entries and all, so the idea of never leaving the car to eat is an attractive proposition. However, let's not confuse time-management with laziness. Given the opportunity to save a few precious seconds, I will pounce with cat-like reflexes even if it means actually expending more energy to do so. Especially if it's at the expense of others. The whole process is similar to changing lanes fifty times on the highway - I'm always on the lookout for an ever-so-slightly quicker way of getting home (I could give a shit if it takes me an extra two minutes to GET to work). It's all about me, me, me.

So here's the process. As a seasoned veteran of drive-thru (drive-through?) windows, if I see that there are more than a few cars ahead of me in line, I immediately scan the inside of the restaurant (calling those places restaurants is like calling the carnival that comes to town a theme park, but what are you going to do?) to scope out the length of the line at the counter. I take into consideration the type of car as well. For instance, if I see a dude that looks just like me (except his car DOESN'T need a new transmission) then I figure he's done this dance before and he's going to be quick. He knows better than to make any special requests for extra ketchup or no pickles or some damn thing. However, if I see a soccer mom in front of me with two or three soccer mom-lets in the back seat fighting over the toy from the last time they went to one of these places, even a rookie would recognize that Mama Cass up there is going to take for-fricking-ever. If I see her turn around to ask the brats what they want, I'm outta there!

Same goes for the line at the counter. It can be hard to see inside there, but if there are a couple of lonely looking lackies just waiting for someone to order up a Whopper, I know that I can save precious seconds by going inside. Conversely, if Mom and Dad are in there with the four kids (one from her marriage, two from his and one together) and there are a few people standing behind them looking at their watches and tapping their feet, I'll stay in my P.O.S. and just hope that the pimply-faced kid at the drive-thru window is all hopped up on Red Bull and can process my order quickly. If I have to wait, I'd much rather do it while sitting on my hind-end in my car instead of standing behind some dumb-asses on a hard ceramic tile floor. Besides, there's less chance of me strangling any of those dumb-asses followed by a lengthy trial where I risk exposing some of the other skeletons in my closet if I just sit in my car.

It takes swift decision-making, but it is such sweet victory to quickly park, scurry inside, order my value meal and make a hasty retreat back to my car and see that the minivan that was two cars ahead of me is just now placing their order! I make sure to make eye contact with the schlub who is still waiting (im)patiently to order his lunch while I'm already enjoying mine. You just sit there and piss away your day, I'll be getting a headstart on clogging my arteries with my combo meal, thank you very little!

You know that picture of Muhammad Ali standing over some guy that he just knocked out (here's a little hint - it's the pic at the top of the post)? That's how I feel when I walk - nay, STRUT - out of there holding my bag of grub. Hey, you in the car! You want a piece of me? I'll gladly kick your ass just as soon as I finish my fries. In the meantime, you just enjoy the fumes of the '79 Caprice Classic in front of you while you listen to the kids fight in the backseat.

Big Macs, Howard Stern and taking "cuts" in line - life is good!

Hate: Game Shows

2007-04-30T15:33:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned that I dig sitting on my caboose watching TV. Unfortunately, along with the good ("Lost", "The Rockford Files") comes the bad (see below). The only redeeming quality about game shows on TV is that they make me feel superior to the dolts who are actually on the show. Sure, I might not be able to actually come up with the capital of Nevada (Carson City) while on the hastily-assembled stage but I can spit it out at home faster than you can say "James Rockford, come on down."

You know that song from the Sound of Music that goes "these are a few of my favorite things"? Yeah, well, the few things below are from the song that goes "these are a few of things that suck."

Deal or No Deal: Are you kidding me? Apparently, the name Greedy or Not Greedy was already taken. Here's the premise: There are a bunch of babes holding nifty-looking brushed aluminum suitcases full of different amounts of money up to a cool $1 million. The contestant picks one of the suitcases for himself and then picks a bunch more in hopes of narrowing down the suitcases to determine how much money is in the one he picked for himself. Along the way, a mysterious banker (seen only in silhouette to heighten the drama!) offers the contestant money to stop the whole process and go home. The now-bald-but-with-a-soul-patch Howie Mandel (of blowing up a rubber glove on top of his head fame) is your friendly host. So, anyway, these dumb-ass contestants are offered lots of money along they way. Way more than they would normally see while working behind the counter at the local Hallmark store. Most of the time, the greed gene kicks in and they turn down these offers in hopes of getting even more cash. And most of the time, they get screwed and end up with, like, $1.79 or something. And it serves those dumb-asses right! My last complaint about this show is that the contestants are not picked randomly. People are hand-picked to play so they can bring their families along to cheer them on (there is lots of good cop/bad cop dynamics going on within the family) and the women are usually babes themselves and the men are usually over-the-top characaters of some kind. And Howie is just bald.

Wheel of Fortune: Are you kidding me - again?! My dad, who is a pretty smart guy, watches this show. He gets the puzzles with about two letters showing. I don't know why he watches other than because that is part of his evening routine. It's not mentally challenging (if you ARE mentally challenged by this show, you are probably mentally challenged by small, shiny objects also), Vanna is over the hill by now and the game/set is just generally long in the tooth. We took one step closer to armageddon when "I'd like to buy a vowel" became part of American pop culture. Damn you, Pat Sajack!

Jeopardy: Could Alex Trebek be a bigger pompous ass?! I think not. Granted, some of these questions are pretty tough. For instance, I personally don't know Napolean's shoe size. But the whole idea of "phrasing your answer in the form of a question" is just another way for Alex to show that he is in charge. In the event that you can actually get those stupid buzzer things to work when you want them to, you better damn well make sure that you don't just blurt out 6 1/2 when the correct answer is clearly "What is 6 1/2?".

Anything on During the Day: Let's name a few of them, shall we? Press Your Luck (the stupid show with the No Whammies thing), Password (I do a great impersonation of the announcer telling the audience the word by covering my mouth a little and saying "The word is 'tapioca'"), Card Sharks (works as a drinking game, too!), any version of Family Feud (though I have to give props to Richard Dawson for making out with all those chicks), Tic Tac Dough (my 6 year-old loves tic-tac-toe. I'm an adult and I think it's stupid but apparently the game show people have more in common with my kid who is in kindergarten than with me) and, lastly, Bumper Stumpers (not real well known despite the mentally stimulating premise of deciphering vanity license plates). Good God, that's a lot of bad TV! I bet at the network Christmas parties, the people who work on daytime game shows sit at the tables right next to the kitchen door....

Hollywood Squares: Again with the tic-tac-toe! This time, let's build some enormous structure and plunk a bunch of C-list celebrities in there to crack stupid jokes while answering stupid questions. Brilliant! The twist is that every stupid joke is punctuated by some double entendre of some kind:

Host: OK, Mr. Contestant, which celebrity would you like to choose?

Contestant: Larry Manetti, who played Rick on Magnum, P.I., please.

Host: Larry, for an X and the win, what's in a Sex on the Beach?

Larry: I don't know but I usually end up with lots of sand in my bathing suit!

Host: That's a good one, Larry!

There have been about 15 different hosts over the years, including the eyebrow-less Whoopi Goldberg but it's still the same dumb tic-tac-toe game.

Anything with Couples: The Newlywed Game, The Love Connection, The Dating Game and don't even get me started on The Bachelor. I'm going to start a new show called The Divorce Game made up entirely of people who have been on these shows.

Dude, I could go on and on. The cheesy hosts of these cheesy shows could be their own category of hatred for me. Wink Martindale? Gene Rayburn? Bob Eubanks? Chuck Woolery? Please! You know there are enough white belts between these guys to stretch from here to the moon. How many bottles of Old Spice do you think these guys have slathered on themselves over the years? I can just see these guys at the bar at the Holiday Inn after taping a few shows talking to an unsuspecting chick: "Hi, I'm Wink Martindale, why don't you come by my dressing room after the show and check out some of the fabulous cash and prizes in my pants!"

And now there is a Game Show Network. And so I must kill myself. It's been nice working with you. Remember to help control the pet population - have your pet spayed or neutered.

Dig: How Little Time is Lost Between the Time a Team Scores a Goal in Hockey and the Time the Puck Gets Dropped at Center Ice.

2007-04-26T07:18:00.000-05:00

Despite what may seem like a cumbersome title, I struggled a little to narrow the scope of this here post. See, I dig hockey. But not all hockey. Mostly I just dig the Detroit Red Wings so this could have been a post about me digging the Red Wings but I'm not such a sports nerd that I retain a lot of information about each player's stats, history and skate size. I'm pretty easily fooled (surprising, I know) and someone could rattle off a bunch of statistics and numbers and junk about a player who may or may not be with the Red Wings and ask me to comment on it. Unfortunately, my comment would have to be something along the lines of "Duh". So this couldn't be a big broad topic of me digging hockey or even me digging the Red Wings.

So I said to myself, "Self, what is it that you dig about hockey if you are such a dumb-ass that you don't even know who plays what position." After much soul-searching, I realized that the thing I like about hockey is that when a team scores an all-too-precious goal, the puck is back in play before you can say Stevie Yzerman is the Man. Janet Jones (wife of Wayne Gretzky) might like to place a little wager on the over/under but that's beside the point.

Somehow, after a bunch of skating around, getting checked into the boards, losing teeth and getting into fights, the puck finds it's way into the net. Nice! The red light goes on, horns sound, fans throw hats (in the event of a hat trick) or an octopus (if it's the Wings scoring) and there is a change of players on the ice. But that's it. There ain't 16 commercials for things you don't need, there ain't much comment by the announcer dudes with their Canadian accents and there sure ain't a marching band or Janet Jackson exposing herself. Within about two minutes, those crazy kids are playing hockey again. Beautiful!

Let's pretend I looked up on-line someplace the average number of goals per NHL game and found it to be 4.3 (we have to pretend because clearly my time is too valuable to waste on such things). With so few goals, you would think that any time the netminder lets one through the five-hole there would be all kinds of analysis, discussion and general wasting of time. Isn't that what the NFL would do? John Madden would fire up his telestrater and blather on and on about who missed a tackle and the condition of the turf and the barometric pressure. There would be replays up the wazoo for even the most boring 2-yard run up the middle. And lets not forget the commercials. Some before the extra point, some after the extra point, some before the following kick-off and finally some more after the kick-off. The NFL isn't called the No Fun League for nothin'!

See, the kickoff after a score in football is to give the other team a chance to re-group and it's their opportunity to even the score. Not so in hockey. If I fire a 100mph slapshot past your facemask with the sweet paintjob, in about a minute and a half I might just do it again. You want your chance to score on me? You better win the face-off, punk, because I'm not going to "kick off" to you and just let you have it. Baseball is cool that way too but there is still too much time between batters with all that jockstrap adjusting and tobacco spitting. Basketball is dumb just because there are so many baskets made. Slam dunk? Big deal - wait a couple of minutes and it will happen again. And how de-moralizing is to score a goal, win the ensuing face-off and then score another goal all in the span of a couple of minutes. Super de-moralizing, that's how much!

The NHL on TV doesn't have nearly the following that other professional sports have so chances are pretty good that you're a big fan if you're watching the game. You probably know how to pronounce Patrick Roy's last name (damn him!) and you have given serious thought to what you would do with the cup if you had it for a day. So you just want to watch some damn hockey. When your team scores, you can't wait for the puck to drop so they can score again. And if by chance the bastards who are lucky enough to be playing your team are the ones who scored the goal, you can't wait for the puck to drop so you can show those sissies who's really in charge.

Don't waste my time with kick-offs and commercials and crap, just drop the friggin' puck!

Go Wings!

Dig: History's Mysteries

2007-03-27T07:43:00.000-05:00

I wish I could tell you that the nifty rhyming title of this post was a John original, but there is a TV show on Discovery or the History Channel (imagine that!) of the same name and it kind of stuck with me.

Anyway (or "Anyways", if you prefer), I dig pondering all those ancient mysteries about pyramids, Stonehenge and Bigfoot. I'm also going to put conspiracy theories under this umbrella: Who killed JFK? Did we really land on the moon? Don't get me wrong - most of the theories that are out there surrounding those two examples are pretty out-there but that's kind of what I like about them.

So, below are a few cool mysteries and my observations on same. For the sake of brevity (I'm sure you're disappointed...), I may do some combining and condensing:

Stonehenge:
Is it just me or are those some big-ass rocks those people were moving around?! That's just one angle of this deal - how did they move those big-ass rocks? The other angle is - what the hell are those big-ass rocks doing laid out like that? I could probably do some research to better educate my vast reading audience on how the big-ass rocks are laid out just right to capture the rays of the sun at the Summer solstice, etc. If I would take a few minutes to google "Stonehenge", I could make some insightful and intelligent comments about the whole deal - but that would be silly. Instead, I'm just going to summarize it by saying the whole thing is pretty twisted. Did they get it right the first time or did they have to let three or four Summer Solstices (try saying that with a mouth full of peanut butter!) go by and move the big-ass rocks a little bit each year to get it right? How about the aliens? Did they use their spaceships and some kind of space-crane or space-ladder to put those big-ass rocks there? What the hell were they even doing it for in the first place?! About the only reason I can think of to spend that much energy on something like that is if there is nothing good on TV. Again, I say it's just plain twisted.

JFK Assassination:
I've been to the spot where he was shot. Kind of creepy. There is a little thing in the road that marks it. If you look "back and to the left" (Seinfeld reference!), you can see where Lee Harvey Oswald (Note the use of all three names. Killers of this caliber - no pun intended - are often referred to with all three names. John Wilkes Booth, James Earl Ray, Mark David Chapman.) shot him from the Texas School Book Depository. Grassy knoll is there too. On a related note, I had a grassy knoll once - a little penicillin cleared it right up! Yeah, so Oliver Stone presents a convincing case in his movie that there was more to the whole thing than Lee sitting in the window waiting for the limo to come around the corner. Ollie presents enough information to create some doubt in my little brain about the whole Warren commission report. And I'm OK with Ollie manipulating my gray matter like that. I don't think it's terribly important to know for sure who killed him anymore. Back in the day, it was certainly important to understand why in the world Jack Ruby made sure that old Lee wasn't able to speak up. Was Jack such a patriot that he must avenge the death of his president? I think not. Now, I just think it's cool to speculate. Even the boys on Mythbusters did a show about it!

Jon-Benet Ramsey Killing:
Killing a kid is just really awful. Plenty of theories out there but someone just plain old got away with it.

Landing on the Moon:
How many people have been on the moon? I'll give you a hint - If you bought a dozen doughnuts, each moon-lander-dude could have one. Of course, it would be tricky to eat it with the whole space suit thing going on, but that's beside the point. Some dolts out there think that the whole landing on the moon thing is staged. They use "evidence" like inconsistent lighting in the pictures, the funky zero-gravity walk that the moon-dudes use and the lack of stars in the background of the pictures to suggest that the whole thing was shot in someone's basement like a bad snuff film. Not sure what they are saying is the motivation for doing this. Believe me, a lot of cogs and widgets and stuff have to work pretty darn well to get a guy from Florida to the moon and back so I'm not saying it's easy. Cripes, we have enough problems making a decent car (see Ford Pinto, Chrysler K-Car and the Yugo) let alone a friggin' rocket! However, my glass is half-full today and I'm going to stick with the idea that, sure enough, we played a little golf on the moon.

Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster and that goofy Woodpecker in the Everglades:
Love Bigfoot! How can you not? He was even on The Six Million Dollar Man. If you're on The Six Million Dollar Man, you have definitely arrived! Unfortunately, I don't think he is really out there. As a matter of fact, a couple of years ago a guy admitted to faking that movie clip that supposedly shows a She-Bigfoot walking through the woods. Now, that guy might be from the Jack Ruby school of buzz-wreckers but I'm inclined to agree with him: there ain't no such thing as Bigfoot. There are plenty of people who have "seen" Bigfoot or even a whole herd of Bigfeet and have casts of their footprints and stuff but, just like people who have "seen" UFOs, they often live in trailers and use words like y'all, yonder and seen (instead of saw) so they can't be trusted. Same deal with the Loch Ness Monster. I know Loch Ness is really deep and everything but I just don't think old Nessie is down there. As far as that stupid bird in the Everglades (or wherever) goes, perhaps if those people put as much effort into curing cancer we could save a lot on our public healthcare costs.

UFOs:
This one's a toughie. Fox Mulder was convinced that there were lots of UFOs flying around out there and I really liked The X Files so I'm having a hard time discounting his theories. And Close Encounters of The Third Kind was really cool, especially when Richard Dreyfuss was sculpting the Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes. I've never seen a UFO or an alien (although there is a guy at work who is way freaky!) so I don't have definitive evidence that they exist. At the same time, "swamp gas" and "weather balloons" are used to explain weird crap in the sky all the time and that seems pretty flimsy to me. After all, what the hell is swamp gas? Sometimes after eating a big burrito, I get a little swamp gas but no one ever thinks that a UFO is flying out of my ass! More like a UFO flew up there and crash-landed! Just like I don't think that Bigfoot is really out there in the woods, I'm going to have to conclude that we are alone in the universe. I know it sounds egotistical but I'm like that. Everyone gets all in a lather about finding water on Mars and how it could support intelligent life. Well, I'm here to tell you that we got boatloads of water here on this Big Blue Marble and we got some real dumb-asses around here so don't let a little agua fool you into thinking that Mars would be a good vacation get-away!

So there you have it. You can draw your own conclusions but remember, if you use the word "yonder", you can't be trusted.

Hate: Actors Who Take Themselves Too Seriously

2007-01-18T10:49:00.000-05:00

I dig movies. I dig TV. Probably TV more than movie, actually. What I don't dig, though, is the actors who think that what they are doing is important. I also hate that female people who act are suddenly called "actors" and not "actresses" anymore, but that's a different discussion. Just like overpaid professional athletes who complain about ANYTHING (you're not allowed to complain about anything in the entire universe if you make as much money as some of those bastards), I don't have much patience for actors or actresses who think that what they do is anything more than, you know, acting.

All interviews with actors are the same, no matter who the interviewer is or who the interviewee is:

Interviewer: Tell me about your latest project.
Interviewee: Well, it's a period piece about a woman struggling against the rules that society has placed on her. It takes place in 1843 in a farming town that is run by a ruthless landlord.
I'er: I see. What did you do to prepare for the role?
I'ee: I really wanted to connect with the character so I spent a week living on a ranch. I even wore long skirts and a bonnet to milk the cows. The challenges that those women faced are overwhelming!
I'er: Wow! You really lived it! That must have been difficult.
I'ee: Yes, I had to be up everyday at 6am to milk the cows and slop the pigs. Then I worked in the fields until 3:30. At the end of the day, I made dinner for the ranch hands right alongside the rancher's wife.
I'er: That's real dedication.
I'ee: Well, I wanted to connect with the character -
I'er: Yeah, you mentioned that.

