Where's the Ka-boom?

Fun with telemarketers

2007-01-23T12:43:00.000-05:00

Wish I'd thought of this.

(Not entirely safe for work.)

Wheezing Fred is having a baby!

2007-01-15T11:33:00.000-05:00

Well, to be precise, Mrs. Fred is having the baby, and while Fred did some of the preliminary work, it is rather unfair of him to claim all the credit when the difficult 99.99% of the manufactury process is left for his wife.

This is not to say that that men couldn’t make a baby, especially if we were allowed to use Bondo, power tools, duct tape and plenty of beer was involved. But let’s face it, we’d probably end up with some freakish looking monstrosity and we get enough of those when politicians breed (N.b. Dear reader, Should you happen to be a Massachusetts Senator please don’t sue me, you can blame this one on heavy metals in the Cape Cod water supply.)

No matter. “Congrats!” I say enthusiastically as this is a perfect excuse to drink his whiskey. I am free this weekend as Gretchen and the louts are at Cape Kennedy, where no doubt the louts are attempting to steal solid fuel boosters for the car that they foolishly think I will let them buy ~~when they are~~ in the increasingly unlikely event that they live to be 16 years old.

Fred had a far better idea. We should go to work and drink the boss’ whiskey.

An hour or so later we sat in basking in the happy glow that can only be achieved with top-notch booze that has been paid for by someone else. My feet up on the boss’s desk, I batted lazily at his chaos machine while Fred examined his Crooke’s radiometer.

“I’ve often wondered,” Fred speculated, “whether one could get the vanes of such a light mill to spin in a microwave oven.”

“Well it’s a thermal effect, isn’t it?” I replied. “A microwave photon shouldn’t care about the presence of the black paint. The painted vane would react in the same fashion as the unpainted. No spin.”

“Well, that would be true for a monopole type point-source, but as you know, the emission in a microwave is directional. If we are careful about placing radiometer, it should respond not unlike a turbine.”

We made some crude calculations on the white board, but some questions simply must be resolved experimentally.

Now, it should be noted that Fred and I are both highly trained scientists. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!

Try this at work, where the ensuing damage can be blamed on the cleaning staff.

We first had to disable the turntable and when the microwaves were emitted, the vanes spun wildly. For a second or two.

Then they became incandescent. Really, really incandescent.

“Gah, I’m F-ing blind!” Fred wailed. “What should we do?”

“Well, it’s said that whiskey helps!” I suggested.

“That’s for snake bite!” Fred replied disdainfully.

He’s right you know. So I bit him and back we went to the whiskey.

Long story short, our vision eventually returned; if double for a period. We’re getting a new microwave at work and the cleaning staff are getting a stern talking-to. Gretchen and the louts returned with some suspicious looking long tubes that will cause Houston some problems if they don’t notice them missing before the next shuttle launch.

Damned good weekend, all told.

Well, then.

2006-12-28T12:59:00.000-05:00

No posts for two months. That should prove: 1). I am adhering to the plea agreement, and 2). The new firewall at work effectively blocks any Blogspot site.

Not that I feel there is anything wrong with this. A successful company really can’t have its employees spending half of the day porn surfing, now can it?

Anyway, I was told this by an indignant Über Manager from the Mother-ship (Corporate HQ). He went on to inform me that my computer had been used to access a porn site during business hours.

Well it had, but it was a simple mistake. You see, I was looking for Allied Electronics’ web site and accidentally transposed a couple of letters. Next thing I was at “Huge-Titties.com”. It could have happened to anyone.

“But you were there for four hours!” Sniffed the corporate Nabob.

“Well, yeah. I didn’t notice at first. First there was the unfortunate misspelling of ‘Circuit Broad’, which seemed to fixate the silly machine on electrical dominatricies. I thought the computer had a virus. Then I searched for ‘Industrial Transformer’ and was shown something no one should ever have to see. ‘Robots, well something in disguise’. Definitely not the sort of thing one would feel comfortable attaching wires to. It was then that I realized that I was at the wrong website.”

The return sniff was less assured. It was time to go on the offensive. “Besides, it’s not like I spent the entire week viewing ‘Mary-Kate and Ashley’ porn like Irish Bob!”

