The Postman Always Rings… Oddly.

I received a parcel in the mail today at work:

I wasn’t expecting anything in the mail. For a brief moment I thought it might contain a bomb or perhaps Anthrax or something equally as dramatic and sexy. But no… I turned it over:

And discovered, after pulling the contents out, that what I had was exactly the opposite of something that I’d want:

It’s a PROMOTIONAL MAILER for the Blackberry PlayBook! But it’s not just a piece of paper, oh no! It’s a silicone bumper!

So now I have a promotional mailer I didn’t want, for a product I really could care less about, but now I have a bumper for it! So, I’m thinking I could sell it on eBay maybe or throw it out. What an incredible waste of resources this is. This doesn’t sell a device. Now I hate the Blackberry PlayBook and I despise anyone who sells it. Before I was ambivalent, now they’ve earned my ire. This is now how to market a new device! This is wasteful bullshit.

Herculean

As I stood in the bathroom, toweling off from my shower I saw a comic that Scott left for me. Herc #1. I read the byline “Savage First Issue” and instantly I thought of a scene that could have been in the Kentucky Fried Movie:

“Their Savage lovemaking was of Barbaric proportions!”

And then I stood there brushing my teeth and giggling with the idea of Herc and some unknown assailant on the cover dropping their weapons and falling into a passionate embrace. I kept on hearing “Savage Lovemaking” and “Barbaric Proportions” in my head. My giggles turned to little “bar bar” noises and I had to sit down on the edge of the tub so as to not fall over.

I entertain myself. I am odd. Where does this crap come from? Best ask the Dalai Dolly dolly! ๐Ÿ™‚

Most Blasphemy Ever

While I was helping a coworker move some really heavy boxes of paper product around the office I had a very very blasphemous thought run through my head. Imagine, if you will, our big red hand-truck, also called a dolly. Now, tape a giant brassiรจre to it and then put it in saffron-colored robes with a pointy yellow hat.

It’s a Dolly Dalai dolly.

Yes yes yes I know, a particular hatchway to hell just popped open for me. I am a bad bad man. ๐Ÿ™‚ Oh but the giggles from that image will hang around me for DAYS.

St. Patricks Day

It’s good to be Irish today. The button nose, the freckles, the ungainly elbows and kneecaps all add up to feeling very special on a day like this one. Of course, we are a proud nationality. Proud of being rough, loud, drunk, and violent. Every other group out there still despises us and the Chinese just shrug. Everyone should keep in mind that when you make Corned Beef and Cabbage don’t thank the Irish, thank the Jews. They were the ones that took pity on us and our Pamphlet of Irish Cuisine and taught us how to feed ourselves on this day. Remember, the Irish only understand one kind of meat, that is, dark and tough, and only one method of cooking, which is boiling until everything tastes like tough tap water. The fact that we immigrated at all, that we built canals and railroads is less a testament to our cultures nutrition and more to our stubbornness in not dying easily.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Oh, and P.S. The snakes were the druids and pagans, so in a way the Church did to them what we did to the Native Americans. Glory days, all. ๐Ÿ™‚

Fussy French Food

Here’s something that I’ve noticed. When trying to explore French cuisine I’ve discovered something very important. No ingredient in France has anything to do with any ingredient in the New World. A leek in France is a tiny little wimpy thing, a leek in the New World can be used to defend your home. A chicken breast in France is exactly 1/4 inch thick, while a chicken breast in the New World is 4 inches thick.

What do we see here? Everything in the New World is bigger. Terragon can be attached to an axle and made into a house-sized fan. In France finding a chicken that is 2 pounds in total weight isn’t a problem, “mais oui!” but in the New World a two pound chicken was probably trampled by a baby New World chicken. The New World chickens start at 6 pounds.

A part of me wants to invite these French chefs to come to the New World, drop them in Meijers with their very own recipe books and watch them weep, then claw at their faces regretting the day they were born for putting pen to paper and insisting that a two pound chicken is a possibility. Chickens do not come in two pound sizes. They emerge from the egg, they rocket to 5 pounds in about 10 minutes and then if they are caught a little later after they hit 6 pounds, like the little bastard we have in the pot currently, we’re very lucky!

So, this cooking French thing is more a test of our instant-read thermometer than paying any attention to the actual recipe. If I can find a whole year to do nothing I can dwell in my kitchen and convert all these fussy french oddities into real New World foods. I don’t have a year, I have some rather silly French cookbooks, but above all else I have an entire rack of wine with which to cope with all this fussy French silliness.

Don’t get me started on their cows… That’s why they fear pickpockets so much. Cow theft. Really. Moo? Screw that. Mee.

 

Impressive Balls

There is a company, whom I shall not name to protect the guilty, which just delivered unto us an invoice for a surprising sum for work not requested. It’s not really anywhere near my level of the Dark Ivory Tower where I have to contend with something like this, however, if this was a vendor I had to deal with, I would be in their office and my armor-tipped vendor-poking-finger would be in full effect.

This is ballsy. This is impressively ballsy. We’re talking gold-plated, titanium-ringed, plutonium-filled balls here. The amounts are all obnoxiously large and round, just like the balls, and the “work” done is more of a ripoff than anything really creatively done. If I were on a higher level of the Dark Ivory Tower I would investigate suing them for plagiarism, theft, and criminal obnoxiousness.

If this was my money I’d be up to their home office like a shot, letting all the air out of their tires and egging their houses, then covering their palatial estates (balls that big, estates for sure) with as much cheap flimsy toilet paper as I could get my hands on. This level of chain-yanking bull-shiat (higher class bullshit) demands nothing less.

The absolute audacity of this place is utterly shocking. But then again, they are marketing whores. Gaping holes on ’em so big if you yelled at them you’d hear an echo.