I have one word for you: blah, blah, blah! Who cares?!! I know there is an entire second industry surrounding the entertainment industry consisting of Entertainment Weekly, Entertainment Tonight and various other things with "entertainment" in their titles - and that just blows me away. You go ahead and make your movie. I'll plunk down my cash to see it (or not) and then you go make another movie. See how simple that is? Don't talk to me about connecting with anything and if you bitch about how hard it was for you to slop the pigs at 6am, you can just shut right the hell up.

See, here's the deal. Making most movies doesn't save the world. Yes, "Schindler's List" woke up a lot of people to the whole holocaust thing. And "Hotel Rwanda" isn't exactly about promoting tourism in that country. So those movies do have a positive affect on our consciences. But, even though I totally dig "The 40-year-old Virgin", it's not going to cure cancer.

So, below is how an interview should go for "Schindler's List:
Interviewer: Dude, that's hardcore.
Interviewee: Yeah, I know. That holocaust stuff is nasty. Nazis suck.

See? The movie says it all. You don't need no dumb-ass director or actor or actress telling you anything more about it. Perhaps if the movie sucks, the aforementioned director/actor/actress feels compelled to over-sell it. How many interviews were done for "Gigli"? Could have been a good indicator, don't you think?!

OK, so now let's see what an interview for "40-Year-Old Virgin" would go like:
Interviewer: Dude, that's hilarious!
Interviewee: Thanks, man. Glad you dug it! My life is pretty shiny right now and I owe it all to a stupid movie. I'm a pretty funny guy so this whole thing came pretty easy to me. A couple of times I had to get up at 9:30 but I called in sick the next day! Can't talk now - I'm meeting my agent at the Benz dealer - he has a red 2-seater all picked out for me.

The difference here is that the interviewee knows that his life is good and he's not afraid to chalk it up to making a damn funny movie. He ain't connecting with nothin'! Except maybe the cute teller at the bank where he shamelessly deposits his big fat paycheck. And he's smart enough to know not to bitch about getting his chest hair waxed because no one gives a rat's ass.

Lastly, I must harp on a particular phrase that the "bad" (read: one who takes himself too seriously) actors use. That phrase is "honing my craft". If I hear some dumb-ass actor talk about honing his craft one more time, I'm going to hone my craft right in his face! Your craft?! Are you making ashtrays out of clay now? Doing a little macrame`? Those are crafts. What you are doing is reading some lines and pretending to be someone else. Shoot, sometimes when I go to the bar and take my wedding ring off, I'm pretending to be someone else! Some people call that being a two-timing cheating bastard but, from now on, I'm going to call it honing my craft! I'm sure the wife will understand.

So, people of Hollywood, please just shut up and make your movies and TV shows. Don't blather on about getting into character and how hard it was to be a ditchdigger for 2 weeks during shooting because there are plenty of people out there who dig ditches 52 weeks a year and they don't go home to a big-ass house and a trophy wife and they sure don't pull down the cash that you do. And if you feel the need to hone your craft, you just do that in the privacy of a rest area bathroom!

Hate: Real World and Road Rules Whores

2006-12-13T12:38:00.000-05:00

I mostly dig reality TV. I like the concept of watching people interact without scripts to see their true nature come out. After enough time, you just gotta be who you are. (Isn't that right, Mel Gibson and Michael Richards?) The same goes for me. While I don't think I would yell out the n-word on stage, all of the other corporate suck-asses that I work with might learn some unsavory things about me outside of Corporate-Suck-Ass-Ville. Fortunately, I've conditioned my wife to tell everyone that the bruises came from her accidentally falling down the stairs so at least THAT won't come up but most of my little co-workers would like a little sideways at me if they knew what a big Howard Stern fan I am.

So while I dig the concept, I hate a lot of the people involved with reality TV. I have to interject here, though, that Gary Hogeboom of Survivor (not NFL, in this case) fame, lives in my hometown. My wife taught his kids in school. I've met him quite a few times and I say hello to him at the grocery store and while walking the dog in the park. So I don't hate Gary. Now, one could make the argument that if I knew the rest of the people involved in reality TV as individuals like I know Gary, I wouldn't hate them either. However, anyone making that argument is an idiot and I would no doubt hate those people too.

So I'm here to tell you that the dopes on MTV's Real World and the various related spin-offs bug the tarnation out of me. I only know a few of them by name (again, I prefer to blindly lump people together) but the one name I do know is Beth Something-Or-Other. (After doing some research on MTV.com, it turns out her last name is Stolarczyk). Beth was on the Real World in Los Angeles in 1993. She was the annoying blonde chick - or doesn't that narrow it down for you? People, we're talking 1993 here! If I could type 1993 in capital numbers, I would. If my cypherin' is correct, that means she first "burst" onto the scene 13 years ago and she is still hanging around on MTV as she is on the most recent version of Real World vs. Road Rules. She is ALWAYS on frickin' Real World vs. Road Rules.

According to Beth's blurb on the website, she is a graduate of Ohio State. Let's stop right there for a minute. As any University of Michigan grad can tell you, Ohio State sucks. That's just a given. My other issue is that while Beth's degree is in film, TV and radio production (who knew that OSU had such a thing!), I don't see her doing much producin'. I do see her on MTV calling other chicks bitches a lot. And on any given episode of Real World Road Rules Challenge, she will no doubt cry over being called a bitch herself but that had to have been taught in a 100 level course at best. I don't think she is producing much more than a bad reputation for herself!

I don't know the finances of being an MTV whore. It must be a good-paying gig for Beth and her little friends to hang around and keep doing these friggin' shows. I'm going to make a bold statement here and suggest that perhaps Beth and her whore-friends are able to eke out a little more dough doing this crap than what her OSU sheepskin might provide. I'm also going to suggest that perhaps a little more fame (infamy?) comes along with calling a girl a slut and pushing her into a swimming pool on film than would come from producing a TV commercial for Gynelotrimen medicated cream. Could it be that Beth et. al. are seizing this opportunity to stretch their 15 minutes into 16 or even 17 minutes? The real irony here is that these dumb-asses were on a show called the Real World and yet they continue to avoid said real world by being on stupid TV shows! Good God, people, I implore you to never watch MTV again!

Now then. Perhaps you've sensed some bitterness. You may have even mis-interpreted that bitterness as jealousy. No doubt Beth would call me a bitch and say that I just wish I was her. That's just not true - because if I really was her, I would have hired a rat to gnaw off that mole on my face a long time ago. Part of my problem with this whole deal is that I'm probably not part of the intended demographic for this show: I'm 39, have a normal name (not Puck or Trishelle), prefer Aerosmith to Kanye West and I generally don't get into fights no matter how much alcohol is involved. I'm sure the intended demographic is dumb-ass half-drunk college students - but they probably refer to Beth as the old chick. You know, the one with the mole. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against dumb-ass half-drunk college students because that's what college is for.

Of course, MTV is really at fault here. If people didn't continue to watch this drivel, they wouldn't continue to make it. They are no doubt throwing a few bucks at Beth to play "Beth" on TV and she is more than happy to throw away mom and dad's OSU tuition money to follow her dream of becoming a media whore. And I'll be gosh-darned if she isn't well on her way. I've already set my TiVo for the Road Rules Real World 2028 to see how many hairs are growing out of The Mole on Beth's face. The over/under is 13.

Dig: Graffiti

2006-11-16T13:18:00.000-05:00

I think I've said before that I'm a big fan of the whole free speech thing. Assuming you have a brain, it's OK by me if you speak your peace and share your little thoughts with the world. Being blog-boy, I would be a bit of a hypocrite if I didn't think it was cool for others to speak/write their mind just like I'm doing - and we just learned recently that I don't dig hypocrites - so you just go right ahead and speak up. However, my caveat (as in "caveat emptor" as passed along by Mike Brady to Peter) is that I will be the judge of whether your comments are worth speaking/writing.

I'm not necessarily a big fan of defacing public or private property, but I dig graffiti. I always find it a little interesting that someone determines that his/her little message must be spray-painted somewhere for all the world to see. It is THAT important. The guy who writes "Wash Me" in the dirt on the back of a semi-trailer is convinced that all of the Ohio Turnpike needs to see this important message. You gotta admire that conviction. Of course, you can't argue with a classic line like that, either. Kind of like the "I'm With Stupid" t-shirt.

The old finger-in-the-dirt method is simple and to the point, but I really dig the graffiti that looks like it was done by someone with a master's degree in Art History. Surprisingly, the "tags" (see, I'm hip!) that you see on boxcars are often quite artistic. They might be just letters spray-painted on a freight train to the local police, but I see mobile art! Mind you, sometimes this piece of white bread (that would be me) can't quite make out exactly what the letters say, but that's kind of my point. To me, it's not about whether it's East Coast or West Coast - it's about the time and effort that someone put into it to make sure his voice is heard. Imagine the skulking about that had to occur and the study of the classic works of Dutch masters to convey the right message in just a few short strokes of a can of Krylon by the light of the local Amtrak station. I'm impressed!

My wife accuses me of being too hung up on the city of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan but that is where I saw two memorable pieces of graffiti. The first was scratched into the elevator of my dorm. It said "capitalism, schmapitalism". Love those college students and their ideals! If you're not familiar with this institute of higher learning, U-M is quite a liberal place to be and the students there celebrate the measly $5 fine for possession of marijuana by holding the Hash Bash every year on April Fool's Day. That said, however, most of us were there to snuggle up to the idea of parlaying our college sheepskin into a little dough. If you truly aren't into capitalism, perhps four (or five, in my case) years of study isn't the best thing to do with your time. But it all goes back to publishing your inner thoughts. If you're in the Business School only to make your parents happy but you would really rather just sell pooka-bead necklaces prior to whatever concert is being held at your local bar, you are certainly entitled to doing a little late-night elevator engraving to free your soul. Don't let the Man (or your Mom) get you down!

The other piece of grafitti that has stuck with me since those heady days in Ann Arbor was a two-liner. Somebody wrote something that I'm sure they thought was quite profound and then someone else followed up with a smart-ass remark. Being a smart-ass myself, I appreciated both. I forget exactly where I saw this but it said "It shouldn't hurt to be a child". Pretty profound and heart-string-tugging, right? Unfortunately, for the first guy, someone else came along later and wrote "But it does". That's just quality humor, people! What would possess someone to take a serious topic like child abuse and turn it into kind of a black humor kind of thing? I sure don't know, but it's damn funny. Talk about bursting the bubble of Mr. Grafitti Man #1! That first guy is probably sitting on the board of directors of UNICEF or something but I bet he is a jerk and has no sense of humor.

I also dig carving initials into an innocent tree. The park where I take the dog has lots of trees - to the delight of the dog and graffiti artists alike. How better to profess your love than to carve your initials, a "plus" sign and then the intials of whomever you're digging at the time? A 3-carat diamond ring ain't got nothing on the permanence of a jack-knife and some soft bark on a maple tree. Even though I'm a tree-hugger and much prefer Central Park to Times Square, I appreciate the advertising that a high school kid (because what adult really carves his initials into a tree?) puts onto a tree that will be there many years later.

And let's not forget the ever-popular bathroom graffiti. I don't have a lot of experience with women's bathrooms and we all know how I feel about public bathrooms in general. However, this otherwise unpleasant environment can be brightened just a little by the quantity and quality of the visual and verbal artistry in a given men's room.

Ninety percent of men's room grafitti is covered by the following topics (either written or drawn):

Male genitalia
Female genitlia
Someone's sexual preference called into question
Political commentary
Peeing
Pooping

Thought-provoking topics, all. Picture a blog but it's really a bathroom stall. Same thing. Got an idea? Write it down. Bust out a Sharpie and speak your mind, my brother! Unless you're signing your name to your work, it's anonymous (read "comes with no responsibility") and maybe some guy will stumble back into the bar and share with his little drunken friends that "Sue Smith Is A Slut". And that's just plain old helping a brother out.

Thank goodness for the dude who wrote that amendment to the Constitution because the first guys totally missed an important little piece of liberty that I like to call The Freedom to Deface Public Property To Provide Entertainment But Without Really Wrecking Said Public Property. Rolls right off the tongue, huh?!

Dig: Turning Left on Red on a One-Way Street

2006-11-01T15:56:00.000-05:00

Laws don't really hurt my feelings. I'm a fairly upstanding citizen so I don't feel pinched by rules that don't allow me to take someone's TV without asking (also called "stealing"), for instance. Despite the opportunity a year ago to leave a body behind in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina where it would just blend in with a bunch of other dead folks, I've resisted the urge to kill anyone so I'm able to move about in society unencumbered by a big heavy thing around my ankle.

Assuming that all the dumb people took the day off from driving, tooling the down the road in my Passat/Shark-mobile is a pretty controlled event. You got your speed limit which I mostly abide by. You got your driving on the right, passing on the left thing. And you got your various Stop/Yield/Red/Yellow/Green thing. Red always means stop, right? Or does it?! Suppose I stop. And then I go. With no green involvement whatsoever. Yep, you read it here first. I'll stop for the briefest of moments and then I'll go about my turning, thank you very little. Making a right turn may not be too special, but I feel a little dirty when I'm turning left on a red light on a one-way street. How you like me now?!

Oh, the freedom! Turning left on a one-way is a free pass, man! It's "cuts" in line, baby! It's finding a Titleist when you really lost an X-Out! It's finding one more beer behind the expired cottage cheese! The Man is not going to get me down today! Badges? We don't need no stinking badges! I don't feel like stopping, I feel more like pausing. The rest of you sheep, you just sit there while we Movers and Shakers take over the world. No red light is gonna keep me down. You Straights can just watch us Left-Turners motor while you sit there listening to what is, undoubtedly, bad music on the radio.

And how about the look on the people's faces who don't know about this little loophole? If it's someone behind me who also wants to turn left, they kind of get that look that says "Huh, wha... That good-looking guy in that sweet car just turned left on a red light. Good God, is there no end to his bravery? He must have the strength of ten men!" The people on the one-way street get the look that says "Look at that guy. He's employing the old "Turning Left on Red on a One-Way Street" strategy. He's a bloody genius! And good-looking too! Oh, to be him...." Meanwhile, I go on my merry way feeling dirty - in a good kind of way.

This feeling is similar to the one I described in a previous post about taking the day off of work. It's called freedom, my friends. The Boston Tea Party's got nothing on me. Even though laws don't really get in my way, I'm more than happy to get a little lawless every once in a while. For those of you who are thinking that my life must be pretty mundane if "lawless" means turning my car when I normally shouldn't, you are correct. Some people find excitement by stealing the change machine out of a laundromat but that's a little too out there for me. At the same time, I do get a little crazy sometimes and leave the TV on when I leave the room. The Left on Red trick is as nutty as I get.

Before I suggest that you break free of your bonds and put this little secret to use, I should probably do some research to see if it is indeed legal everywhere to do this. And yet, I'm not going to do that. I implore you to just do it anyway. The birds will sing and rays of sunshine will penetrate even the darkest cloud as you leave the Straights in your dust. Enjoy your freedom and ask not what your country can do for you because all we have to fear is fear itself!

Dig: Running the Chicago Marathon

2006-10-24T17:43:00.000-05:00

Lots of training (18 weeks' worth) came to an exciting (it was exciting to ME, at least) conclusion this past Sunday in downtown Chicago: I ran a marathon. I set a few different goals for myself but the hardest one was probably my time goal of 4:20 - that's four and a third hours of running - and, what do you know if my actual time wasn't 4:20:47! I'm cutting myself some slack on the 47 seconds and calling it a win. My first goal was to just finish. That was going to be pretty much a given. Unless I blew out a knee or a spleen or something, I was going to get myself across the finish line. My second goal was to run the whole thing and not take any walking breaks. I allowed myself to walk through a few of the water stations so I'm saying that goal was achieved also. And then I met the whole time thing so all in all a pretty good day.

I won't bore you with too many details about the actual run. This blog o' mine ain't about summing up my physical feats of strength (insert comment about my limited physical feats of strength here). These electrons are about things that I dig, hate and don't get and I'm here to tell you that there were a few of each on this particular 42 degree day. So, the over-riding theme is a big Dig (pardon the reference to the super-duper construction project in Boston) but let's review a little, shall we?

Don't Get: How do those Kenyans do it?! Good God, the winner ran a pace of 4:51 per mile. I was happy with my 9:56. I can't run one mile in under 5 minutes, let alone 26.2 of said miles! Unbelievable! I might move to Kenya so I can run faster.
Dig: The spectators. They were huge for me. Supposedly, there were a million of them. There were plenty of times when I needed to be distracted so I didn't focus on my misery so I just people-watched which was almost as good as my recent airport-people-watching activities. Saw lots of dogs, signs, pseudo-runners, people holding signs, my wife and the occasional sign. Gave high-fives to a boat-load of perfect strangers and every time I slapped some skin (or glove, since it was so chilly), it pumped me up to run faster. Saw Elvis and any time you see Elvis, you know it's going to be a good day! (Ironically, I was in Chicago on 8/16/77. Do you know where you were when you heard that the King died?)
Hate: Chafing. But I've already covered that in a previous post. Let's just keep moving along since you really don't want to know about where I chafed. I'm happy to report, though, that a couple of well-placed band-aids did their job!
Dig: Gutting out the last 6 miles or so. I Started to fade but I just kept pickin' 'em up and puttin' 'em down. I told myself that all I had to do was run to that No Parking sign and back that I had done so many times in training. Forget the 20 that I had already done. Just run to the sign and back. The definition of "sucking it up".
Hate: That feeling of almost-puke that I got for about 24 hours before the race. You know that feeling? Like if you caught a whiff of the inside of a dumpster at the wrong time, you might just lose it? I can't tell you how many times I had to grit my teeth and go to my Happy Place during the day prior to the race.
Dig: Only peeing in an alley once. Bonus! It was just that little nervous pee, anyway. Otherwise, I had a pretty good balance of fluids going out and fluids coming in.
Don't Get: People who do this on a regular basis. For me, this whole thing was less about running than it was about me setting a goal and achieving it. I haven't decided yet if this will be a one-off or if I'll be one of those people who runs marathons. For now, I'm a guy who ran a marathon. Big difference - and not just the letter "s". For a "Dig" within a "Don't Get", though, I dig that other people don't get how I could do this. Here's a little tip from an experienced marathon runner on how to run a marathon: Run 1 mile. Repeat 26.2 times. It ain't that hard to understand and it's as much in your melon as it is in your legs. I guess it's kind of like me thinking the people who do the Ironman triathlon are freaks. Let your Freak Flag fly, I say!
Hate: All the pre- and post-race shenanigans. It was really distracting (in a bad way) to have to worry about getting to the race on time, meeting with my wife, checking out of the hotel, etc. Us small-town boys don't know nothin' about them there taxi-cabs and those boys with the funny accents who drive them.
Dig: A sign that said "No Namby Pamby Bullshit". Amen to that, my brother! That's what I'm talking about! As a matter of fact, that's what I said to the guy holding the sign. That sign carried me for at least 0.37 miles.