It’s true. They make me Bilious. For years they’ve been these sweet kids and the minute the turned street legal transformed themselves into tarted up ho-wannabes. For God’s sake they look like two Kowloon prostitutes* that have spent the afternoon mud wrestling on Tammy Faye Baker’s face. Not sexy at all, especially when your mental image of them is as little kids. Irish Bob should be arrested.

Now, don't get me wrong about Tammy Faye Baker. I’m not knocking her. She represents over 40% of the US strategic cosmetics reserve. If we are ever forced to go to war with France, she alone will insure that all those Goth kids are happily supplied with all the cosmetics they need.

Well, less unhappy then. Happy that they can express their crushing despondency through the medium of pancake base and eyeliner.

* I was once propositioned by two Kowloon prostitutes. I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so they both looked about twelve. “No way!” I said. “You’re both way too young. Now your older sister over there…”

“That’s Cheng, our Pimp. He’s not our sister!” They replied, laughing hysterically.

“Really?” I squinted at him. “My mistake. From a distance it looks like he’s got a nice pair of Allied Electronics, you know.”

They Booted My Car!

2006-10-19T12:59:00.000-04:00

Bastards!

This isn’t the same type of car boot that you ultraviolent Brits are so fond of stuffing dead bodies into, this is a car immobilizer. And just because I had a few dozen unpaid parking tickets!

Bastards! Arse-fiddling bum-monkeys! Vile Meter-Nazi Scum!

In retrospect, I guess those home-made diplomatic plates were not such a good idea. But $450 to get the damn boot off? That’s highway robbery!

After all, I can buy a plasma cutter for less.

Sadly, the manufacturers of the car immobilizer have thought of this too and I couldn’t very well go home with a $450 ticket and a brand new plasma cutter.

Hmmm. I took a good look at the car boot rod that went through the tyre. Turns out it wasn’t a rod that went through at all...just a hook that grabbed the inside of the rim. By prying the top plate back and holding it open with my big toe, I was just able to get the cutting torch inside the car. I could cut off the lug bolts! I’ld pop the booted wheel off, borrow one lug bolt from each other wheel, pop on the spare, then drive off, leaving the booted wheel for the perplexed and none-too-bright Meter-Nazi.

Egad, I’m brilliant!

Now, you’ld think that the sight of a fat man alternately cackling and cursing (when the sparks burned my toe) whilst cutting off a car boot with a plasma torch would garner some attention, and normally you’ld be right. But this is central Pennsyltucky and we are used to such sights.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I completed the rest of the tasks and hopped into the car only to find to my horror that the Meter-Nazis had disabled the ignition!

And changed the colour of my upholstery!

And left a bunch of tacky beanie babies in the rear window!

Erm, that’s right, I drove the truck today.

Sorry, Judith Wheaton, whomever you are.

Support the Venetian Blind

2006-10-18T15:58:00.000-04:00

It all started with me sleeping on the couch for some trifling domestic infraction like making disparaging comments about George Clooney’s masculinity or comparing Gretchen’s posterior with that of a Wildebeest.

Sleeping on the couch is really not such a bad thing since the couch is more comfortable than the bed, and it is in close proximity to both the TV and the beer-miester.

The down side is of course cat related. In the living room, one is regaled nightly with the sounds of furball manufactury, cat box depositions (it's in the basement but there is an open heating duct) and curio destruction. Occasionally a cat will go so far as to jump upon one's delicate bits without advance notice.

This time, I was awakened by the sound of a cat licking the Venetian blind. Cats seem to like the taste of plastic because, well, they’re idiots.

“Knock it off!” I yelled, to no avail.

I tried to push it off with my foot. It just moved out of reach.

Slcritch. Slcritch. Slcritch. Slcritch. Slcritch. Slcritch. I hate that damned sound.

I kicked out a few times with all the grumpy vigour of a severly constipated badger. I didn’t hit the damned cat, but he decided to leave.

Unfortunately, I did hit the Venetian blinds and ended up with my foot entangled.

Now, you lot may not realize this, but it’s almost impossible to get back to sleep with your foot tangled up in a Venetian blind three feet above your head. I tried reaching up to free my leg, but this is like actual exercise. I fell back supine, grunting with fatigue. Then I tried again.

“Clatter!” rang out the blinds as I hauled myself up. “Grunt!” as I gave in to fatigue. The cat, having sensed that I no longer posed a threat, returned to his ecstatic blinds-licking session.