Stunning. Bullshit. Stunning Bullshit. Wow.

Irresistible

There are some things that I have to actively suppress when it comes to my life, my health, or my continued jail-free existence. I don’t know what it is, but there are some things that fill me with this unusual and unnamable compulsion to explore and fiddle with.

First is this:
Fire Alarm

I don’t know what it is about these. The color, what it means, or the fact that it sets off every alarm in a building. I’ve yet to succumb to pulling one of these for the sheer thrill of it. And I am fully aware of how much of a giant asshole I would be if I pulled it without a fire. I almost always have to put my hands in my pockets to avoid the temptation.

Next:
Power

Yes, this is an automobile power socket, sometimes called an accessory socket or a cigarette lighter socket. For years I’ve had this very odd urge to jam my finger into this socket. I know that a cars 12 volt, 15 amp electrical system is certain death but there is a very small piece of me that wants to just do it. What’s really agonizing is that I have two of these facing me every day in my Hyundai Santa Fรฉ. Over the years I’ve found that if I close one of the accessory sockets with its cap and stuff the other one with an actual accessory plug that this itchy-finger problem simply disappears. Just to head it off at the pass, I would NEVER do any of these things, this is all about the odd thoughts that pop into my head, not the things I actually act on. So put down the crazy-pants spastic reaction bucket and back away.

Next:
6 plus R

This one is purely violent and malicious. I want to drive a car that I don’t care one iota for and push the engine right to the red-line and then throw it in reverse and pound down with every fiber of my being just to hear the transmission endure total annihilation. Related to this is a similar wish, and that requires the car again at red-line and then throwing it into Park and listen to the guts of the machine tear itself apart.

The only problem with this, is that I’ve seen it done on Mythbusters. Turns out modern cars have safety equipment and protocols in place to prevent this very strange procedure from actually working. Throwing a car into reverse at full speed does nothing but put the transmission in neutral, same for Park. Curses!

Next:

This one is a classic. I wish to utterly destroy using a sledgehammer this object. Anyone in IT will instantly recognize this damned machine for what it is. I want to dump it in a field, don safety gear and then proceed to destroy this object with an epic passion.

Thankfully here I don’t have to, the movie OfficeSpace did this for me. I will forever be indebted to their depiction of the violent destruction of this hated thing.

Last but not least:

This is a generalized urge. I see these in lots of places and have to squeeze my eyes closed very tightly and stuff my hands in my pockets. The delirious intoxication from wondering what would happen if you pounded this as hard as you could is dizzying. I’m sure many of these are connected to fire suppression or chemical exposure accidents and would do a serious number if ever I allowed my id to do what it wants, which is to POUND THIS SUCKER AS HARD AS I CAN, with a scream and giggles afterwards.

Again, television has already covered this, Ren and Stimpy did it.

Does anyone else have these secret little urges? Let us know in the comments. ๐Ÿ™‚

Ringtones & People – Update

It’s too funny to let the turkeys get me down. Here are the assignments so far:

  1. Scott – Katy Perry Firework
  2. Mom – Rhythym of My Heart
  3. Norm – Imagine
  4. Jeffery – Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Star”
  5. Dad – Imperial March
  6. Little Chris – Guster’s Center of Attention *inside joke*
  7. Sister – Fur Elise
  8. General Ringtone – Aflac’s Goat “nah, naah, naaaah”

 

Superbowl XLV

Anyone who knows me knows full well that my attitude to organized sports is careless at best and massively abusive at worst. I take a lot of my cues from my personal hero, George Carlin, especially for his points that good sportsmanship and competition isn’t where it’s at, it’s loss of property, loss of limb, and loss of life where the real drive is. Anyways, since I care not a whit for the players, their teams, or the entire endeavor really it came down to the commercials. After all, the game is just a sweaty grunty window-dressing for the real game – that is, drawing the millions of people who watch to the advertisers. The ad men spend millions to put their very best spots on TV. So after a while, the game becomes a foolish excuse and people look for whats in-between, they look for the ads.

What did Superbowl XLV Ads have in common? Ultra-violence. We’re talking Clockwork Orange level of abuse and mistreatment. The Pepsi Ad where a woman throws a full can of soda at ANOTHER PERSONS HEAD, the Doritos Ad where one man licks the fingers of another, then tears the pants off yet another and fetishistically goes Japanese-businessman on them, all the way out to the extremis, which would be Bridgestone’s ad where a cube-drone attempts to head a Reply-All Email off at the pass by hurting a great number of people, Wow.

After watching the ads I was filled with a kind of cheerful violence, if I had watched ‘Taken’ right afterwards I would have likely been trembling with the urge to pull people’s heads off and scream at the corpses.

So, what do we learn from Superbowl XLV? That when we are at the market buying Pepsi we should have helmets. When we are buying Doritos we should have gloves and secure pants and a rape-whistle, and when dealing with Bridgestone perhaps a taser, a handgun, or an aluminum baseball bat. The central theme is “buy our products and something horrible will happen to you at random”. So… avoid Pepsi, Doritos, and Bridgestone.

Save yourselves. ๐Ÿ™‚

Making Commercials

Almost every night we sit down and watch The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Right at the start I have to take time out to comment that The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson is some of the best television being made. We look forward to watching it every night. Beyond the program we have started to see a very beloved advertising campaign, the one for Aflac. It’s very strange to even think of affection and advertising in the same sentence, but this particular company has keyed in on what has to be the most subtly funny animal-based advertising campaign. Here it is.

We have been laughing so hard at this that it has not only become a catch-phrase for us, but we always stop the DVR and play this companies advertisements each time they come on. This is how commercials should be made.