So there you have it. A pretty good Sunday morning for this 39 year-old. I'm reluctant to say that it wasn't as hard as I was expecting, but I felt pretty good at the finish line - and even for the 26.2 miles prior to the finish line. Any of those freak-ish triathletes would be planning their next marathon to better their times but I'm just going to bask in the glow for a while. If you need me, I'll be over here in the glow.

For all the race details, go to www.chicagomarathon.com. Check out runner number 39362. I'm the good-looking one in the yellow hat.

Don't Get: Models

2006-10-03T09:16:00.000-05:00

For those of you that know me, my confusion over the entire fashion industry probably comes as no surprise. You might give me credit for having a full grasp of the whole khaki pants and polo shirts scene but not too much beyond that. My wife tries with me but I seem to get stuck in a bit of a routine and can't quite get out of the rut. She would say that about a lot of things about me and occasionaly I humor her by wearing the funky clothes that she buys for me. Mind you, "funky" in this situation might mean a shirt with stripes instead of just plain. I don't think I look awful, but you wouldn't mistake me for a GQ cover model. Yeah, less like GQ magazine and more like "White Bread" magazine. I'm confused enough over clothes, but my real confusion comes when the models hit the runway.

Imagine my brain-lock when I watch America's Next Top Model. We've already discussed my general dis-like for Tyra Banks and a lot of that stems from how seriously she takes herself and the fashion industry. When she critiques the models, she goes into full model mode and shows them just how it should be done. She points out that they should look like this instead of that. And I'm here to tell you, I just don't see a difference between the before and the after!

One of the things I don't get is how so many of the models look pretty un-hot until these pictures appear out of nowhere. After hours and hours in the makeup chair and just as much time spent using Photoshop, the next thing you know Janet Reno is some babe whose poster is in every high school boy's gym locker! And then you feel all gross when you've been digging her look only to find out that it's Janet (Am I a Man or a Woman?) Reno. High school boys are pretty screwed up in the first place and I personally don't think it's fair to mess with their heads (or other parts of their bodies) like that. I know some cute chicks. I see them at work or wherever and they look good. No Photoshop and I'm assuming something less than one hour spent on makeup. And so when I see what the Tyra wannabes look like prior to their transformations, my little brain just doesn't know how to process that info. Should my cute friends run off to Milan or Paris or New York to become models? Yes, I think they should.

So I've mentioned make-up. I don't get make-up. I get that chicks usually look better after applying some make-up but I don't know what happens between "looking rough" and "hot piece of ass". Maybe I don't get make-up because beyond freshening up the deoderant, I can get ready to go out for an evening in about a minute and a half. Unless I have to change socks which puts me at the two minute mark but other than that, I'm pretty low maintenance. Again, some of you might be saying that perhaps I should do a little more "maintaining" but perhaps you should shut up! My wife is not high maintenance by a long shot and yet it's a whole process for her to put her make-up on. Eyes, cheecks, lips, more eyes, a little more on the cheek, start over on the lips, different color for the eyes but just the lashes this time, touch up the lips, etc. etc. etc. While she is transforming herself, I'm usually sitting on my arse waiting until she announces that she is done and then I do my deoderant thing and we're good to go. And, of course, the whole time I'm thinking that she looked pretty good to start with.

One could argue that make-up actually makes your skin worse. If you're trying to cover up a zit, does it make sense to do so with something that further clogs your pores? Other people (people who would no doubt bug me) would say that the only reason that women put on make-up at all is because they are just trying to please men and it's the only way to get ahead in a male-dominated society. To that, I would say "Shut up. And do something about that zit."

And who doesn't just love to hear a model complain about how hard it is to do a photoshoot at 5am and how cold they were wearing just a bikini while sitting under a waterfall? Yeah, the guys in the coal mine have a lot of sympathy for you, sister! I can just hear them:

Coalminer #1: "This coal minin' is some hard work."
Coalminer #2: "Yep. Dirty, smelly, dark, low pay, specter of death hanging over my head all the time. Tough stuff."
CM #1: "'Course, this ain't nothin' compared to what Miss July goes through."
CM #2: "You got that right, brother. I hear she worked 4 hours just to get that one shot of her on the yacht sipping champagne. Her diamond ring kept messing up the f-stop."
CM #1: "Yeah, I would have been a model but I just don't want to work that hard."
CM#2: "You got that right, brother. Hey, why is the canary dead?"

Do those pictures have to be taken in Tahiti? Would the schlubs who buy the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue know the difference between a public beach on Lake Erie and some private lagoon on Bora Bora? As long as the photographer waits until the houseboat is out of the frame, I'm guessing that the schlubs wouldn't notice as long as it doesn't cover up the chick's cleavage.

And what's up with that walk and those dead-looking eyes? The key word in this whole discussion is "model". As in "I want to model myself after you." And yet I rarely see someone walking from one conference room to the next here in Dilbert-land doing that goofy walk with that look that says "I'm just here for my looks which, oddly, aren't that great until I get all made up." For that matter, with some of those girls tipping the scales at a cool 90 pounds and no curves, they look more like junior high boys instead of hot babes. Don't tell Mark Foley or he'll send some inappropriate text messages!

Certainly, I'm plenty stymied about some of the goofy get-ups that the chicks wear during couture week but I'm willing to write that off as more of a one-time event than a regular occurence. But what I really don't get is how the cute chick at Barnes and Noble (who walks perfectly normally) isn't on the runway and the chick who looks more like the kid who had the locker next to me in Junior High is up there doing that goofy walk looking at me with dead eyes.

Hate: Hypocritical Jesus Freaks

2006-09-28T13:11:00.000-05:00

I could certainly have made this entry a general hatred of hypocrites. It bugs the tar out of me when people say one thing and do another, although I probably wouldn't be opposed to a hypocritical racist now that I think about it. I'm also not a big fan of politics and general ass-kissing and most of the folks involved in both activities are hypocrites in my opinion. They'd just as soon stab you in the ass as kiss it.

So my hang-up with Jesus Freaks (or Bible Thumpers, if you prefer) is that it's pretty easy to be a hypocrite when you're holding yourself up so high (and/or mighty). In western Michigan where I live, there are boatloads of Jesus Freaks. I got no problem with that. If you dig your savior or god, you go right ahead and dig him/her. I don't care if it's the same one that I dig - you're entitled - thanks to that good old US constitution which covers the bases pretty well. I think both John Lennon and Rodney King had it right and I generally have a live-and-let-live approach to life. Like I said in my People Watching post, I dig watching people in their natural habitat and I generally find people highly interesting albeit irritating.

So, because of the copious amounts of Jesus Freaks in little old Grand Haven, MI, there are just that many more hypocrites. Again, it all comes back to holding yourself to a standard that really only one guy could maintain. He is my savior of choice and I dig the stuff he did - especially that whole nailed to the cross thing. That's hardcore. So lots of other people dig JC too and they try to follow his lead on being a good citizen. Cool. Good. Go for it. But, before you go spouting off about what he did and what you do, you better be squeaky clean, my brother.

Here's an example for you: I used to work with a guy who was a big fan the Son of God and did the whole bible study thing at lunch and the WWJD bracelets and the whole bit. He could rattle off bible passages like I do with lines from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The problem with this dude is that anytime we went on some company sponsored event he was all about taking advantage of expense reports. He packed a PB&J sandwich that his dutiful wife made at home when we were at the office but when we had to go somewhere he would start off with a salad and soup, then move into a big steak for the entree, followed by dessert and a drink or two. What would Jesus do? I don't know, but I don't think he would screw the company out of $50 for lunch! Believe me, I'm not hung up on letting the company hook you up every once in a while but that's ME! I'm not the one trying to come off as a super-duper virtuous citizen here. I am what I am and sometimes that ain't too pretty. I'm SUPPOSED to hose the company, he isn't!

So this is not a rant on religion. I'd prefer that you didn't blow up me or any of my friends and family with a roadside bomb in the name of religion but if that's what you believe, that's what you believe. Not my style, but whatever. Something tells me that I'm not going to change your mind, even though we Christians are supposed to do some of that. For that matter, I dare say that any Christian who is intolerant of fill-in-the-blank is a hypocrite. (Being intolerant of stupid people doesn't count.) This IS a rant on making sure you are really as upstanding as you say you are.

Sorry for such a heavy topic today, gentle reader. It was prompted by somebody that is normally reciting chapters and verses but one day this week was cussing and swearing like Artie Lange on a roll with Crazy Alice. I'm no religious scholar (not really a scholar of any kind, actually) so I'm not going to get into a religious/philosophy discussion here. I'll just offer a little bit of free advice: JC had some pretty big sandals to fill so you'd better be up to the challenge, especially that deal about casting stones.

To the untrained eye, it would appear as though I, too, am throwing stones. Well, you're right, and I'm getting ready to chuck a big rock right at your melon, you darn hypocritical Jesus Freak!

Hate: Public Bathrooms

2006-09-20T13:21:00.000-05:00

UPDATE! UPDATE! UPDATE!

So I'm dinking around on Youtube a few days after I wrote this post and I see the video on the other end of this link. Unbelievable! Apparently, someone out there is just as twisted as I am but I feel completely vindicated in my feelings about public bathrooms!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzO1mCAVyMw

So I'm in O'hare airport and I get a certain rumbling down below that lets me know that there's no way in H-E-Double Hockey Sticks that I'm going to be able to make it until I fly to Boston, secure my luggage, secure a rental car, drive to my hotel and settle in to the privacy of my own little sanctuary to do my business. It must be done. I must actually drop a deuce in a public bathroom. Oh, I've done it before, mind you. But my therapist says it's done irreparable harm that, despite an enormous boat payment that I could help cover with weekly appointments, is simply untreatable. I won't bore you with the details of the transaction in the loo but it was highlighted by an overflow next to me. Oh, the humanity!

My biggest beef with public bathrooms is that they aren't my own. At home, I rarely pee on the wall and flushing is not just a courtesy, it's a given. I also have a nice selection of magazines to read that I might not otherwise have time to review. Soap for the hands afterwards? Of course! Would you prefer to smell like lilacs or roses? Two-ply and plenty of it. It is an unhurried event as long as the kids aren't causing each other to bleed and, I dare say, quite relaxing.

Not so in the world of I'll-just-rest-my-cigarette-on-the-edge-of-the-urinal-while-I-pee. If it's "go" time, man, I hold the world record. Get in, release, wash up and get the heck out! I'm not really a fan of people in general, and I really don't like people in the same Porcelain Prison while I'm doing my thing! No time for the May 1983 issue of Popular Mechanics, thank you very little, I've got business to take care of. And, apparently, half of the Western Hemisphere has taken care of their business right where I'm standing.

Bathroom-ing is not something to be shared with someone else. As much as I don't get the whole deal with women going to the bathroom in pairs, it's just not cool for guys to do it at all. Conversations are not meant to be held in such environs. Talking with someone is best done eye-to-eye not eye-to-urinal-handle-dripping-with-condensation. And yet, I really don't want to look you in the eye and chat while I'm taking a leak so it's best that no talking occurs. If there is a burning topic of conversation (i.e. something related to free stuff or beer or chicks or something) the only legal place for that discussion is while washing one's hands and/or yelling over the hand dryer. Otherwise, keep your eyes straight ahead and we'll all be OK. Also, please do not call me on your cell phone while you are in there. If I hear an echo or grunting or what sounds like a babbling brook, I'm hanging up on you.

I'll admit that there are two exceptions to my hatred for public bathrooms. The first is grafitti. I dig grafitti and there's no better place to read a humorous debate over someone's ex-girlfriend's special skills than a men's room stall. What else are you going to do in there? There's no Us Weekly so you may as well write a poem that has the word "Nantucket" in it.

The other exception, surprisingly, is the port-a-potty. I know you are probably thinking that, if I can't stand a somewhat civilized bathroom in Ohare airport, how could I possibly dig a port-a-potty? The key here is the privacy. Is there anything more cocoon-like than a port-a-potty? Slide the little plastic handle in place so the poor leg-crossing bastards outside know that you're in there and the world is your oyster! No chance of an overlfow here - just drop it in! Want to use the entire roll of TP? Go right ahead - nothing to clog up here! Assuming no one tips it over while you're indisposed, you're good to go and you can let your troubles just fall away! When you're done, you can slide the little lever thing back with confidence and stride outside with nary a care in the world. You're probably also thinking that the facility in the actual airplane is quite cocoon-like also so why couldn't I just use that one? Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt, too.

So there you have it. You can invite me over to your house any time because there ain't no way I'm going to cross the threshold into your water closet and cause undue gross-ness (whether solid, liquid or gas). Public bathrooms are also what's keeping me out of prison and the armed forces. I would have knocked over countless liquor stores by now if I could have had my own facility with a lock in my cell. Now that I think about it, though, my general fear of being shot PLUS the whole shared bathroom thing is what's keeping me from signing up to join the army. You know how we all can sleep better because certain people are on duty in the military? Well, you can sleep better knowing that I'm NOT on duty....

Also, on a related note, it's best not to come to my house at about 6:15pm as I might be unavialable for a few minutes...

Dig: People Watching at the Airport

2006-08-23T10:52:00.000-05:00

So I just went on a nice, relaxing vacation. Flew from GRR to ORD and landed in BOS. Stayed overnight in Boston and then proceeded to spend a week in (or is it "on"?) Cape Cod. Ate lots of seafood and drank some good local brews. For those of you who leave your houses (don't laugh - there are plenty of freaks who only journey from their mom's basement to their twin bed with the Star Trek sheets), you know that there can be a lot of downtime when flying. This particular trip didn't have too many long layovers but my trip home was the day after some psychos were planning to blow up a plane using liquid explosives so there was plenty of extra time for me to sit on my caboose. What to do while eating my Cinnabon and swigging my Starbuck's? Watch you, that's what- and I gotta tell you, you don't look so good! That's what I really like about people watching - it makes me feel good about myself and my lot in life.

Certainly, people watching at some club where Playboy playmates hang out probably would provide better scenery. However, I'm 39 with 3 kids living in Michigan so that just ain't gonna happen for me unless my wife gets a whole lot more understanding real quick. So I'm stuck with people watching at more mundane places like airports. While it's true that I once saw Pat Boone in the Minneapolis airport, he isn't exactly the same as getting an eyeful of Miss January.

O'hare is still the first or second busiest airport in the country and you get a pretty good cross-section of folks: White, Black, short, tall, fat, skinny, fat, fat, bald, hairy, fat and the occasional fat person. You know those reports that The Government puts out that says we are all fat? Well, they're right. And God help you if you have to sit next to one of them on a plane. Don't get me wrong, I blend right in with my Cinnabon purchase but I don't overflow too much onto the poor sap who is lucky enough to sit next to me. Based on some of the people that I saw, though, apparently there comes a time when you just don't give a shit anymore what you look like. You make the leap from pants with a belt to pants with an elastic waistband. Shoes with laces are just too much work so you become Velcro Shoe Man. Tuck in my shirt (a t-shirt with hot fudge stains down the front)? Not likely. And so what do you do next? Apparently, you go to the airport. By the looks of it, the Fat People of America (FPA) meeting is there and is held at gate B6. Snacks provided! Yep, feeling pretty good about my only-eight-pounds-over-my-goal weight!

Have you ever been part of The Family (not the Mob family, just a regular one) traveling through the airport? How many kids? How many kids under the age of 4? If you were the 4 year-old, you probably didn't care what other people thought of you. If you were the parent, though, you wanted to crawl under the carpet or disguise yourself with some Groucho Marx glasses most of the time. Families in airports are probably pretty good birth control, actually. If you are thinking about having kids but aren't really sure, hang out at the airport and see what your reaction would be to little Johnny screaming his head off in public because his dad refused to pay $6.25 for a hot dog. Would you pay $19.95 for a dumb-ass stuffed animal from the dumb-ass gift shops? Are you capable of pushing a stroller with a crying kid, carrying a backpack full of SpongeBob coloring books, holding the hand of the older kid all while having your boarding pass and ID at the ready for the next security checkpoint (no doubt staffed by a big fat guy)? You'd better be able to suck it up without yelling at the spouse or just make the appointment with Dr. Snips-A-Lot now. I saw lots of families doing the summer vacation thing and I'm sure several children were put up for sale as soon as they returned home. I was smart enough to leave the heirs to my fortune home with their grandparents. Suckers!!

Of course, a lot of people that you see in airports are traveling for work. I used to do that. You get pretty efficient if you do it enough. You can tell who the pros are because they move fast. They grab their nifty carry-on bag (contents: Blackberry, laptop, files for meeting, two pens, mints, newspaper/magazine, rental car agreement and receipts for expense report) and they're maneuvering around the fat people like the airport is one big Frogger game. I don't watch those people too much because they all look the same. Being a corporate suck-ass, I can pick out another corporate suck-ass a mile away and unless he is working on his blog, I have no use for him. Go back to your cube and fill out your report, Dilbert!

On the rare occasion that the planets align and you happen to catch the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders on a press junket, you can sometimes spot a babe. From my exhaustive research, though, I've found that the problem with babes in airports is that you can't really tell if they are babes or not. She might be a babe on the outside but once she loads herself up with carry-ons, cell phones, purses and a great big sour look on her face, she turns into Ruth Buzzi. You could take your favorite clerk at Victoria's Secret in the mall ("My wife is about your size, would you try this on for me so I can see if it would fit her?") and load her down with all the accoutrements of travel and the next thing you know it's the Roto-Rooter guy! Only if she has a lackie/boyfriend/husband (who secretly despises her) carrying her crap does she look as good on The Inside as she does on The Outside. Certainly, you would still have to listen to her bitch at said lackie to hurry his ass up but, at that point, your feelings toward him turn from bitterness and resentment to sympathy and you really feel like hip-checking her into the nearest luggage carousel thingy.