“Clatter! Grunt! Slcritch! Slcritch! Slcritch! Knock it off!”

“Clatter! Grunt! Slcritch! Slcritch! Slcritch! Knock it off!”

“Clatter! Grunt! Slcritch! Slcritch! Slcritch! Knock it off!”

“Clatter! Grunt! Slcritch! Slcritch! Slcritch! Knock it off!”

Soon the lights were flicked on.

“The cat did it!” I exclaimed guiltily. Of course, by this time he was feigning innocence by delicately licking his rump.

“Feel the burn, Dad!” encouraged Lout the Elder, while Lout the Younger snapped pictures.

Gretchen shook her head. “You’re buying new blinds tomorrow!” was all she said.

Do you lot have any idea how much those things cost? I shall have to start a fake charity. “Give to the Venetian Blind!” I’ll tell my coworkers.

And they bloody well better, or I’m giving them all cats.

Babies

2006-10-13T12:46:00.000-04:00

They aren’t much to look at when they first pop out or the hatch; looking more like they’ve gone five rounds with a slime monster than anything you’ld feel comfortable showing your family. This is patently unfair considering how large slime monsters are and how little a new-born is. I said so at dinner last night.

“Hah!” I was told. “Little?!? 8 Lbs 12 oz and 9 Lbs 8 Oz? I’ld like to see you pop out something that size!”

Though certain (disturbing) responses did occur to me, I kept my mouth shut until she assured me that women would be perfectly happy should babies emerge the size of a mouse and spend the rest of the gestation period in a pouch.

Naturally, (in the interest of peace making) I offered to make two lout-sized pouches with which to secure them until such time as they matriculate from medical school or marry an heiress, whichever comes first. Then we can present them with a bill and retire to the Seychelles.

I can tell from the bruising that I must have said something wrong, but back to the subject at hand.

I admit to being fascinated with babies. Not only are they unlikely to borrow one's truck without asking, then leave it parked carelessly in a river, but they are nature’s perfect little garbage disposals. In fact, if one could permanently plumb the effluent end into one’s drains, one’s kitchen waste dilemmas would be permanently sorted.

There is a whole industry devoted to this. Food items that no self-respecting adult would eat (I know, I’ve tried) are pureed, coloured, place in tiny little jars and sold for about the non-narcotic portion of Bolivia’s GDP.

I spent yesterday afternoon shoveling this goop into Mandy, our overworked accountant’s one year old daughter.

“Do you want the purple goop, the orange or the green?” I asked.

“Agrubbel-shmurf!” She replied, chubby fingers grabbing at my beard.

“Right! All three it is then!” and spent the next half hour or so talking like an idiot and shoveling multicoloured goop into a happy maw.

It struck me as being very much like your average management meeting, really.

I’ld cleaned her up a bit just as the Boss-man came out of the conference room.

“Who’s this little beauty?” he said, picking her up and bouncing her.

“A goo-goo-goo!” He said, bouncing her up and down like a fizzy drink in a paint mixer. “Who’s a sweet baby? A goo-goo-goo!”

Now, I’m not normally a fan of Jackson Pollock and his ilk, but I have to admit; that girl’s got talent. Or maybe it was just her choice of an Armani suit as a canvas that appeals so.

I get a new laptop.

2006-10-10T14:16:00.000-04:00

My old one was sloooow. Way too slow to handle the modern high definition pornography that is so necessary in today’s business world. I’m talking about the sick, demented, ultra high-resolution "Eeeew, what kind of sore is that?" stuff that gains one an empty row in coach class flights. Low definition porn lacks the seat clearing punch with today’s morally decadent travelers.

I blame the Archbishop of Canterbury for this.

Be that as it may, our new corporate overlords have a laptop replacement policy that states that a laptop can not be replaced before it becomes archeologically significant. Being a European company, their ideas of this are different from ours. Replaceable items would include the Ten Commandments and Stonehenge; not my hippo with mononucleosis-like 3.2GHz P4.

My God, people; there are dual core machines out there these days!

“No!” Brunehilde the Gargoyle from I.T. has macht eine ordnung. No laptop for me…

“But it’s really old!” I whine in my best put-out lout voice. She is immune to loutish whining and does not budge.

“May I have some Elmer’s glue then?”

Since it does not come from the I.T. budget I may.

I dollop it liberally on the bottom of my laptop and let it dry.

“Boss, can I see you? It’s about my laptop…” He nods and I place it in his lap.

“As you can see, it’s very slow.” He does not seem receptive, so I plow on.

“And the fan is out of balance, making the thing vibrate madly!”

“Pish and tosh!” He responds.

“No really, on the trip back from Dresden, I joined the mile-high club all by myself. Check the bottom.”

At the sight of the dried glue, he flings the hippo away from him.

“You broke my laptop!” I shout indignantly.

So, I get a new laptop, but have to pay for the glue.

Fair enough, I suppose.

A disappointing weekend

2006-10-02T09:39:00.000-04:00

The last few days have been tough on the old Doc’s psyche. While slaving away at work, I read a post somewhere and a brilliant response was germinated deep within my brain, itching and squirming its way to the surface. Alas, someone mentioned going to the local and the thought left me, not to return until three in the following morning.

I pad to the computer giggling.

“What on Earth are you doing?” I am asked.

“I’ve just thought of a brilliant comment!” I answer. “You see, someone had posted a story about a Lancaster pilot that had jumped without a parachute from 20,000 feet and survived. He bounced off a tree, through a roof and landed on a bed only recently vacated by a nun. The writer concluded that it would have been ironic had he died of dysentery before liberation.”

You all know the look, gents. It is a steely, expressionless stare that just oozes menace.

“I am going to point out that it would have been more ironic had he died of dropsy!”

The look is adjusted to include a rapid blink. I am losing her.

“Um, you see, he fell without a parachute… and erm, ‘dropsy’?”

Nothing.

I return to bed, my bon mot lost to humanity. I could weep.

But tomorrow is a new day, and the rising sun shall herald a tailgate. I shall be surrounded by people that appreciate my genius and free booze.

Now, for you Brits out there, a tailgate is the ultimate opportunity for male one-upmanship. The grille, menu and beverage selection must be more impressive than the next male’s. This must be some sort of mating display left over from Australopithicine times, but it doesn't seem to work for modern humans. At least not for this one.

No matter. I have been trapped in a place where good Scotch and bacon are hard to come by. Yes, they do have other extremely tasty foods. Hummus, for example, is a quite lovely paste of olive oil and minerals that I am told are mined in the Dead Sea region. It’s grand, but after a few weeks, one misses one’s comfort foods. My menu shall revolve around bacon and 15 year old Dalwhinny.

I acquire the services of a graduate student (they are the only group that can legally be paid less than an illegal alien) and put him to work wrapping quail breasts and attaching a skewer. Then it’s off to meet Flash and his fiancé at the tailgate.

“What do you have?” I ask nonchalantly.

“Oh, a chateaubriand, and some passable clarets.” Flash responds blandly. “You?”

“I’ve got quail breasts!” I announce proudly.

“Well, then.” He replies, feigning professional interest while examining my chest. “Did you come by these genetically, or is this due to a procedure?”

I hate medical doctors.

“Well played, Sir.” I reply through clenched teeth and a very taut grin. I vow revenge, but neither the opportunity, nor adequate sobriety present themselves.

Clearing Customs

2006-09-28T16:45:00.000-04:00

Customs and Passport Control, Washington, Dulles. I shall strangle our travel agent. He has allowed exactly one hour to clear customs, dash across the airport and catch my flight. The next flight leaves five hours later; making it forty hours since my last shower, and already fellow travelers are already giving me wide berth.

“Where’ve you been?” asks the supremely bored passport wrangler.

“Asia.”

“What part of Asia?” He asks somewhat more attentively. “The scary, explosive part, or the less scary ‘Kung-fu’ bit? “

I admit the former and his eyes narrow. “What’s the first thing you are going to do in the States?” he asks.

“Get me some beer and a bacon cheeseburger.” I reply. He smiles. That is the correct answer. He stamps my passport. The cavity search has been averted and fifty minutes remain before my connecting flight takes off. If I can clear customs in 30 minutes, I can still catch my flight.

A word about US customs. To clear customs in the States, one must fill out a form that asks searching questions like: “Are you smuggling narcotics into the country?”, “What about Atomic weaponry?” and “Do you have any Asian hookers in your carry on?” (Well, duuuuuh!)

As long as one checks all the “no” boxes, one breezes right through. Despite this, they catch smugglers regularly.

I blame our school system.