We don't have enough time in the day to talk about airport security, but I'm pretty sure that I see about a dozen terrorists while taking a tour of Concourse B. There was one dressed up as an old lady whose osteoporosis had turned her into a walking upside-down "U". I saw another one who was disguised as a 4 year-old kid crying because he couldn't get a hot dog for $6.25. I think he was in cahoots with the 6 year-old kid who was obviously using his GameBoy to take over control of the incoming flights from the air traffic controllers. And then there was the fat guy but I think he was actually part of the crack security team checking my shoes for explosives. The main reason why I think they are terrorists is because THEY ALL HAD CELL PHONES! Good God, what did we ever do before we had to go 15 minutes without talking to someone on the phone!? You may find this surprising, but my cell phone conversations usually are more of an exercise in waiting for the person on the other end of the phone to shut his pie-hole so I can get onto something more important. Like writing blogs about people watching, for example.

Again, why do I like to people watch in the airport? Because it makes my miserable existence look pretty shiny! Despite what appears to be intolerance and my general dislike of people, I like watching them in their natural habitat. All I need is one of those things that looks like a gumball machine full of People Chow and a handful of quarters and I'm good to go for an afternoon of amusement.

Hate: Losing Stuff

2006-06-22T09:07:00.000-05:00

While it's true that I dig the show Lost, I hate losing stuff. I used to have a pretty good memory and I could remember where I would put my crap. However, as I've gotten older and have much more clutter in my life, I'm finding that I can hardly remember if I've taken off my underwear prior to hopping in the shower (true example from my 5 year-old. Hilarious!). It's just about a daily occurrence that I wander out to the parking lot at lunchtime to enjoy my favorite fast food value meal and I can't find my car that I parked approximately 5 hours earlier. How could I possibly forget where I parked my car? It's like the size of a ... car!

Speaking of cars, if I can lose the entire car, imagine how often I lose the dinky little keys. I usually carry my cell phone in my pocket along with my car keys but some days I get a little bitter about feeling like Carl the janitor from The Breakfast Club and throw all that junk on my desk or kitchen counter or some place. And then hilarity ensues as I search high and low for them. Before you suggest calling the phone ("Just call the phone, dumbass!"), I always have it on vibrate so as not to intrude upon the quiet of others around me - because I'm polite and not an asshole. I guess that's why God created two sets of keys with every car. He needs to work on creating duplicate cell phones though.

And don't even get me started on finding the clicker. If it meant that the clicker would magically appear in my grubby little mitts by hopping on one foot and singing a Clay Aiken song all while shaving my ear hair, I would gladly sing whatever that little leprechaun has on his greatest hits album. And before you suggest that I actually walk up to the TV and manually (he said, with disgust) change the channels, I suggest that you watch your tongue before I wash it out with soap! If God had wanted me to change the channel myself, why would He have invented clickers?! My legs are for running marathons (for which I've now registered) and my index finger is picking my nose so you just back off, Mister Man!

My most recent lost item is part of my bike rack. You see, last fall I used one of the straps to attach a faux shark fin to the roof of my car for the journey to Chicago to see Jimmy Buffet at Wrigley Field. I was the envy of all the saps on the road that day as they admired my nifty homemade shark fin with "Buffet or Bust" written on it. Unfortunately, I used one of the straps from my bike rack to secure said fin and now I can't seem to find the strap. So instead of putting my bike on the rack outside the car, I had to fold down the seats, remove the wheel, remove the seat and generally piss around with the whole scene instead of quickly loading up. Sure, I can call the nice people at Yakima and get a replacement strap but that friggin' thing is in my friggin' house some friggin' place and I am friggin' determined to friggin' find it! Like, how many places could it be? My little hovel isn't that big so why is it hiding from me? Damn strap!

For you golfers out there, I won't get into the whole deal about losing golf balls. If we're going to talk about golf, I'd rather talk about Tiger Woods' wife's boobs or Phil Mickelson's.

One thing I've learned about losing crap is the fastest way to find it is to give up looking for it. But you have to trick it into thinking that you don't care anymore and then it will show itself. Totally true of golf balls. Your first ball off the tee could have gone into the deepest talc mine (see, the ball would blend into the talc because it's white) coming to rest within inches of the molten core of the earth but if you just mention the word "mulligan", the ball will miraculously show up in the middle of the fairway. No way does that first ball want to get trumped by a mulligan! You could have had every intention of putting on your heat-resistant suit and rappelling down that mine shaft to retrieve your Top-Flite X-Out but don't let the ball catch on or it won't show up in the fairway. My next step with my missing bike rack strap is to break out the Yakima catalog and start dialing the toll-free number to order a replacement. I'm anticipating that the missing strap will magically appear in the microwave or some other completely random place.

Let's review:
Lost is a way cool TV show
Losing stuff sucks (it also sucks when people spell "losing" with two o's)
Stuff shows up if give up looking for it
Phil Mickelson has man-boobs
You lost another 5 minutes by reading my drivel about losing stuff. You should be peeved.

Dig: Lost

2006-05-26T11:53:00.000-05:00

Have you been watching this show? Holy cow, it's good! It's like cold-beer-with-pizza-while-watching-the-red-wings good. Of course, that comparison falls aparat a little considering that the Wings lost in the first round of the playoffs, but you get my point. Last night was the finale and the two hour Lost extravaganza lived up to the quality of the rest of the season, which doesn't always happen.

Believe me, I'm not going to try to get into all the ins and outs of this show (on ABC - check your local listings for time and channel) because there are more twists and turns in this thing than your large intestine! Even better, it's not filled with shit like the aforementioned part of your digestive tract. Instead, I will present to you concepts that make it so good. Later, I will be going over other basics of English composition that I learned in that stupid English class that is required for all freshmen.

Creativity. Could I be more vague, you're asking. No, I could not be. However, Lost comes up with more weird stuff than you would find in all of the X-Files shows combined. Don't get me wrong, I dug Fox Mulder and Dana Sculley too but it got to be a little predictable after awhile. Maybe Jack and all the other castaways will eventually be as predictable but I don't think so. One of the things that Lost has going for it is that these poor bastards are on some mysterious island that doesn't necessarily have to conform to what goes on in the rest of the world. For instance, most other tropical islands don't have polar bears on them. The writers aren't constrained by convention so they go frickin' nuts with characters and situations. No rules, man!

Multi-Media. So Charlie was in a band called Driveshaft and the cool thing is that there is a website (driveshaftband.com) with tour dates, pics, etc. There is a site for the airline that owned the plan that crashed (oceanic-air.com) and the foundation (hansofoundation.org) that is running the whole dharma initiative thing (thedharmainitative.org). All of these sites are fully developed and have lots of hidden easter eggs and stuff. You could spend all day jumping from one of these sites to the next which are ALL FICTITIOUS! Those nice people at ABC went to a ton of trouble to make your Lost experience a lot more than just setting up shop on a Wednesday night for an hour. Very cool. I dig lots of TV shows but none of them do too much more than present their 30 or 60 minutes of drivel.

References. No, I don't mean like asking your brother-in-law to put in a good word for you when you apply for a job. I mean like referring to a book that is somehow related to the situation on the island. Even names are scrambled (anagrams for you English majors) from names out of history or literature or popular culture or something. One of the bad guys is named Henry Gale who supposedly crashed in a hot-air balloon. Henry Gale was also the name of Dorothy's uncle in The Wizard of Oz. Obscure enough reference that not everyone gets it but obvious enough to be cool. One of the things that the numbers (4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42) COULD be is retired Yankees uniforms. Why in the world that would be true doesn't really matter - it's just cool that it is.

The What's-Around-The-Next-Corner Factor. I just made that up! That's the feeling of anticipation/anxiety/excitement of wanting to know what's next. This show is all about that. You'd better get your Chocolate Yoo-Hoo during the commercials because you don't want to have your head in the fridge during the show or you might miss Michael turning on Libby and shooting her in the stomach! Pee in a coffee can if you have to because you never know when Kate might find another stash of fake beards and stuff! Heck sakes, some of the commercials are for the Hanso foundation, for crying out loud!

So that's about it. It's a way cool show. There aren't may shows that I make sure I catch every week but I don't miss this one. I was a little disappointed when they killed off Shannon, the token hottie, but it's still a great show. I guess the big deal is that it makes my little walnut of a brain have to do some work while it's on. Catching obscure Seinfeld references wasn't quite as challenging as following/dissecting/analyzing the goings-on on Lost. Generally, I like to sink into the couch and pretty much just let a given show wash over me but Lost actually makes me think. Even if it is about Shannon, the hottie.

You'll have to wait until next fall for new shows to come back on again but I suggest you clear your calendar now.

I'm here to help!

Don't Get: Littering

2006-05-03T07:42:00.000-05:00

So I'm walking the dog through the woods last night (or, rather, she is racing around through the woods like an absolute fool while I shuffle along on the trail) and I'm digging the whole scene. It's about 65 degrees and sunny, the leaves are starting to come out, I'm not at work (which is good, just by definition) and then I see an empty water bottle alongside the trail. You know - one of those clear plastic bottles that the manufacturer (do you manufacture water?) has tried to make look different than the other 150 brands of bottled water that are out there. It looked woefully out of place compared to last fall's old leaves, this spring's new leaves and the occasional flower popping up. About the only thing that the bottle was good for at this point was to provide blog fodder, so here we are!

So now I'm thinking about the dolt who was enjoying the same walk as I am but doing so while drinking some overpriced H2O. Heck, he may even have been walking his dog:

Dolt: Sure is pretty out here with the leaves and flowers and stuff.
Dog: Yep, I agree. I can smell all kinds of bunnies and squirrels and other woodland creatures.
Dolt: And this overpriced agua is really tasty and refreshing too!
Dog: Yeah, it might be nice if you shared some with Man's Best Friend...
Dolt: Sorry, Fido, I just polished it off so I'm going to chuck the bottle to the side of the trail.
Dog: What are you, some kind of idiot?! You're going to ruin this beautiful park with your garbage? Why don't you just bring your old couch and car battery out here while you're at it?!
Dolt: Just relax, Spot. And quit licking yourself.

Don't even try to make the argument that a dog "litters" every time he lifts his leg or drops a steaming lump someplace. That stuff is carbon-based and disappears with the first good rain. Skippy's water bottle will be with us for a long time. I feel OK throwing banana peels out the window as I'm eating my "breakfast" on the way to work for the same reason.

And what about smokers? Who ever said it was OK to just throw your cigarette butt wherever the hell you want to? I have to smile a little on the inside when I see smokers relegated to the freezing cold to do their thing. They huddle together for warmth and stand on the little cement pad around whatever door is designated as the "smoking area". Just how enjoyable can that cigarette be? The bad thing is that they think their butts magically disappear when they throw them into the snowbank. That's fine until it gets a little warm out and the snow melts. Is there anything uglier than the pile of nasty-ass cigarette butts left when the snowbank/ashtray melts? I think not. Eventually, those butts just kind of go away, but I'm not sure where they actually end up. Hopefully, they stick to the bottom of the smoker's shoe and he leaves a little trail of fire as he walks across the purple shag in his trailer, burning it to the ground in a conflagration that smells as bad as a tire fire burning out of control but I kind of doubt that happens. I also am convinced that when one of those idiots throws a butt out the car window that it will somehow become lodged in my gas tank and blow me up but that hasn't happened yet either so I've dodged that bullet for now.

Quite a few years ago, I was participating in one of those Adopt-A-Highway things and cleaning up crap alongside US-31 near where I work. One of the guys who was working alongside me was puffing away on a cigarette and where do you think he put the butt when he was done? Yep, that jackass threw it on the ground! I'm out there on a Saturday alongside the highway not unlike a low-flight-risk prisoner in hunter orange picking up garbage and this guy thinks it's OK to flick his butt on the ground in front of me! The voices in my head told me to push him in front of the next SUV coming down the road but my meds kicked in and I was able to restrain myself. Just like short people, stupid people got no reason to live, man.

Is this a nature or nurture thing? If you are comfortable throwing your Snickers wrapper on the ground, is it because your mom and dad threw their Chunky wrappers on the ground too? (Chunkies kind of represent the '70's to me) Or is it just because you could really give a rat's ass about the environment and garbage cans are for the weak? And what's the cutoff? Are Mr. Pibb cans OK to throw into the ditch but a pair of old Nike Waffle Trainers are off-limits? What about a mattress? Refrigerator? I'm guessing that if you litter with one thing, you do so indiscriminately. To you, one man's garbage is, well, every man's garbage. On an unrelated note, I think homosexuality is a nature thing.

Look, if you think littering is acceptable then I'm going to come to your neighborhood every Sunday night to dump my trash instead of putting it on the curb for Mr. Garbageman. I can save $13.00 per month and apparently you won't mind. But if you get all pissy with me about dumping my empty boxes of Cocoa Puffs and the yogurt that expired six weeks ago in your front yard, why don't you help a brother out and put your own crap in the garbage too? Yes, I know it all goes to a landfill anyway and the associated groundwater tastes a little "tangy" but we're not talking about that today.

Pick up your garbage and put it in the proper place so that American Indian doesn't have to have that tear coming down his cheek anymore! And quit smoking too!

Dig: Chinese Buffets

2006-03-29T08:52:00.000-05:00

Are all-you-can-eat buffets just an American thing? If you go to Italy, do they have buffets? How about Canada? Canada is kind of just an extension of the US, anyway - I bet they have them. Buffets seem pretty American - lots of food that's been taken from another culture and with a focus on bigger, not better. But the thing is that there aren't any American buffets out there. I'm not entirely sure what would be in those stailness steel warming dishes at an American buffet actually (hamburgers? hot dogs? PB&J?) but I do know that there are a zillion Chinese buffets in the US and I dig them!

Buffets are pretty much all about quantity over quality. There aren't too many filet mignon buffets around and you don't see many ads in the yellow pages for a place with a name like The Lobster Trough. I'm not bashing Chinese food, but it must be pretty easy to make in volume and have it still be pretty tasty. Not super-fabulous delicious, but tasty. You know, the kind of food that tastes pretty good sober and tastes even better when you're drunk. The kind of food that you can't make at home for the same amount of money and effort.

Seems like most Chinese bufetts have the same dishes. You have three or four chicken dishes that have been pretty American-ized, a couple of pork dishes and maybe a few seafood dishes. Along with those "entrees", there are usually some rangoons, mushrooms, egg rolls and some potatoes of some kind. And, in case you have come to a Chinese buffet under duress, there is some non-Chinese food like ham or meatloaf or something. Throw in a few dessert items (including a soft-serve ice cream machine), a bunch of those stainless steel warming tables, a few booths and the occasional booster seat and you're good to go.

So, back to quantity over quality. Most of the food is good. Not much of it is excellent. When someone asks you about the place to go for the best food, you probably don't direct them to the Golden Dragon. However, if someone is in a hurry and is looking for some good grub without spending a boat-load of money, the old Dragon is the place to be! I'm guessing that the guy manning the Kingdom Chicken warming tray didn't go to culinary school - in China or anyplace else. But that's OK because you don't need no stinking chef for this place, just crank up the General Tsao's chicken machine and bring in the nice people with their money! The stuff is good enough to eat once a week and, for the time you are in their nice establishment, you can pretty well gorge yourself. God bless China, I mean America!

I'm going to tread a little lightly here so as not to offend, but do you have to be Chinese to work at a Chinese buffet? Whenever I go to one, I don't see too many white-bread folks like myself working there. Is there some discrimination going on that I should know about? And what where they doing prior to working at the buffet? See, that's the thing about opening a buffet of American food. America is a melting pot of people, right? So I couldn't very well just hire white people to work there. I'd have to hire a certain percentage of lots of different nationalities. But if the Chinese buffet is located in the US, then aren't those people Americans? I don't know about you, but this converation is making my head hurt and I don't really want to open that whole racism floodgate....

Kind of a short post today - I apologize. The more I wrote, though, the more I realized that there were quite a few things about Chinese buffets that I don't get so perhaps I should have published this under the Don't Get heading. Maybe I'll go load up on some Sesame Chicken and ponder this topic some more. And, if I need to do, I can go back and help myself to some Orange Chicken for some additional ponderin'!

Don't Get: The amount of time dedicated to the weather forecast on the evening news

2006-03-02T09:57:00.000-05:00

Do all weather guys have pictures of their respective news anchors with hookers and lines of coke or what?! Are there some out-standing gambling debts or some underwear preferences that we don't know about? How do they get so much air time? Just how long does it take to say that it's going to rain tomorrow? Is there not enough real news to fill the 30 minutes (less 7 minutes or so for commercials which are probably neither effective nor entertaining) that we have to talk ad nauseum about the weather? For crying out loud, Weather-Dude, just tell me if tomorrow is going to suck or not!

OK, I feel a little better, but now allow me to continue. Never mind, I don't need your permission - the nice people at blogger.com gave ME the sign-on, not you.

There's a lot of crap going on the world every day. Some of it good, a lot of it not so good. A half-hour isn't much time to talk about all that stuff. If Peter Jennings weren't dead, he wouldn't sit idly by while some weather guy is giving a forecast, Pete would talk about all the silliness going on in the Middle East or Washington or New Orleans or someplace. He would talk about the news. And even the local guys (who probably lay awake at night fantasizing about becoming an anchor on the national news: "This is World News Tonight with Joe Blow") certainly could spend 23 minutes talking about news in their little corner of the world. There are enough robberies, murders and cats stuck in trees to go around.

There is a TV station in my world that brags about having the weather earlier in the newscast than the other stations in the area. Is that something to crow about? Is the weather really the most important thing going on in the world? Can I affect the weather? (In case you were wondering, the answer to all of those semi-rhetorical questions is "no"). There are usually a couple of little teasers about upcoming news stories and then they jump right to Junior talking about the weather: "Osama Bin Laden found in Topeka, Kansas - but first the weather". I'm sure that when the anchor cuts to the weather guy and goes off-camera, he immediately rolls his eyes makes that hand gesture of a guy bopping his bologna which, as we all know, is the universal sign for "blah, blah, blah".

OK, so now the weather guy is on. First thing he does is review yesterday's weather for some reason. Not sure why anyone cares about yesterday, but he must think it's important. Next thing he does is talk about some big-ass warm front in frickin' New Mexico or some damn place. He assures me that this matters to me in Michigan because of the affect it will have on a cold front or a high pressure something-or-other or a gulf stream or something. From there, he tells me about the high temperatures in various cities around the country and, if that weren't enough, I get to hear about the LOW temps as well. What more could a boy want?! Certainly, If I'm taking the kids to see the Grand Canyon, I would want to know about the weather in Arizona but isn't that why god made weather.com?