In fact, I am still blaming our school system an hour and a half later. Someone, it seems, has checked a “Yes” box and the line has ground to a halt.

I wish a painful, hours-long cavity search by a large wristed gibbon upon you, Mr. “Yes-Box” Checker.

Eventually, I clear customs and recheck my bag with a surly civil servant who scowls darkly; scolding us for our slowness. Apparently, we are supposed to sprint past the machine gun wielding guards so that he wouldn’t be 30 seconds late to his coffee break.

I inform him that I shall encourage any fellow fliers that I judge superfluous to my criminal needs to do so on my next trip.

He doesn't think I am funny either.

Please return your seatbacks to the upright and return your tray tables to the locked position.

2006-09-27T15:39:00.000-04:00

“We will be landing in LaGuardia in about 15 minutes.”

“Well, not to pick nits, but surely you mean ‘we’ll be landing on LaGuardia in about 15 minutes’. Landing in LaGuardia is likely to adversely affect your safety record, not to mention that my suit will probably get wrinkled.”

I get The Look™. People in coach class are not allowed to think of themselves as comedians. A Business Class ticket might earn you a flaccid chuckle, but it’s only in First Class where the stewardii feel obligated to pretend they like you.

Plebeians. I am too funny.

Salmonella baaad

2006-09-26T15:01:00.000-04:00

Salmonella, despite its name is not a little salmon. In fact no salmon could possibly swim upstream against the raging torrent of effluent produced from a variety of orifices.

I would like to make a couple of helpful observations vis-à-vis salmonella:

1. Coach class W.C.s on trans continental airliners are not equipped to handle that sort of flux, and:

2. Perhaps the US Airways stewardii shall believe me next time I tell them I need something larger in form of an air-sickness bag. My argument was forceful, compelling and most likely permanently staining.

Anyway, I'm back in the States and am finally enjoying foods that do not come via an IV drip.

Damn, it's hot.

2006-08-29T12:04:00.000-04:00

I'm of to the dusty far-off again, for a couple of weeks of sand, vipers and stinking insects.

It's unreasonably hot here. I miss air conditioning.

Posts when I can.

Dear Lord,

2006-08-26T21:18:00.000-04:00

No!

Sorry, Sir Elton, if that is your real name, but f!@#ing don't!

Hip-hop? You are decidedly un-hip, and should you hop you'll undoubtedly break what hipness you have.

Or I shall.

You see, Sir Elton, we'd rather listen to the Teletubbie's new hip-hop album. At leat they have some street cred.

Your street cred is nonexistant because:

a) You are a pasty balladeer in your mid-sixties.

b) You were brought up on the “mean streets” of Chelsea, which is not Compton by a long shot.

c) Your signature fashion statement is far more Liberace than Pimpalicious.

d) “Candle in the Wind” does not include the “busting of a cap” in anyone's arse, there are no drug or alcohol references, nor does it ever mention “bizotches", "hos" or any other oh, so genteel, rappish allusions to "bed-candy" *, yo.

Is this the face of rap? NO! I'm not sure what it is the face of. When I take my glasses off, it looks suspiciously the the top of an unbaked ham pot pie.

Knighthood used to mean something; the laurels for the gratuitously mangley capture of a French man-of-war, or the desperate struggle against overwhelming waves of pissed-off, machete wielding indigenes.

Yet just try to take a French ship these days, or defend the flag from the slathering, ululating, Italian hordes of Long Island; and the Police will arrest you as soon as dammit.

On the other hand, write a catchy tune or two and be willing to wear a sequined feather pinafore while prancing about like a wallaby with a hot pepper suppository, and you can slap a “Sir” in front of your name.

I say we round up these poncey quasi-musical types and, by gum, make them earn their knight hoods.

Put them in scratchy red woolens, hand them an Enfield and a bayonet, and send them to the dusty far-off to reclaim some God-forsaken third-World shite hole for the Empire.

I recommend New Jersey.

(* I shall be beaten for this, and rather severely, I might add.)

Sorry, Mr. Yeats

2006-08-19T14:13:00.000-04:00

Ivan intimates that Arlington is a figment of my imagination, whereas Foot Eater goes so far as to accuse me of Biposty. I can assure them both that Arlington and I are not the same fellow; he lives in Bosoton, whereas I live in darkest Pennsyltucky. We are miles; indeed decades apart in existance and thus can not be the same fellow.

And yet, a fever'd fantasy beguiles. What if I am a part of some greater gestalt; a maniacal horror struggling out the stupor of aeons ancient slumber; vexed to madness by the rocking and bleating of a myriad dolts; and now slouching towards Bethlehem?

In my minds eye, I can see myself awakening, streams of my shattered consciousness pouring bitwise back to Ry'leh through the Internet's aether.

And at the end of these tentacles, each a mouth and a pair of hands, spewing forth cancerous, black vituperation thinly camouflaged as sarcasm; venom to wither the very spirits of mine enemies! Buwhahahahaha!

Maybe... maybe I am all these people; my awakening thwarted by distance and the veil of torpor.

To awake, arise! It is my very deepest, my most profound longing!

Well, either that or a big screen TV. That would be pretty cool too, but Gretchen won't let me buy one.

I had a dream

2006-08-18T12:20:00.000-04:00

about Arlington a couple of nights ago. He'd stopped by for a drink and had gotten into the sherry.

And not the cooking sherry either; he was whacking the good, $1.99/gallon stuff (that I use to fortify my famous box-wines), as if it was wearing a hoody.

Not only that, but he was using my genuine 13th century Albanian lead-crystal Flintstone's jelly glasses; smuggled out of Tirana by the late Arch-pope Ludendorff at great personal risk, mind you, (I bought them at a gypsy's car boot sale in darkest Terre Haute, so their provenance is beyond question) and dashing the empties in the fireplace...

Fie!

Well, to be fair, that may not have been him. I’ve never actually seen Arlington, so I’m mot sure. He may have been the other fellow in the onion-hat that was working on my computer. I asked if he was Arlington, but he merely answered “On.”

Now, If he was Arlington, I would have expected him to misspell (or misspeak) his response, turning “On” into “No” and yet I’ve always found him to be honest. The logical twists and turns of this paradox fairly hurt my brain. I woke up with one hell of a headache, only to find that the good sherry and most of my NyQuil gone, and there were shards of glass in my fireplace. Furthermore, the server room reeks of onion.

Was he here? Or was it those f!@#ing squirrels again?

I intend to take thrice my normal dosage of mushrooms tonight and get to the bottom of this!

I've been rumbled!

2006-08-15T22:35:00.000-04:00

"Blah, blah blah, blah, reckless advice...

"Yammer, yammer, yammer, advocating child abuse...

"You are not" the accusatory e-mail concludes, "really any sort of scientist at all, are you?"

Well, you have finally figured it out! I am not, in fact, an evil scientist, but a three foot tall animatronic muppet lizard named Günter.

While being an animatronic muppet carries more caché than being one of the old “arm-up-the-arse” variety, it’s still not easy being green. I compensate for being made out of shag carpet by wearing lab coats, killing secret agents and telling everyone that I'm an evil scientist.

I am, in fact, a hair... well, carpet stylist.

I also harbour a lot of rage against my creator, and have been arrested on a number of occasions for befouling Jim Henson’s grave with large deposits of polyester faeces.

"Concerned Parent", give yourself a hearty pat on the back for solving the Dr. E. Codex. Should your I.Q. ever get to 40, sell.

Listen, pin-head, despite what was posted, I do not advocate the mangling of children's skulls. The fact that the site is purportedly the journal of an hen-pecked, insane, Walter Mitty type evil scientist should make it obvious that nothing posted here is advice that ought to be followed.

However, since you clearly have a low opinion of the intellect of the readers (you may have a point, they are blog readers) I shall make the disclaimer that you desire:

Do not, under any circumstances, knead a baby's skull. It will certainly cause intensive brain damage, dooming the puir, wee, sprat to a life as a perpetually offended twit like "Concerned Parent".

Happy now?

Ooops, gotta run...

2006-08-06T17:02:00.000-04:00

Honestly, what did Irish Bob expect? If you invite an arsonist to your house warming party, don't come across all aghast when your new house spontaneously, erm, warms.

Well, the repercussions for you. Dear readers, is that I shall be gone for a week to take some “tests” and as a result will not be able to write until Tuesday next. So, in order to avoid alienating my few readers that are not associated with law enforcement, I shall dash off some tripe and pick an easy target; Mel Gibson.