Finally, after all this dinking around about other people's weather, he zooms in his little map of the US to my neck of the woods (as Willard Scott would say). Often, he'll repeat the same mumbo-jumbo about high-pressure stuff and cold fronts and temperatures in the surrounding 100 miles. And then he'll break out the big guns, the ultimate gizmo for the weatherman - the doppler radar loop! There was probably more than one boner in weatherman school the day they got to play with the radar thing: Look, class, you can run it forwards and backwards! Light blue means a little rain, dark blue means a lot of rain! Those schlubs at the other weatherman schools got nothin' on us! (FYI - Penn State is a big weatherman school.)

After showing off the size of his radar dish (obviously compensating for something), Skippy gets down to business and lets me know that tomorrow will be partly cloudy (is that different than mostly sunny?) and will have a high of 76 and a low of 58. Terrific. That's what I've been waiting for. Now I know that I can wear my Motley Crue t-shirt instead of my Ratt sweatshirt. I don't even need him to be that specifc. I can live with "upper 70's". Is there much difference between 76 and 79 degrees? For that matter, "pretty nice day tomorrow" works for me. I think weathermen should just limit their forecasts to "nice day" and "crappy day". Play back the last conversation you had with someone about the weather. It probably went something like this:

You: "I hear tomorrow is supposed to be pretty nice."
Friend/Co-Worker/Life Partner/Stranger With Whom You Are Making Idle Chitchat: "Yep, that's what the weather guy said"

Please note that you didn't say anything about high-pressure systems or mention barometers or thermometers or richter scales or compare the size of a hailstone to a common spherical object such as a baseball, golf ball, bocce ball or grapefruit. If you get into the size of basketballs, then maybe we can talk, but until then it doesn't really matter.

One last thing. I DO get the weather channel. It is a channel/website completely devoted to the weather. I've marked it as a favorite on both of my computers. All I'm saying is that I'm sure there is a cat in a tree out there who isn't getting the press time he deserves because of a new record high in Death Valley. It's a desert, people! It's gonna get hot! One day, it will be the hottest it has ever been and whether it is 125 or 126 degrees doesn't really matter a lot. It's just frickin' hot (qualifying as a "crappy day")! I hate cats, but Fluffy deserves the air time and I just don't get why he has to get screwed over by the weatherman every night.

Hate: Stupid Commercials on TV

2006-02-20T14:17:00.000-05:00

This may be another Beavis and Butthead type of post where the overriding theme is "I don't like stuff that sucks" but I feel it necessary to share with you my feelings on commercials that are so poorly made it makes me want to buy their competitors' products in an effort to drive them out of business. (That was a long sentence but I'm here to tell you that it was worth every electron.) My poor brain can hardly handle the daily tasks that my little life demands, but when I'm inundated with stupidity, a little bit of gray matter turns black and falls off. Next thing you know, I'll have things that look like little mouse turds falling out my ear every time I shake my head. And that's rarely good.

I should probably be thankful for commercials, shouldn't I? If I didn't mind limiting my TV viewing to just a few local channels with a considerable amount of "snow", I could be enjoying free TV, right? I couldn't watch "I love the '80's" but I could still catch some "Dancing with the Stars". And, for that matter, "Lost" is by far the best show on TV right now even though you can't argue with a good episode of "What Not to Wear". So I need commercials to pay for that free TV. Instead of paying a gob of money each month to the cable company, I would "pay" in the form of commercials. Seems like a fair trade, I guess. What's my deal, then? I'll tell you what my deal is. My deal is when those commercials are so friggin' stupid that my brain turns into mouse turds!

Let me tell you what I'm looking for in a commercial. If you're trying to sell me something just bring in some guy who isn't duded up to look like an expert. That whole "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV" thing doesn't do much for me. Put a guy in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and if I feel like he is honest when he is telling me that his product works really well or is better than the competitors', then I'm good to go and I'll buy his stuff the next time I'm in the market. Here's a possible script for the guy in jeans and a sweatshirt. The setting is an empty stage with a gray background (like you used to have in elementary school pictures, except hopefully the guy has a better haircut than I did when I was in third grade):

Guy in Jeans and Sweatshirt: Yesterday, I had a really bad headache and I took some Tylenol and my headache went away. I don't know about you, but it worked better than Advil for me. If you have a headache, you should go out and buy some Tylenol.

See how simple that is? Nobody posing as a doctor with the whole lab coat thing. No goofy pictures or graphics showing a time-release capsule blah, blah, blah. Just some guy who is digging his headache-free life. I don't need a backstory. Don't show me pictures of Junior rubbing his temples because his boss is yelling at him and his wife is bitching about the kids. The reason that this is more effective than any current headache commercials is because I don't feel like he is feeding me a bunch of hooey. This technique works for toilet bowl cleaners, cars, paperclips and refrigerators too. Less is more, people, and the less any salesperson talks, the better.

So that's easy. It's a little bit more difficult to create a commercial that is entertaining in some way. Headaches and Tylenol aren't exactly knee-slappers so you need a hook. You could either go the subtle route with some real Seinfeld-esque dry humor or go over the top with some Office Linebacker kind of stuff. Either way, though, you'd better make it good or I'll run from your dumb-ass product like I'm covered in gummi bears and being chased by a bunch of fat kids.

So instead of wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, have a guy wearing a two-sizes-too-small Superman outfit with a couple of holes in it, big fly-eye goggles and the actor has a big zit on his nose. He could even be holding a bowling ball in one of those cheesy vinyl carrying bags. The script can be the same, though. The temptation would be to have him say something about how fighting crime and life as a superhero really gives him a headache. That would be easy, but no funnier than him just standing there. Instead, just let him say the same thing as if he looks as normal as the jeans guy. Much funnier, and the next day around the water cooler people would be asking what the deal was with that acne-riddled superhero guy and the Tylenol. Also, for what it's worth, that goddamn Energizer bunny has driven me to buy Duracell batteries. Yep, I do know that that stuffed bunny is associated with Energizer - it just makes it easier for me to know which batteries NOT to buy.

Commercials have become so prevalent in our lives that we now have TV shows about commercials and let's not forget the hullabaloo around the commercials that played during the Super Bowl. I'm sure that whoever invented the commercial is wringing his hands somewhere talking about his master plan to shows those bastards at the network that his commercial for Tucks pads is better than this week's episode of Joey. He is well on his way to rule the world via toilet bowl cleaner commercials but I refuse to fall victim to his diabolical plan.

But I digress (which probably is no surprise to you).

My little walnut understands that television commercials do have a place in the universe. I'm just saying let's all try to make this li'l ole universe a better place by making those commercials more direct and with a little bit of entertainment value. Either get to the point and tell me that your product actually works or make me laugh and we're all set.

And if you can't do that, you can just use a babe in a bikini. I'll buy whatever the hell she is selling. In fact, put me down for a case.

Hate: Chafing

2006-01-30T11:03:00.000-05:00

This topic actually came to me as I was adjusting the collar on my recently dry-cleaned shirt. I always tell them "No Starch" but my neck was all hosed up from rubbing against my crispy shirt all day long. Even though it was my neck that was chafed it was a real pain in the ass! My life is full of enough crap to worry about and I have to add neck-chafe to the list? Thanks a lot - like I have time for that! Maybe next time I'll be lucky enough to have a pebble in my shoe or a popcorn kernel stuck between my teeth that I can't seem to dig out with my tongue despite hours of trying.

Despite my neck issues, it's also no coincidence that a post about chafing appears right after a post about running. The two go hand-in-hand (foot-in-foot?). Part of the price of running a bunch of miles to maintain my Greek god-like physique is that oh-so irritating burning sensation created by skin rubbing on skin. Or skin rubbing on cloth. Or skin rubbing on plastic. Or just general rubbing of skin. Skin is pretty soft stuff, right? You would think that it wouldn't be a big deal. But, just like smoking crack, rubbing on skin should be done in moderation. When it's not, it leads to chafing which leads to Vaseline and from there everything just goes into a downward spiral.

Often, skin to skin contact is quite a pleasant experience but that usually involves my own skin and someone else's. When it's my left inner thigh rubbing against my right inner thigh for a couple of hours straight, it's not nearly as nice as when one of my inner thighs is rubbing against someone else's (preferably female) inner thigh. And believe me, I'm fully prepared to test this theory by timing thigh contact for a couple of hours with a willing volunteer who meets the criteria as determined by me. I'd use one of those clocks that are controlled by a satellite in outer space to make it official and everything so that no one would accuse me of rubbing inner thighs for more than two hours.

But back to my pink, tender, slightly swollen inner thighs. Man, that hurts like hell! You have to walk all bowlegged so as not to worsen the condition and the only thing that makes it worse is..... a shower! The very thing that you want right after a long run only makes the chafing more painful. The shower feels terrific only for as long as it takes for the water to run down my chest, past my unit and to chafe-land. Man, that hurts like double hell!
Me after a long run: "My inner thighs are chafed and it hurts like hell!"
Me, again: "I sure could use a shower so as not to stink up the joint."
More of Me: "Dude, that hot water on my sensitive inner thighs hurts like double hell!
Me: "When will I learn?!"
Me, still: "Who are you talking to?"

Speaking of Vaseline, often it is offered to runners during a long race. I first experienced this a few years ago as I came up to a water station and there was a race volunteer standing there wearing rubber gloves holding a big dollop of Vaseline. I kid you not! It took me a second to realize that this kind person was offering me some chafe-be-gone. Talk about drawing the short straw! You know that guy was the butt off all the jokes from his little race volunteer friends!

Race Guy: "OK, everyone, let's draw straws to see who is going to dole out the Vaseline"
Volunteer #1(drawing straw): "I hope it's not me. I hope it's not me. I hope it's not me."
Volunteer #2 (after drawing straw): "Blast! I have to be Mr. Vaseline Man! I'll show them. I'm only going to offer my petroleum jelly to the cute girls. All the rest of those stupid-ass runners will have to suffer through their chafing!"
Volunteer #1 to Volunteer #2 (in a mocking tone): "Hey, Mr. Vaseline Man, would you lube me up?!"
Volunteer #3 to Volunteer #2: (also in a mocking tone): Hey, Mr. Vaseline Man, I hear Star Jones is running in this race. Maybe you'll get lucky!"
Newscaster: "Authorities today discovered two bodies hidden in the woods near last week's race course. Oddly, they were covered in Vaseline. Police are looking for a man described as 'really pissed off and holding a short straw'."

The jury is still out on whether chafed nipples are worse than chafed inner thighs, but I'm here to tell you that it doesn't hurt any less. Us runner-types can have this problem during long runs. I'm not going to get into the whole mechanics of why a nipple might be sticking out far enough to be chafed by a t-shirt but it happens. Even on warm days. There are band-aids out there that are designed/shaped specifically for the purpose of keeping your shirt from chafing your nipple. I have to believe that this is a niche market and one would think that your basic round band-aid would serve the same purpose but somebody felt the need to re-package a standard band-aid, mark it up a couple hundred percent and sell it in running stores. As embarrassing as it might be to wear these things, allow me to paint a picture for you: It's 45 degrees and raining. Nipple-chafing set in 30 minutes into a two hour race with sufficient irritation to cause just the slightest amount of bleeding. Now picture a guy whose nipples have been bleeding through his rain-soaked white t-shirt for 90 minutes. Sorry to do that to you, but nipple-chafing is serious business! Let me clean your mental palate by mentioning Baywatch (but don't think of David Hasselhoff) or the words "Amateur Night". Better?

So what to do about neck/thigh/nipple chafing? If you're not into Vaseline, there's a product out there called Body Glide. It looks like deodorant but it helps to keep various parts of your body gliding smoothly. Works pretty darn well, too. And weird as it may feel, invest in the nipple-aids. Nobody has to know. But I'm here to tell you that I will wear band-aids on my nipples before I wear a dicky to address my neck chafing!

Dig: Running

2006-01-24T12:48:00.000-05:00

Look at me! Two positive posts in a row! For some reason we've had a lot of sunshine lately so maybe that's perked me up. Normally, this time of year is pretty dreary in Grand Haven with lots of snow, short days and general misery so it's way nice to see the sun.

Today's post is brought to you by the sore muscles, sweat and creaking knees that a healthy dose of running brings. I dabbled with running in college in an effort to not balloon to enormous proportions but it was a pretty half-hearted attempt. I was pretty into mountain biking for quite a few years as my main method of burning calories but almost exactly three years ago, I took up running pretty seriously. Putting in ten or fifteen miles a week, coupled with the Subway diet (cheese-less sandwiches with low-fat dressing and baked chips instead of fried) took about 15 lbs. off my fat little body. Even better, I didn't hate it. I was wearing the wrong shoes and was doing the old school cotton t-shirt thing but I've come a long way since then. The next summer I did a few 5k's and kept up the routine of running a few times a week. I got faster with each race and I became a "runner" at some point along the way. I've run two 25k's (15.5 miles) and a half-marathon (13.1 miles) and now I'm planning to do the Chicago Marathon on October 22. So I dig running.

I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, "This dude is fucked in the head. Running sucks!" And while it is true that I may be fucked in the head, I don't think that running sucks. And here are a few reasons why:

No one can do it for me. When I get home after my standard 5-mile run (to the first telephone pole past the school and back), I will have done it by myself. Every step of the way was mine. For that matter, I couldn't even coast downhill like when I ride my bike. Same thing goes for when I run 15.5 miles. As much as the cheering and following behind a babe in tight shorts helps, that babe ain't gonna move my legs for me. Certainly, there are plenty of people who run marathons every year but not everybody can or has so when I do I will be part of a pretty small group of people. Completing a challenge like this with no one to do it for you may or may not be important to you, but it is to me and this is my blog so you can just shut up. If I take the time to think about what I'm doing, I can feel pretty good about running a mile in 8 minutes and 41 seconds. A mile. In 8:41. When I'm getting to the end of my run and I'm really in the zone and I'm flying along at much faster than 8:41 per mile, I'm feeling pretty Rocky-esque (you know, like the scene when he runs up the steps to that museum in Philadelphia).

It's good to get the poison out. Most runners feel really good - when they're done. The first few miles are the hardest for me until I get into my aerobic routine. The middle miles are just a groove and the last few miles I'm really humpin' to get it done. The whole way, though, the latte's, Big Macs and chocolate chip cookies are just pouring out of my body. Ever sit next to somebody who was super drunk the night before and you get a contact buzz from the booze coming out of him? Same thing, except you can't get drunk on the McDonald's special sauce. The adrenaline continues to pump for a while after I return home and I feel pretty good about taking the previous 52:38 (a good time for me for 6 miles), to burn calories and clean out my pores instead of watching America's Next Top Model. Besides, there's something about Tyra that bugs me and I can't quite figure out what it is.

Time to myself: For those of you with kids, you know how little time you get to yourself anymore. That was the first thing to go when my daughter was born. (I'm making an assumption that you're holding up your end of the parenting. If you've worked out a deal with your other half where he/she does all the work with the kids, please call my wife.) I have important crap to think about as you are finding out by now: blog topics, dumb-ass people at work, get-rich-quick schemes, etc. and I need quality time to do my ponderin'. What better time than when I'm knocking out a quick 5 mile run? The MP3 player is only there for background noise and I'm happy to say that my little walnut can listen to Kid Rock and compose a blog topic all while putting one foot in front of the other for about 44 minutes. Even though I've created the family's monthly budget on the back of the bulletin at church in days gone by, I feel a little less guilty about doing it while I'm running than while I'm ignoring Henry, my priest.

I'm trying not to be a middle-aged fat-ass: I'm 38. I haven't been scanning the used car ads for a red convertible and I don't dig gold chains, but I'm not really looking forward to being 40. Fortunately, people usually think I'm much younger than I am, but I don't want to be the guy who looks 57 even though he's 42. My stupid friends from college would tell you that I've always been a little thick in the middle and I don't want to have to poke another hole in my belt in an effort to hold on to something I don't have anymore. Mind you, those dumb-asses might think I'm thick in the middle but I'm here to tell you that they're pretty thick in the head! Anyway, running is a way for me to burn off the calories and not let my body turn to a big pile of mush. Certainly, I could cut out the trips to Taco Bell but I'm not quite that committed.

I'm such a running nerd that I now track my miles on-line, have a whole bunch of "technical" shirts, shorts and underwear and I recently subscribed to Runner's World magazine. I'm finding that either you really dig running or you really don't. Plenty of people don't run - most with a legitimate reason like having bad knees - and don't get the whole running thing. When I was a more serious mountain biker (and subscribed to two mountain biking magazines), I never would have considered running. However, in recent years, it seems as though I've gotten older. Not quite sure how that happened, but my body now prefers the aerobic routine of running and my brain prefers the feeling of accomplishment of carting my 38 year-old body across a finish line. And pulling a Burley down a bumpy trail looks a lot like shaken baby syndrome to the nice people at Child Protective Services.

I'm anticipating that I'm going to be a runner for a long time even though I've only been doing it seriously for three years. I'm also thinking that I will get a little faster before the crunching in my knees causes me to slow down. If I want to keep in halfway decent shape, I'll need to keep it up because there are still a lot of value meals with my name on them out there. And even though I'm generally not very competitive with other people, I can still picture the 10 year-old kid who finished just ahead of me in my first 5k and that kind of bugs me. Him and Tyra.

Dig: Satellite Radio

2006-01-20T08:06:00.000-05:00

So I have about a 30-minute commute to work. Not bad compared to you poor saps in LA or Chicago or someplace but it's still time that I have to give away each day. Here in West Michigan, there are precious few good radio stations so I would jump back and forth between three fairly cheesy "morning zoo" shows: Bob and Tom, Free Beer and Hot Wings (don't get me started on their names) and Kevin Matthews. I was a big Kevhead a long time ago but I become a pretty die-hard Howard Stern fan for the short period of time that he was on the air here in Biblethumperland so I've been missing him. Imagine my delight when he announced he would be moving to satellite radio! I'll talk more about Howard in a minute, but let's discuss satellite radio in general first, shall we?

I'm generally a pretty cheap bastard. That comes primarily from not having much money. This is true despite purchasing a slick new minivan recently (can minivans be "slick" or is that a contradiction in terms?) equipped with a DVD player and five sunroofs. This thing also came stocked with XM radio. And a free 3-month trial! Thanks, Nissan! "I'm sure there's no way that I'll want to part with $12.95 per month after my free trial, but thanks for the free sample of XM", I foolishly said to myself. Fast forward to the day the renewal letter comes from XM reminding me that my free trial is about to end and would I like to renew my subscription? I think you know where this is going. The Marketing folks at XM/Nissan succeeded yet again in signing up another subscriber after giving away $38.85 worth of satellite radio. I'm such a sucker!

The reason that we re-upped is because XM is cool. In fact, I dig it. There are more friggin' channels on this thing than you can shake a stick at. And beleive you me, I've shaken a lot of sticks in my day! Certainly there are plenty of channels that I don't listen to. I'm not really into Rap or Hip-Hop (I'm pretty white bread) and I generally skip the Christian and Classical channels, but there are about 25 music channels that I regularly surf and there are a ton of talk channels and sports channels. Channel 150 is one of two comedy channels and how can you resist listening to Chris Rock do his thing while you're driving to the grocery store? Mind you, one must exercise caution when young ears are in the car but Chris is one funny guy and it beats listening to the usual formula of morning drive time radio or whatever 25 songs are in heavy rotation at the moment.

So back to Howard. Prior to leaving terrestrial radio (that's the same as "regular old radio", for you uninitiated) Howard had about 13 million listeners and you gotta figure he's going to bring a percentage of those folks with him to Sirius. He should, considering his 5 year, $500 million contract. Yep, a half-billion. Not bad, considering how ugly he is. One of those nice people that moved to Sirius is me. This isn't a post about digging Howard, but I do dig him so I ponied up the money for a years' subscription (12 months for the price of 11!) and plugged in my nifty new radio that I received for Christmas and away I went. Howard was the primary reason why I wanted Sirus radio for my car, I have to admit. However, I also just plain old dug satellite radio after listening to it in the super-duper minivan. Howard was just the guy that convinced me to do Sirius instead of XM.

Taking Howard out of the picture, Sirius and XM both have their strengths and I'm not sure which one is better. Both have lots of categories of music as described above and both have contracts with different professional sports leagues. For instance, Sirius has the NFL but XM doesn't, so I would have had to sit in my car to listen to the Steelers win today instead of my wife's minivan. XM has a contract with major league baseball and NASCAR (this is me not making fun of NASCAR again...) and the Big Ten. For my friend, Ron, Sirius has a gay and lesbian channel so that might be good for him.

Satellite radio allows you to check out new music without plunking down money for a CD that might be a little iffy. Again, I'm a cheapskate and just because I like the one song that I hear on the radio doesn't mean I'll go out and buy the CD. I can hear a little more than just the single that was released and then decided if I want to spend the money. And, because satellite offers so many oldies (by that, I mean '70s, '80s and '90s) stations, you don't have to be embarassed about listening to such classics as "Afternoon Delight", anything by The Outfield or "Mmmm Bop" because you don't have to actually lay the CD on the counter and look the clerk in the eye as you give him your money. You can tool on down the road and listen to Hansen-like music all day long without the guilt of buying their CDs. If anyone challenges you on what you were listening to, you can always just say you were surfing the channels and the last time you listened to this one, there was something much less sucky on.

Prior to hopping on the satellite bandwagon, my CD changer took a puke on me. I was working a friend to buy his because he says he never uses it. Why not, you ask? Because he has Sirius, he says. And he's right. He lent me his changer and said that he would sell it to me if I really wanted it but that I might find that I don't need a CD changer if I have satellite. And, by golly, he's right. I haven't listened to a single CD since Christmas. I guess that's only related to digging satellite radio in that Sirius is good enough to replace my CD changer - sorry if I got off track there for a minute.

So, there you have it. Satellite radio is cool. Much like cable TV, there is so much stuff on that you're bound to find something you like. Want to know how the traffic is shaping up in Seattle? Channel 156 on Sirius can hook you up. Miss the latest driving-in-circles event that NASCAR holds every weekend? Tune in to Channel 144 on XM. And let's not forget the high-brow comedy of Howard Stern on Sirius Channel 100. Just this week, he was asking Larry King's wife why in the world she wanted to become Mrs. Larry King #7 and who can resist that little tidbit of news?!

Don't Get: Advice Columns and Those Stupid Celebrity Q&A Columns

2006-01-11T19:32:00.000-05:00

As you can see by my two recent Don't Get posts, I'm one confused guy lately. Every Sunday, I am further confused by the people who feel the need to seek advice from Dear Abby, et. al. and ask questions about various celebrities. Just like I don't think Yakov Smirnov (please see any website dedicated to '80's pop culture if you don't know who Yakov is) is really from the former Soviet Union, I just can't believe that there are actually people out there who write to these "columnists" (not "communists" - that would be a Yakov Smirnov joke) looking for advice. I won't bore you with too many examples of these columns, but I will give a few:

Dear Abby (dearabby.com): She and her sister, Ann Landers, started this whole mess. I'm not sure what qualifies them as advice experts, but I'd be willing to bet that it ain't a Ph.D. in Advice-Giving-for-the-Price-of-a-Stamp. The first "letter" on Abby's site as I write this details how a female business owner caught a male employee forging a check for $1k. Despite never having "a sexual relationship" with this yahoo (that's important, how?), she is wondering what to do. Believe me, it's not important what Abby says in response. The only correct reply to this letter is "Why the hell are you wasting valuable ink and paper with dumb-ass questions like this?! Shut the hell up and go home to your 15 cats!" Suffice it to say, all of the letters written to Abby have a similar dumb-ass quality to them.

Parade Magazine (parade.com): This is one of those throw-away "magazines" that clutter up the Sunday newspaper. There are usually just as many ads for the Franklin Mint as there are articles and, for that matter, the articles usually have something to do old people in some way. Anyway, on the inside of the front cover is "Personality Parade", a Q&A column written by some joker named Walter Scott. I can picture old Walt making up these letters while sitting on the can, shuffling over to his phone to dictate to his blue-haired secretary (not "administrative assistant") and then spending the rest of his day eating too much only to fall into a food-induced coma at about 6:30. Unfortunately for us Michiganders, "Tom Seelye" of "Detroit" recently wrote in asking who started the trend in Hollywood for male leads to wear aviator style sunglasses. I'm serious, folks, this was actually printed. No heavy lifting for Walter. No questions about cancer or world hunger, please - let's just focus on sunglasses. I'm struggling to make another smart-ass comment about this because I am weeping for the future of our great state....

USA Weekend Magazine (usaweekend.com): Just like Parade magazine this publication is best suited to wrapping fish. A recent dolt from the Show-Me state (that's Missouri, in case you are a dolt also) was looking for advice because her 16 year-old daughter wanted to get a boob job. Apparently, this chick has "saved the money needed and seen so many makeover shows that she is more knowledgeable about the procedure" than the mother-of-the-year is. Where to begin with these two?!
A: the girl is 16
B: she has learned everything from makeover shows
C: how did she get all that cash?!
Look, if you need some broad from USA Today to tell you that this isn't a real good idea, you frickin' DESERVE to live in Missouri! Perhaps instead of new tubes for your slut-daughter, you could put the money to better use by upgrading to a double-wide! As a matter of fact, why not send me the money and I'll invest it in something worthwhile like a 60" plasma TV. (Don't get me wrong, a nice rack is a beautiful thing but the kids at the local "alternative" high school don't deserve it whereas I do deserve a big TV.)

OK, last bitch about these things. Exactly how urgently do people need answers to these questions? One would hope that "Tom" could wait a while to hear back on the important topic of celebrity eyewear, but is the high school chick driving to the plastic surgeon as we speak? I'm guessing that if I ever needed help on a weighty issue ("My prosthetic leg is currently on fire and I'm confused over which type of fire extinguisher to use...") I'd be looking for a pretty quick turnaround time and because the world is full of stupid people, you gotta figure that there would be quite a few letters ahead of mine in the queue. Might I suggest a conversation with an actual person living in close proximity to handle some of your questions?

Other than the fact that it's a way for dumb-asses to see their names in print, nothing good can come of these things. Every Sunday these things suck me in to see what the stupid people are concerned about and it makes me a little stupider every time I read them and that pisses me off! Damn you, Tom Seelye!

Don't Get: Guns as Toys

2005-12-26T21:48:00.000-05:00

Us WASPs had a big week this week. We celebrated the birth of our savior by giving lots of gifts to each other. We don't have enough electrons here to discuss the commercialism of Christmas (Christmercialism?) so I won't get into that whole scene but it was through this transaction of gift-giving that my five year-old son ended up with his first gun - two guns actually. Yep, five years old and the proud owner of two guns. Along with his remote controlled Jeep Grand Cherokee, some Lego stuff (how rich is THAT guy?) and a nifty telescope, Jack received a dart gun and some other plastic contraption with all kind of sounds and noises and a laser sight! Yes, these guns have orange tips on them so the cops don't think they're real, but it just doesn't taste right for a kid to receive a gun as a toy.

I live in the beautiful state of Michigan where hunting is pretty serious business. Every year on November 15, all kinds of folks head out into the woods to shoot deer. The preparation for this day begins immediately following the last day of the previous year's season and involves lots of camo, pick-up trucks and guns. I have no problem at all with this activity but, in case you hadn't guessed by now, I'm more into blogs than guns. I'm not into it but, if you are, by all means enjoy your time sitting in the woods. As a matter of fact, I'll be glad to eat some of the venison that you bring into work or family gatherings.

I have plenty of friends and family who participate in the whole November 15 ritual. I've shared my feelings about guns with a few of them and they assure me that they teach their kids to treat guns with the utmost respect. Always assume the gun is loaded, they say. You're darned right, you better be afraid/respectful of a gun! Gun as hunting implement, I get.

And as much as I know that I would totally curl up in the fetal position if I was ever sent off to fight in a war someplace, I also get the idea of gun as diplomat. My brother-in-law did more than his share of time in Iraq and I really respect him for doing his thing over there. I haven't quizzed him too much about what went on but I don't think he was in the fetal position. It's hard to spread democracy with your head between your knees. Crap goes on in the world that requires the diplomacy that only an M-16 can bring and I'm cool with OTHER people taking care of business. I think that George has a hard time admitting he was wrong or even adjusting the game plan but now that we're messing around over there, I'm behind the guys 100%. George didn't get my vote in either election, but whatever...

But hunting and war are different than toys under the Christmas tree. Jack now jumps out from behind the recliner and shoots. He crawls on his 5 year-old stomach under the kitchen table and shoots. He sneaks up on stuff and shoots it. I guess my concern is that if would ever somehow get a real gun in his hands, he wouldn't be able to separate the pretend shooting from the real thing. Believe me, he gets an earful from me if he points the gun at a person and I'm happy to say that he's learned that lesson mighty quick! Suffice to say that Jack isn't copying this behavior from me and believe it or not, I'm not dumb enough to think that I can shelter him from all this stuff. For that matter, I didn't just throw the guns in the garbage either. I think the jury is still out on whether completely hiding guns from a kid is better than having them around the house, so I guess the best thing I can do is to not promote it but also not treat guns like they're completely forbidden. This is really testing my parenting skills!

Don't worry, this is NOT the place where I get on my soapbox and prattle on about violence on TV or XBox games and try to blame society for somehow teaching my kid how to "cover" his buddy. All of that is true, but this isn't the place where I will be doing that. (How is it that so many of us aren't active gun users but we "know" so much about guns?) I'm not necessarily a big fan of Michael Moore, but I AM necessarily not a big fan of Charlton Heston.

So you see, I don't really have a problem with guns, per se. I have a problem with a gun as a toy. It just doesn't make sense! In what way is a gun a toy? Toy = Legos. Toy = Skateboard. Toy = Train Set. Toy does not = Gun. How is shooting a gun something that I would want my little kid to think is fun? Guns are very powerful and demand the respect that my hunter friends say they have. Legos only hurt when you step on them.

Hate: Bad Service

2005-12-19T07:12:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you've been able to tell by now, but I'm an impatient sort. I don't want you in my way at the grocery store and it bugs me when my wife digs around in her purse/steamer trunk for the car keys. I don't have enough time in the day to do all the things that I want, so waiting for other people isn't something that I enjoy. I've become especially impatient and intolerant of bad service because, in the end, it means that you are just sucking more time right out of my watch and that just takes away from being able to do the important stuff in my life like, you know, sitting around.

This topic was prompted by a trip to the mall with my lovely bride last weekend. I know what you are thinking. Yes, I went to the mall a week before Christmas. Yes, I should have been more patient and tolerant in light of the whole Jesus thing. Yes, I should have known that everyone in the entire world would be at the very same mall bothering me. Anyway, I experienced some pretty crappy service and I just had to share my feelings with you . Can't a brother just expect the lackies earning their $6.50 per hour (plus a 10% discount from the store!) to do their jobs?!

We were looking for a gift for her dad. Some kind of goofy things that you strap on your shoes to prevent you from slipping while you walk. We could debate whether this gift was going to be any good or not (Amy has the very same thing and has yet to use them but she wants to get a pair for her dad?) but that would take time away from talking about the Employee of the Month at Dick's Sporting Goods.

So we're kind of wandering around looking for these things. We have that look about us that just screams "I hate everyone here and if you could just point me in the right direction, I'll be happy to spend my greenbacks on your overpriced crap so I can then stand in line with the rest of the sheep". Finally, I make eye contact with Skippy and ask him if they carry these stupid things. I knew I was in trouble when he kind of scrunched up his face like he had bitten into a bug and repeated what I asked him. I could hear the little gears turning in his little melon and then grind to a halt as if someone had poured a bucket of sand in there. With great confidence, he announced that, despite the enormous catalog of inventory that Dick's carries, they do not have such an item. While unfortunate that I would have to traipse off to another store, it was even more unfortunate that I saw an entire rack of these goofy things not 50 feet from where Junior had just told me that they weren't! (If that didn't make sense, it means that Dick's really does carry these things and the high school punk had no clue but lulled me into a false sense of security by speaking "confidently".) So off I went to buy the boot traction things and Sporto no doubt went off spreading more bad information. I know that I shouldn't expect much from a chump making $6.50 an hour but come on! If that's what you signed up for, at least do your friggin' job! Maybe Dick's is a little overwhelming for him. Perhaps a place like Hot Topic would be more his speed where the junior high girls aren't as demanding as impatient bastards like me .

Here's another example - and much shorter! I was at Starbuck's (imagine that!) in Meijer's the other day. As we all know, my VentiNonfatNoWhipMocha costs $3.76. Because I didn't want to get a whole bunch of change back, I gave the chick a fiver and a penny. The problem was that I gave her the penny AFTER she had already rung up my mocha goodness. Good God, you'd think I asked her to perform some sort of calculus right on the spot! See, normally her nifty little cash register would have told her to give me $1.24 but now I had given her the extra penny and she froze up like she had stepped on a rusty nail when she was a little kid and the lockjaw had just now set in. She kind of made that bug-biting face and let me know that she "isn't very good in math" and looked pleadingly at me to take back my penny. Standing my ground, I gave her the penny and let her know that the change should be a buck and a quarter. "Not very good at math", she said. She should have said "I'm pretty stupid and I can't think for myself so please don't mess me up by giving me money after the cash register tells me what to do." Again, this transaction took valuable seconds away from watching another video of a guy getting hit in the nuts by the fat kid on his little league team and who wants to miss that?

OK, last example. Most of my monthly bills are automatically deducted from my vast fortune every month insteading of mailing them in. One of those bills is from the evil cable company. Don't get me started on these guys but one month they screwed up and didn't get their grubby mitts on my money. So what do you think they did? They took twice the usual amount the next month. So I got on the horn to the idiots at Charter Communications and asked them what the deal was. It seems that they had a software upgrade that went awry and they weren't able to take their money in the first month so they just helped themselves to my loot in the second month. Huh? What? Does that seem fair to you? You snooze, you lose, man! Let me just say here that you don't want to screw me in the money department. I don't have that much in the first place so I get pretty protective of it. I proceeded to chew on the ear of the Charter person until I thought I was going to have a grabber - all for about $100 that they were entitled to in the first place. Yes, I fully acknowledge that it was no big deal for them to delay their debit a month and the mortgage company wasn't going to change the locks on my house, but that's not the point. The point is that all this crap is done electronically and there is no reason why my little life should be affected by your electrons going haywire. If you have a software "upgrade" (now they can play solitaire and minesweeper online!) have a backup plan, you dolts! People do this stuff all the time. That's what IT nerds are for.

For those of you who think I'm just a whining pain in the ass, allow myself to explain.... myself. This country is becoming more and more service orientated (love that "word" almost as much as irregardless!) and yet I get crappy service! What's up with that? I work in the automotive industry so I see plenty of manufacturing jobs moving to our amigos in Mexico and our (whatever the Chinese word is for "friends") in China. This is done usually because the labor is cheaper and, if those folks can make the same widget with the same quality, then more power to the capitalists who want to reduce their costs. If the punk at Dick's was smart (of course, by definition, he isn't) he would strive to be the best darn flunkie he could be or we might ship his service sector job over to India like Microsoft has done.

Please stop before you try to explain global economics to me. I don't care about the globe. I'm mostly interested in me. Please improve your math skills. Please improve your knowledge of the company for which you work. Please program your software so that it does what it's supposed to do. And, for the love of Pete, quit sucking the time out of my watch!

Dig: America's Funniest Videos

2005-12-08T07:30:00.000-05:00

What a concept: Put out the word out to the American public that you want to make an entire TV show out of their home videos. Genius! Everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame, right? Even better if I'm the producer of my own little film! After collecting countless hours of video from countless family gatherings, and stupid pet/human tricks, I'd be glad to send it straight to your living room so you can share in my glee! I'm sure you'll enjoy movies of my grandma's bridge tournament as much as I do!

So what does it take to produce such a great addition to American culture? As it turns out, not a whole lot. Get a B-List (C-List?) host, a set with lots of "video" related items (monitors, "film" on the wall, old TV sets), an audience of 100 nice folks visiting Hollywood on their summer vacation and a check for $10k and you're good to go. When Friends was on the air, each cast member was getting like a zillion dollars per episode or something like that and there were multiple sets, so each episode cost a good chunk of money to put together. How much can AFV cost? Including the $10,000 for the winner, the budget has to be about $10,005.78 per episode. And most of that comes from the extra garbage cans they had to buy to throw away those big old bulky VHS tapes! The version of the show with Daisy Fuentes might cost slightly more for her outfits but I would argue that getting Daisy into a slinky little number to introduce the next video of Uncle Bob splitting his pants while bowling is worth it.

So while we're comparing this stroke of genius to Friends, I gotta tell you that I laugh out loud a lot more at a little kid hitting his mom in the head with a stick when he misses the birthday pinata than when Joey makes yet another inane comment about his next audition. I've heard actors and writers say that a comedy is much harder to produce than a drama. And certainly, a lot of it depends on the delivery. If you tried to write a script for the little kid to hit the candy-filled donkey twice and on the third time whack his mom in the head, it just wouldn't work. But when Junior is swinging for the fences (or the Jolly Ranchers) and clocks mom in her melon, you can't fake the humor when mom drops like a ton of bricks and Skippy goes back to the pinata for the candy. You just can't write comedy like that! The only thing that Friends has over AFV is the babes - unless the now-unconscious mom happens to be a hottie but that's rarely the case.

Sorry to throw another list at you, but allow me to expand a little on some of my fave types of videos that are presented on the show:

Guy Getting Hit in the Nuts: You can't go wrong with this one, folks! And there are so many variations. You got your basic "dad teaching kid how to hit a baseball and the kid hits one back to dad right in the nuts", the ever-popular "dad wresting kid on the living room floor and kid kicks dad in the nuts" and of course, the "golf/billiards/softball game with ball somehow hitting guy in nuts". The reaction is always the same, though: guy drops everything that he is doing, grabs his nuts and drops to the ground. Every guy in the audience winces and does a sympathy nut-grab but they're all laughing because it ain't them that feels like their stomach is bing pulled out sideways. Now that's rich! If there was an All Guy-Getting-Hit-In-The-Nuts channel, I'd pay $9.95 a month for it! AFV is good at stringing together about 20 of these videos together and setting it to music, often Yakkity-Sax (you know, the theme to Benny Hill). Funny saxophone music and crotch shots? That's pure gold!

Cool Sporting Feats: These have quite a range to them. Anything from buzzer-beating half-court shot to a multiple-lateral kickoff return for a touchdown (a la Cal vs. Stanford) to a dragster bursting into flames as it races down the track. Those things are just sweet and the reason I dig them is because they don't happen all the time. Yet, for some reason, somebody had their nifty little Sony out and captured the whole thing on video for me to enjoy in the comfort of my living room. Ever see the clip of the homerun ball that hits a dude right on his head as he is riding by on his bike? What's up with that?! That's your basic bad luck, people - thanks for sharing!. How about all those nut-jobs doing crazy stunts on their motorcycles a million feet up in the air? That's messed up - yet so cool! Lastly, two more words for you: Joe Theisman. How many times have you seen that nasty clip of his leg getting bent the wrong way? It's so nasty and yet if it were to come on in the middle of whatever TV show you are glued to, you know damn well you'd watch it. Joe would totally have won the ten grand on AFV if he had submitted the tape.

Wedding Videos: I'm not talking about the videos where everything goes right. I'm talking about the ones where the groom passes out at the altar. Or the ones where the mother of the bride leans over to light a candle and her hair catches on fire. And who can resist the bridesmaid who gets all boozed up and gets all out of control on the dance floor and ends up wiping out with her light blue prom/bridesmaid dress over her head! This is quality entertainment at its finest! Sorry that you spent a million dollars at your wedding and the only thing that people remember from it is the divorcee' throwing elbows to catch the bouquet! Even better, it's all on video! On a recent episode of AFV, the bride forgot that she was wearing a microphone and leaned over to the poor sap who was marrying her and announced that she wasn't wearing underwear. Underwear itself is funny. Letting the world know on your wedding day that you're going commando is a riot!

Wipe-Outs of One Type or Another: Guy makes birthday cake. Guy lights all 68 candles on cake. Guy steps on cat. Guy falls face first into cake catching hair on fire. Kid puts out fire with with pitcher of Kool-Aid. How is that NOT funny! Give that man $10,000!

OK, so maybe it ain't Shakespeare. It probably ain't even Aaron Spelling (of Melrose Place fame). And I certainly won't comment on the hosts (except to further stress the hotness of Daisy Fuentes). But you want to make me laugh? Forget about Chandler Bing. Give me a fat guy (fat guys are always funny) doing bellyflops in his above-ground pool causing the sides to collapse flooding his kid's birthday party! Now THAT'S funny!

Don't Get: Fantasy Football

2005-11-22T10:21:00.000-05:00

I have a few friends who do the whole fantasy football thing. I don't. Mostly because I don't get what the attraction is. There are fantasy leagues out there for just about every sport, I'm sure. You could maybe talk to me about a fantasy hockey league for a few minutes and I could get a warm feeling in my heart for the Red Wings, but do NOT waste my time on a NASCAR fantasy league. Other than admiration for the marketing genius who somehow got NASCAR into the mainstream, I have no interest in NASCAR. Again, nice work on building an empire out of driving in circles, but don't let me interrupt your pork rinds and PBR.

Maybe you're like my friend Warren who is a huge sports fan. Doesn't matter what sport. You want to know Bill Buckner's lifetime batting average? Warren can hook you up. He even knows who came in second in a given sporting event. I had to type "super bowl 23" into Yahoo to find out who played, but Warren could tell you that San Francisco beat Cincinnati by scoring two touchdowns in the fourth quarter for the win. So he's a big sports fan. I got it. He's also about the world's nicest guy. He's the kind of guy who would jumpstart your car for you at 3 in the morning and even bring treats from home for you. Thanks, Warren!

But does being a big sports fan mean that you are automatically a big fantasy sports fan? One of my other friends (who is an idiot) says that this fantasy football business is just a big male bonding activity. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with football, he would say. At that point, I would say to him that he is an idiot (mostly because I just like calling him an idiot). He digs the coming together of a sport that he digs and the internet which he also digs. That's fine. If you dig two things and you dig it even more when those things come together, then I say be my guest. I guess I just don't dig something over which I don't have any control (the NFL) enough to worry about it. I do dig the internet but its usually related to stalking people and the penalties are getting pretty stiff for that kind of activity. Want to bond with me? Let's skip the football talk and get right down to drinking beer! Can't drink as much when you're blathering on about Tom Brady's completion percentage.

I'm sure my manhood will be challenged by those of you who enjoy fantasy football. Be my guest (again). And while you're at it, you can kiss my ass. I just need to know why it is fun to create your own football "team", compare how they do against other "teams", trade "players" for other "players" and then celebrate a "victory". Please note the quotation marks. I've placed them there to emphasize that these are not real players, teams or victories. It's pretend, people! Just like my son pretends he's Zorro. Or Darth Vader. Darth Vader is cool and all, but until Junior gets his own light saber and can demonstrate his use of the Force, I'm not falling for it.

If you're really into football, maybe you should PLAY football, not just fantasize about it. If you tell me that the reason you are into fantasy/pretend football is because you are old like me, that's fine. I'm down with that. Your body can't take the punishment that comes along with a chop block or an open field tackle? Then maybe fantasy football IS for you. I'm just not sure where to draw the line. Why football? Work can sometimes dish out some mental punishment. Why not have a fantasy work league where you write a fantasy resume, accept a fantasy job and cash a fantasy paycheck? Might be a little tricky to pay the bills with those fantasy dollars but it's a good way to avoid doing actual work.

Or if you're like Warren and just generally a big sports fan, why not collect baseball cards? Maybe you will stumble onto a Honus Wagner rookie card and sell it for a boatload of money. I suppose you can gamble with fantasy sports to make a few bucks, but there's always the chance that you will have to resort to volunteering for medical experiments if you pick a bad "team".

Maybe I need to find something to be that passionate about. I'm pretty passionate about sitting on my ass. I also dig watching TV - while sitting on my ass. Are there fantasy Watching-TV-While-Sitting-On-My-Ass leagues?

Could it be that I am in the wrong here? Could be. And monkeys might fly out of my butt. I just don't get it. Looking forward to your comments.

Dig: Taking the Day Off

2005-11-17T08:30:00.000-05:00

So my wife is a teacher. For most of the day yesterday and a good part of last night, it snowed and blowed ("blew" doesn't rhyme) so she was rewarded with a phone call at about 5:30 this morning with her two favorite words: Snow Day. For those of you folks in Arizona or Africa or someplace who aren't typically eligible to receive a ticket in the Snow Day lottery, a Snow Day happens when the superintendant of the school system determines that the roads are too dangerous for buses to be out and about and therefore the future of our country gets the day off from learning. My wife would tell you that if you see "blowing and drifting" in the forecast, you're golden. Well, there wasn't much snow to drift, but it sure was blowing so the roads got pretty slippy, as my grandma used to say. It was really crappy driving home from work yesterday so I was pulling for her to get the day off. Mind you, she's stuck with our three brats all day but she can put them into SpongeBob-induced comas if necessary. So that brings me to something that I dig - a day off.

I've never been to prison or held hostage in a 7-11 robbery gone bad, but I am a middle-management corporate suck-ass father of three and husband of one who seems to get more work thrown at me with not enough time/people to do it. So the freedom that comes at the end of the day prior to taking the day off is the kind of freedom that I'm sure Martin Luther King was talking about. Assuming you aren't taking the day off to get a root canal or an audit from the IRS or a visit to the proctologist, you can petty much just take that big old weight that you carry around on your shoulders, hand it to the poor sap who has to be a contributing member of society while you turn into a slacker for the day and just skip on out into the sunshine. Yes, the sun always shines on the day off. You could be living in Seattle, where it rains all the frickin' time or here in Michigan where it snows half the year but the clouds will part for a brief moment allowing the sun to shine through and the angels to sing. As soon as you go into day-off mode, life is good and you are untouchable.

Again, as long as you don't have anything to do relating to gloved fingers and Vaseline (unless you're into that sort of thing), you have the whole world in front of you. Want to stay up late watching stupid shows on cable? Go for it! Booze it up so much that you do a little drunk dialing during David Letterman? Be my guest, 'cause you don't have to work tomorrow! Just don't get so drunk that you forget to turn off your alarm, because if you get up at the same time on your day off that you do on days that you go to work, you need counseling. Days off are for sleeping in. I recognize that there are people out there who enjoy getting up early. But those people clearly have issues that we simply don't have time to discuss here. Sometimes I have grand plans to get up at 6, run a quick 10 miles by 7:30, re-shingle the roof by 10, feed the poor by noon and then spend the rest of the afternoon working on my doctoral thesis. However, this doesn't usually happen and I am content to spend my day off only getting so far as to use the oven instead of the microwave to cook dinner.

Having a day off is like finding a $20 in your pocket that you thought you lost the last time you went to the casino. That's free money, baby, and a day off is free time. Time that is normally given to someone else. If you're like me, you spend most of your life at someone else's mercy. Work, kids, wife, bills, and just generally The Man. Well, The Man won't get me down on my day off! You want something out of me on John Day? Tough luck, Junior, I'm not punched in today! Don't try to call an 11:00 meeting, because that's when I'll be playing Plinko with my friends on The Price is Right in hopes of getting to the Showcase Showdown! And I hope you don't expect me to go someplace that is offended by unshaven people in sweats and old baseball caps, because I don't get all dolled up on my day off. If you need me to do some research on the Great Wall of China, you might be in luck if there is something on the National Geographic channel. If not, you're S.O.L.

Appropriately enough, one of my fave movies is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. There is a scene when Ferris, Sloane and Cameron are at the Cubs game and Ferris says to Cameron something about normally being in Phys. Ed. at that time. They both give a little laugh like they have totally gotten away with something. Certainly, they HAD gotten away with skipping out of school, but even for us yahoos who have to have our vacation time approved by HR, there is still that feeling of "everybody else is at the salt mine being good little worker bees and here I am in my favorite sweatpants scratching myself while I watch reruns of those reality show whores on Road Rules vs. Real World." The ONLY natural response to that feeling is that cheshire-cat, smug little Ferris Bueller kind of chuckle to yourself. You've been making deposits into that bank of time all your life and now it's time for a little withdrawal. Hand over my time, little Banker-Man, I'm going to piss some of it away! And don't even think about judging me for "wasting" a day off by doing nothing. This time is mine. It's bad enough that I don't get to earn interest on it, but I'll do whatever I want it with it, thank you very little.

And that's the bottom line here. My time is valuable, people, and there's a lot of crap I want to get done. One of the things that I want to do is sit on my arse. Yep, I go to work and meetings and stuff. Yep, I do the dad and husband thing. Sorry, I haven't gotten around to my Ph. D. yet. All I'm saying is cut me some slack and allow me to enjoy that feeling of sweet freedom that Tim Robbins felt at the end of Shawshank Redemption. The rest of you schlubs keep making those little hash marks in your cells/cubes. If you need me, don't call, because John Day ranks right up there with fishing out the secret decoder ring from a box of FrankenBerry cereal.

Hate: Women's Purses

2005-11-10T09:36:00.000-05:00

Ladies, I apologize if you don't carry around a purse the size of Montana stuffed with lots of crap like my mom and wife do. Also, if you have just a couple of purses, then this post isn't for you. I haven't had a lot of experience with different women's purses so I'm basing my hate on a sample size of two. Because I like to make broad, sweeping generalizations, however, I'm going to include all females over the age of 16 in this discussion. If you feel like you are being wrongly accused, feel free to go watch a movie on Lifetime or watch Dr. Phil or admire your Longaburger basket collection while I vent.

Being the good husband that I am, I was cleaning out our front closet recently. In addition to the various hats, mittens, jackets, shoes and backpacks stuffed in there, I found TWELVE purses. One short of a baker's dozen! Innocently enough, I suggested to my wife that she had too many purses. She looked at me, blinked a couple of times and then walked away. Having a lot of purses must make you deaf because she obviously didn't hear me. Either that, or she finds nothing wrong with having that many purses and did everything but say "I find nothing wrong with having that many purses. Shut up. Go make yourself useful by taking out the garbage."

So we have the issue of just the sheer number of purses. We also have the issue of their size. Certainly, the size of the purse is related to the amount of crap that is stuffed into said purse. We'll address that next but I'm going to write to my congressman (if I knew who it was) suggesting a tax on any purse larger than twice the size of a man's wallet. I think I'm being generous here. There really is no reason for chicks to carry anything bigger than my leather tri-fold but I didn't want to appear insensitive. (Just between you and me, though, I AM insensitive but I don't want to APPEAR insensitive. Big difference.) Similar to the "sin" taxes on cars that get crappy gas mileage, I'm proposing that a purse that is deemed too large will carry a $100 tax that will be used to build more golf courses. Girls, if you would like to carry around a big-ass purse, that's fine. The consolation for me is that every time you do, I'll be that much closer to enjoying a little pasture pool with my buddies. It's a win-win! Some people might suggest that the money be used to fund something stupid like schools or roads or blind people or hurricane victims. I'm going to take a strong stance on this one, though. Just don't tell the blind people or the people living in squalor in Louisiana. Or is "living in squalor" and "Louisiana" redundant?

The thing that I hate most is the amount of useless crap that is found in a given purse. Archeological digs don't turn up as many ancient artificacts as what you might find in one of my mom's purses. Just last week, the FBI stopped by to look for Jimmy Hoffa in one of her purses! It's a bottomless pit, people! In addition to the paper money (all singles, in our case) is a forest of receipts. I can assure you these are receipts for stupid stuff. Nothing cool like ipods or plasma TV's. These are receipts for pillow shams, decorative figurines and groceries for the family. You know, dumb stuff. If I have a receipt in my wallet, it would be for beer or a new transmission for the car or something manly like that. After I drink the beer, there is no reason for the receipt so I dispose of it properly. My wife, however, has receipts from 1983 in her purse! She will have the receipt for the slippers she bought in 1994 but do you think she has the receipt for the crappy plastic kids toy that broke after the first day so we can take it back to the store to get our money back? If you said, "ain't no way", you are absolutely correct.

My wife's purse and my mom's purse both smell the same. Due to the large amount of gum wrappers, wadded up dollar bills and the leather from the purse itself, the smell that wafts out of the purse when it's opened up to buy another pair of shoes or man-bashing book is enough to bring any man to tears. Imagine the smell of a cow rubbed all over with dollar bills handled by coal miners, ditch diggers and outhouse cleaners then "freshened" with a million wrappers from Trident Cinnamon gum or Wrigley Big Red. Throw in the smell of lint and old lipstick for good measure and you have the makings for something that Sadaam would feel guilty about using against the Kurds. My wallet, despite resting on my right butt cheek all day long, smells better than the purse from hell!

While I'm in a pissy mood, let's talk about the idea of me carrying your purse for you. I know there are men out there who carry purses. I also know there are men out there who prefer Ken to Barbie, if you know what I mean. I honestly don't care which team you play for but please don't carry a purse. There is no good way for a man to carry a purse either his own or his wife's. What am I going to do, sling it over my shoulder? Carry it by the handle where it will inevitably clash with my shoes? I don't think so! The best way to do it is to tuck it under my arm and kind of carry it like a football. Obviously, the whole time that I am in possession of the "football", I will have to avoid eye contact with anyone. Every once in a while, I might get a knowing look from another poor sap of a husband but usually I'll just get stares from small children as they are whisked away, eyes shielded, by their concerned parents.

So there you have it. Ladies - it's time to man-up and start carrying a wallet in your back pocket. All you really need is your driver's license, $50 and a credit card (No, that does not mean you can rack up a huge balance on the credit card!) The rest of the crap that you carry can be strewn about your minivan for all I care.

There, I feel better now.

Hate: Overpriced Things

2005-11-07T09:51:00.000-05:00

Many of the things that I will be sharing with you in this whole blog thing will probably be painfully obvious. I'm guessing that this is one of them. Just like Beavis (or was it Butthead?) said: I don't like things that suck!

As I said in an earlier post, I am addicted to mocha latte's from Starbucks. I love them. If I could, I would marry a mocha latte'. I would buy it a ring, walk down the aisle with it and exchange vows with it. After a nice reception and dancing to the chicken dance, we would jet off to the Mediterranean for a week and then settle down for a nice little life. However, besides that I hate the frickin' chicken dance, I couldn't afford it. I've already resigned myself to the fact that my kids will be going to community college because I spend so much money on VentiNonfatNowhipMochaLatte's. Imagine how much I would spend if I was married to it! If those things weren't so damned overpriced, though, my kids could still attend a good college. Which brings me to today's silliness.

I work in the auto industry, the most screwed-up industry in the world. Understanding and reducing cost is a big part of my job and one of the things that I've learned is that cost and price don't have anything to do with each other. Boys and girls, how much do you think it costs to make that beloved mocha latte' of mine? Let's just make some big broad guesses, shall we? For the purposes of today's discussion, we'll leave out the cost of the herion. Milk = 25 cents, mocha goodness = 50 cents, cup = 10 cents, lid = 5 cents, java jacket = 5 cents. According to my cypherin' that adds up to a cool 95 cents. Ok, maybe I have to add in 25 cents to send to Mecca (that would be Starbuck's HQ) for various marketing and overhead crap. Now I'm up to $1.20. MSRP on this stuff is $3.55. That means that Mr. Starbuck is getting $2.35 in profit for every one they sell! Good God, people!! Perhaps the UAW wokers at Delphi should start making mocha latte's instead of poorly-designed, poorly-manufactured widgets for the overstuffed, backwards-thinking, fat-cats at GM! Imagine a whole factory churning out mocha latte's with 200% profit margin on every one. Mind you, Delphi would surely screw it up given enough time, but for a while that would be a sweet gig!

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of capitalism. This is true despite some graffiti that I saw in Ann Arbor way back when I was in school that said simply "capitalism, schmapitalism" that still makes me chuckle today. I also understand the whole concept of supply and demand but I'm not prepared to pull a Rosa Parks and boycott Starbuck's. She is a bigger man than I am in that regard and she's dead and a woman besides! If you can make a buck or two or three, my brother, you just go right ahead. I just don't like it when it's so obvious. If you're going to screw me, at least turn out the lights so I don't see you doing it!

What's worse than getting hosed by overpriced stuff is when the price of really overpriced stuff goes down so it's only overpriced instead of really overpriced. I have one word for you: gasoline. It's a great day when gas is ONLY $2.25, isn't it my fellow sheep?! Hey, everybody,I got a great deal on gas today - it was only $2.19! Huh?! What?! Exsqueeze me?! Since when is that a good deal? I'll tell you when - When you compare it to the hosejob we were getting when it was $2.99, that's when! Our European friends have no sympathy for us because they've been getting hosed for years. I'm sure Jean-Claude is having a laugh over his croissant at us Yankee dogs having to pay that much for a gallon of petrol. Bite me, Jean-Cleaude!

I actually went to http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/margins/ to understand the price breakdown of gasoline. According to this highly informational website, the two big components of gas PRICE are refining and crude oil. (Please see above where I mention that cost and price don't have anything to do with each other...) Makes sense. A couple months ago, those poor bastards in New Orleans had to dodge flying oil rigs which cut into the daily production of crude oil - I understand that. Apparently, though, the big oil companies are able to still eke out a little money at this game because both British Petroleum (BP) and Exxon Mobil (XOM) are back to trading at the same price as they were prior to the Hurricane-o-Rama. As a matter of fact, for the first month after Katrina hit, both stocks increased in value. If you're a stockholder, you'll be happy to know that both are trading about $20 higher than where they were 2 years ago. If you're just a schlub like me driving a bunch of miles to work every day, you might not care so much.

I'm convinced that the CEO's of the oil companies got together and created those hurricanes themselves. I can just picture them setting down their brandy snifters just long enough to wring their hands together as they discuss ways to create an "emergency" so they can drive up prices:
Oil CEO #1 (while wringing hands): I need more money. $1000000000000 isn't enough!
Oil CEO #2 (in full hand-wringing mode): I'm as rich as God! Too bad I can't control the weather like God does."
Oil CEO #1: That's it, by Jiminy! I'll have one of my minions create a few hurricanes!
Oil CEO #2: Great idea! Just don't let that punk George Bush screw it up! He'll have everyone out buying hybrids. That boy seems to have forgotten how he got his money to buy his presidency!
Oil CEO #1: Good point. I'll make sure that it hits New Orleans. Lots of Black people there and you know how George hates them!
Louis Farakhan: Yeah, and George blew up the levees too!

Believe me, I don't know what the "right" price is for that delicious mocha latte' that I drink or for the gasoline that my car drinks. There are some things that are priced correctly, I think. I just can't think of any right now. Maybe something that falls off the back of the truck or that your friend gets for you through his brother-in-law's cousin's girlfriend's step-father. I have a friend who hooks me up for seats to the Detroit Pistons games. I could give a rat's ass about the Pistons but when it says "Comp" where it usually says $37.50, I know the price is right! I have another friend who is a bartender at the Rosebud in Grand Haven. He usually throws a beer my way when I come in. Do I think that the tasty Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is worth $3.50 out of the tap when I can get a six-pack for $7 at the grocery store? No sirree, Bob. Do I think that it's worth free? Damn skippy!

Let's review: I hate overpriced stuff. I like capitalism. I hate getting hosed. I like taking advantage of my friends when they give me free stuff. If you own an oil refinery I'll be your bestest friend! In the meantime, I'm going to load up on a bunch of plastic bottles that cost 5 cents, print some labels that say "John's Water" for 2 cents, fill the bottles at my kitchen sink for a penny and sell it to Louis Farakhan for $1.25 a bottle. If he buys a gross of them, I'll knock it down to a buck apiece. Due to this dramatic loss of revenue, I'd have to skip the week in Aspen this year but I'm willing to cut old Louis a deal because I'm just a hell of a guy!

Dig: T-shirts With Sayings On Them

2005-11-02T11:32:00.000-05:00

Love t-shirts. I'm a t-shirt kind of guy. As much as I am a middle management suck-ass and wear plenty of "dressy" shirts to work, I am Mr. T-Shirt Man on the weekends. In addition to being a suck-ass, perhaps you've noticed that I'm also a smart-ass. And since I am wasting your time writing about not becoming a dentist (even though my "friend" Mark thought it was too wordy), I also dig manipulating the English language. Thus, I am a big fan of funny, sarcastic, t-shirts with well-written messages on them. I'll provide a few examples for clarification:

I'm With Stupid. A classic. Short and to the point. Of course, without the arrow pointing to the sorry sap who happens to be next to you, the whole point is lost. Hilarity ensues when two people are walking down the sidewalk, one of whom has the t-shirt on pointing to his hapless sidekick! Back in the day, this probably wouldn't be on my list of faves, but now it harkens back to a simpler time when only girls had pierced ears. Next time I see Mark, I'm going to make sure I'm wearing this shirt and stand next to him all day long.

Frankie Say Relax. Not so much. I love the '80's. In fact, I love the VH1 show "I Love the '80's". Loved the song even after I understood all the homosexual references. However, the neon, oversized t-shirt hasn't made the translation well. Maybe in another ten years, this will be a classic just like the I'm With Stupid shirt but, for now, it's best used for wiping out the cupboards one last time prior to moving out of your basement apartment.

Anything Really Old With The Date On It Telling The Reader How Old It Is. I have two examples for you. The first is my own t-shirt celebrating U-Michigan winning the basketball national championship. Anyone remember that? That was prior to Chris Weber and all of his shenanigans. 1989. Yep, 16 years ago. I was in my fourth (not to be confused with "senior") year at Michigan and have fond memories of the riot that took place after Rumeal Robinson made the winning free throws. Still have the shirt. Don't wear it anymore but I still have it, doggone it. I'll break it out for the right occasion though. Like when Michigan wins another basketball championship. Or when monkeys fly out of my butt. My second example is also sports related. I once saw a guy wearing a Cleveland Browns t-shirt celebrating a divisional championship in 1981. This is significant because the year was 1996. This die-hard Browns fan was wearing a 15-year-old t-shirt. Nice! That's dedication, people. A shirt that age just screams "Even though the Browns suck now and are leaving Cleveland under the dark of night to move to Baltimore, I'm going to hold on to the glory years of 1981 and, for that matter, I'm going to compare everything in my life to how good it was 15 years ago when all the cars had V-8's and you could work on them yourself before we got all these damn rice burners on the road!" Yes, I realize that it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue to scream a sentence that long, but you get my point.

The Such-and Such 5k/10k/Marathon, etc. T-Shirt. I mention this category of t-shirt because I have about 15 of these myself. These shirts are "given away" to anyone running in one of these events. Since they are supposedly freebies, the price is definitely right because they are pretty nerdy. Each one has a logo showing some guy running and a list of the various causes or sponsors. They may have a different picture and different sponsors, but they all fall under the heading of "ran the race, got the t-shirt". I'm working my way up to a marathon so maybe that one will have some sentimental meaning to me, but otherwise these are worth as much as you paid for them. If I wear my "Susan Komen Breast Cancer Awareness 5k, Grand Rapids, Michigan" t-shirt with my gay-ass Timex Ironman digital watch and my running shoes and shorty socks, I look like a real dork. Some people might say I'm a dork no matter what I wear, but I just tell them to shut up.

Pseudo Gas Station/Surf Shop/Bar T-shirts. Don't waste my time with fakes. American Eagle Outfitters has a bunch of these and so does Old Navy. A t-shirt from Bud's Amoco in Wichita is sweet but only if Bud has one himself so you can look like Bud. And who doesn't want to blend in with gas station attendants?! In Grand Haven, we have a bar called the Tip-A-Few Tavern. If you're looking for a fight, that would be the place to go. They make really strong drinks and the air is so thick with smoke, you chew it more than breathe it. Great place. Their t-shirts say something about having really good burritos, which is true - their burritos kick ass. That makes their t-shirts cool. However, if the marketing department at Old Navy printed the very same t-shirt, it would suck. Part of having a cool t-shirt is visiting the place so you can tell people about it when they ask you if the burritos are any good. Same thing goes for the Bad-Ass Coffee Shop in Destin, Florida. Yes, they have cool t-shirts by virtue of their name. And I can vouch for their mocha latte's too.

Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts. This is a toughie. The Hard Rock has gotten pretty corporate and has kind of sold out to The Man. Anymore, one HRC isn't much different than another. All of them have impossibly small purple jumpsuits from Prince, bustiers from Madonna and guitars from Ratt (speaking of the 80's). I think that the farther away from the actual Cafe, the cooler the t-shirt is. I have two HRC t-shirts right now - one from London and one from Stockholm, so those might be a little cooler than one from Chicago or Detroit (please see a map of the US to confirm that I live closer to Chicago and Detroit than London or Stockholm). Maybe I'll work out a little deal with the other white-bread people in the suburbs of Stockholm.... For what it's worth, I also have a t-shirt from the now-defunct All-Star Cafe. Myrtle Beach. Got it in 1998.

Concert T-shirts. Another classic. Cheesy, yet classic. Again, I've had my share of these over the years, but the only one I own right now is from a Jimmy Buffett concert outside of Chicago. I saw Jimmy at Wrigley Field this summer and thought about buying a shirt. Cooler heads prevailed, though. Similar to the 5k genre, the only thing that changes on these t-shirts is the artist and the list of dates and venues. Oh, and the price. Better stop off and apply for a loan on the way to the concert so you can buy a t-shirt because these things are way overpriced. Generally, I'm going to say that concert t-'s are out unless you have one from when The Ramones played CBGB in 1972 or something. That would be sweet.

Obscure Things/Sayings That Are Just Out There T-shirts. Perhaps my favorite t-shirt is a mustard yellow shirt that shows how to open a Presta bike tube valve. On the back of the t-shirt is a regular (Schraeder) valve next to a Presta valve with an arrow pointing to the Presta with the word "unscrew" next to it. I'm sure you're saying "Huh?" right about now. You might also be saying "Who would want a t-shirt with stupid stuff on it?" Further, you might say "That dude is a nut job!". My point exactly! An instant favorite! That's why the Old Navy fakes suck - they don't mean anything to the wearer. It's just Mr. Old Navy being a poser.

Got a favorite t-shirt? Let me know.

Don't Get: Wanting to be a Dentist

2005-10-29T11:59:00.000-05:00

Yes, I get why we need to have dentists. No, I don't get why anyone in their right mind would want to be a dentist! Why would you ever want to fish around in someone else's mouth scraping away tartar and using words like absess, bicuspid, plaque, gingivitis, and molar? OK, "molar" isn't so bad, but the only dental-related word that even has the slightest positive connotation to it is "oral"!

So, let's review the possible reasons why you would want to be a dentist:

Money. This is the first thing that came to my mind. All doctors are rich, right? And dentists are a kind of doctor, right? Well, if you think that an annual salary of $116k makes you rich, then you just go right ahead and deal with bleeding gums all the way to the bank, my friend. (I got that number from salary.com - a painfully simple name for a website that deals with salaries.) Suppose you see 10 orally-hygeine-challenged people a day. Five days a week. Forty-eight weeks a year (because just like "real" doctors, it seems like dentists are always on vacation). That would be 2400 nasty mouths that you have to look into each year! Good God, that's only $48 per pie-hole! Even if I'm off by 100%, that's still less than a C-note to be getting up to your elbows in someone's face! You ain't going to be knocking Bill Gates off his perch that way.

You dig Fixing Teeth. Dude, if you get off on this stuff, I don't want you near my choppers because obviously you are not right in the head! There is no way in the world that anyone can enjoy this job. Maybe someone is holding your family hostage and the only way they will live to see their next Christmas (or Hannkah, if you prefer) is if you go to dental school for a bunch of years, open up your own practice, build a regular clientele, attend the laugh-a-minute dentist conventions and proceed to work on people's mouths. Only after buying your first boat with money generated from root canals will your family be returned to you. That is the only reason why you might actually like wielding those instruments of death. If you say you enjoy it because you want to help people return their choppers to good working order, you're just a lying sack of shit.

Addicted to Heroin-Laced Mocha Lattes. Possible, but might be a stretch.

Chicks. There have been a few cases where dentists have been, how you say, "inappropriate" with their female patients. Probably a few male patients too - especially from the guys who couldn't quite make it as Catholic priests. I can just picture those first heady days of dental school:

Dentist Wannabe #1: "I can't wait to be a dentist so I can get lots of chicks!"
Dentist Wannabe #2: "Really? Dentists get lots of chicks?"
DW #1: "Sure, my brother! Get the babes horizontal in these sweet chairs with a little laughing gas and you're good to go!"
DW #2: "Uh, isn't that kind of illegal?"
DW #1: "Illegal, schmillegal! Bring on the sedated chicks with dental issues!"

This theory is flawed in that, just like hookers, you can only be so selective in who you choose as customers. You can wait for Pam Anderson to bring her dental business to your little practice but it gets hard to make the payments on your nifty dental chair without working on a few people who look like the female Phys Ed. teacher in Porky's. Sure, you can always use the laughing gas angle, but the authorities kind of frown on that.

As you can plainly see, there is no logical reason to become a dentist. Next time you are in The Chair (note the capital letters), ask old Dr. Dentures why he got into the field. I'll bet you dimes to doughnuts that there was some sort of head trauma involved. At the same time, remember that Dustin Hoffman wasn't being tortured by a podiatrist in Marathon Man. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Dig: Venti Non-Fat, No-Whip Mocha Latte from Starbuck's

2005-10-27T08:59:00.000-05:00

Sweet baby Jesus, that stuff is wicked good! I never used to drink coffee - and I still don't consider myself a coffee drinker. What I am is completely addicted to the friggin' VentiNon-FatNoWhipMocha (you have to say it like that - kind of like JudgeLanceIto back in the days of the OJ murder trial). Don't ask me if I want coffee because I don't drink coffee - I drink VentiNonfatNowhipMocha. I don't even know the ingredients of this thing except that there has to be herion in it so that anyone who comes within 10 feet of it gets addicted to it. Damn those people at Starbuck's for making such chocolately goodness!

Yes, I realize that there are approximately 12.8 coffee joints per capita in the US and I have punch cards from the 12.8 assigned to me to prove it. However, Starbuck's - ubiquitous, corporate Starbucks - is the monkey I choose to have on my back. Every morning, my monkey and I get in the car and drive to one of FOUR Starbuck's on my way to work. (Yes, I always put the seat belt on the monkey - I'm addicted, not irresponsible!!) Sometimes I go through the drive-thru where Sarah gives me my daily fix. Other times, I go into the grocery store to see my other source. Mr. Mocha (the monkey) hops on my back wearing his little Starbuck's hat and t-shirt and off we go to get our VentiNonfatNowhipMocha.

I do have one decision to make every day regarding my morning mocha: to save a few minutes by going through the drive-thru and NOT receive a punch or take the extra couple of minutes and go in the grocery store to take another step closer to a freebie by receiving that coveted star-shaped punch in my card. Let's just say that no one at work has said anything about being three or four minutes late most days....

I am more than happy to part with my $3.76 every day to feed my habit - except when my punch card is full. What a happy day that is! Free herion?! Yes, sir! Sign me up! Not only am I an addict, I'm a cheap addict and when I can get my "shit" for free, it ranks right up there with the birth of my kids as the happiest moments of my life.

Do NOT come between me and my VentiNonfatNowhipMocha! Picture a mama bear and her cubs. Now picture a hunter-guy wearing flannel camo coming between the two. Now picture lots of blood and guts with pieces of flannel camo mixed into it. Same thing with me, except I'm not all hairy like a bear.

For the love of God, people, if you don't want your life to go into a downward spiral, stay away from this devil-juice! Besides, that leaves more for me....

Starting with something I hate sets such a tone....

2005-10-25T07:03:00.000-05:00

.... and yet, I find myself hating more things than I dig/don't get. So, let's begin, shall we?

Today's hate is brought to you by the people who like to stop and chat in the middle of the aisle in the grocery store, mall, etc. Hate that. Meijer's (my local grocery store) is not the place to hang out and chat with your little friends. You go in, get your damn cart, load up your damn food and you get out, dammit. You need to stay out of my way while I am doing same! Keep to the right except to pass and sure as hell don't stand in the middle of the aisle talking about Junior's upcoming birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's or anything else unless it can somehow benefit me.

Sunday after church is a big time for this.
"Hey look, honey, it's the VanSomethingorothers."
"We haven't seen them since our fondue party in 1979"
"Let's discuss what our families have been doing since then."
"Great idea. I have the Powerpoint slides right here in my purse."
"Super! This display of 2-ply toilet paper will make a great backdrop to show our kids' resume's"
Meanwhile, I have to use that last little piece of TP that is actually glued to the roll to take care of my needs because these dolts WON'T GET OUT OF MY WAY!!!!

I don't mean to stray too far into the Things I Don't Get category, but I don't get the whole idea of standing in the middle of the aisle completely oblivious to being in other people's way. Hello?! Don't you see us giving you dirty looks? "Accidentally" running our carts up the back of your ankle? Giving you a little hip check as we pass by? This little act falls under a broader heading of hate that I like to call "Being Inconsiderate of Me" (the rest of you are on your own) and bugs the tar out of me.

And that's really where I'm coming from here, folks. I don't really enjoy being at Meijer's. It's a pain. Don't make it more painful for me by prolonging my shopping experience. Mind you, if there were girls in bikinis standing next to you in the aisle handing out chocolate chip cookies and CD's of my favorite bands, I might actually find great pleasure in waiting for you to get out of my way. However, Meijer's has to keep their overhead low so the only girls they could afford to hire to dole out treats are girls that I wouldn't really want to receive treats from (sorry about that preposition at the end there)!

You being in my way benefits me not. You being in my way discussing a hot stock tip or how you accidentally left $10,000 behind the third oak tree from the left benefits me much. So that's the only way I'll cut you any slack on this issue. You want to make me push my stupid cart around you while I debate over Cap'n Crunch and Lucky Charms? You'd better make it worth my while by helping a brother out in some way. Otherwise, get thee out of the aisle!

And now I'm all pissed off!!!