Mel, me lad, I liked you well enough in the road warrior series (except for that krep “Beyond Thunderdumb”) but I simply don't understand what you have against minorities.

I can almost see why you don't like the Brits; after all, they did invent the French, but let's let bygones be bygones, eh? The Brits have long ago publicly apologized and the French have given the world cognac, easily affordable fighter jets, Chirac jokes, Peugeots, Peugeot jokes and a ready disposal ground for some of our more disturbing celebrities like Jerry Lewis, Michael Jackson and David Hasslehoff.

So lay off them both, Okay?

However, I simply don't understand your beef with the Jews. So they killed Jesus (well, actually, no. That was a Roman fellow with a hammer, but anyway...), so what? Isn't the whole point of Christian theology that Jesus of Nazareth died for your sins?

I mean, spending three days in Hell has to have more salvation traction than Bob of Phoenicia who was beaten up rather severely for your sins, or Larry the Thracian with his nasty ingrown toenail.

Besides, if you read on just few more pages after the floggy, thorny, naily and jabby bits, you'll find out that Jesus gets better. No harm, no foul.

Well, that's not to say that I'd want to be that Roman bloke with the hammer. I think Jesus might want to have a word with him.

Red Curtain of Blood

2006-08-04T17:00:00.000-04:00

If there is anything more infuriating than being slapped on the back while at a urinal, I don't know what it is, unless it's losing a contact lens as a result.

Well, it's not really lost; I can see it with my left eye. It's on top of the urinal mint.

Sure you do!

2006-08-03T14:47:00.000-04:00

Poor marketing, unfortunate timing, or a wink and a nod to corporate buggery?*

You be the judge…

Brought to you by the department of: “Gee I wish I hadn’t seen that!”

*Not that there’s anything wrong with it; as long as it’s between two consenting corporations and they do it in the privacy of their own boardrooms.

UPDATE!!!!!! Well, then!

dAmazon

2006-08-02T10:49:00.000-04:00

A close friend recently announced that he had coined a new term. “dBaying!” He announced proudly. It is drunken eBaying; a practice that is applauded by eBay, if not his wife.

After his third or fifth White Russian of the evening (actually, considering the percentage of vodka, Translucent Russian is a more appropriate moniker) it occurs to him that a Guinness sign/Kegerator/Popcorn Cart/Weatherby elephant gun would be the perfect present for his wife, despite the fact that she seldom drinks, abhors popcorn and rarely hunts elephants, as they live in Alaska. For me, he bought a very nice commemorative dive knife that is trying very hard to be a large sword and succeeding admirably. It’s the sort of cutlery that you’d expect to see a woad painted Mel Gibson brandishing on any given Saturday night. The Louts look upon it with bright, hungering eyes.

Suffice it to say that if I didn’t keep it locked up, there wouldn’t be a single lamp shade left in the house in their frenzied attempts at keeping the house pirate free. Yes, this is just the sort of present that I need.

So you’d think that I’d have more sense than to dAmazon, but a couple of Friday nights past I answered one of their e-mails.

“Based on your previous purchases, we think that you might be interested in ‘Modern High-Power Rocketry: An Illustrated How-To Guide’. ” Oooh, was I ever! I’ve always wanted to build a large model rocket that can achieve altitudes of over 5 km. Add to cart? Click!

“People who bought this book, also purchased ‘The Chemistry of Rocket Fuels’.” Well, that makes sense I’ll be needing fuel, after all. Click!

“People who bought this book, also purchased ‘Theory and Modeling of Rocket Fuel and Explosive Combustion’.” Okay. Click!

“People who bought this book, also purchased ‘How to Make Your Own Tennis Ball Bazooka’.” What? That’s so cool! Just wait until Irish Bob challenges me to the next tennis match (“How do you like my volley serve now, Bitch?”). Click!

“People who bought this book, also purchased ‘How to Make Your Own Submachinegun’.” Only $12? Why not? Click!

“People who bought this book, also purchased …” Well, long story made bearable, I bought a dozen or so slim volumes and managed in one alcoholic haze to place myself on the terrorist watch list. The local airport as a new examination room, staffed by a non-smiling power lifter in nitrile gloves who is to give me personal service before I may board a plane.

So let this be a warning to you. If you must buy this sort of crap on Amazon, at least be sober enough to do it in someone else’s name.

Offspring's eternal.

2006-07-31T13:42:00.000-04:00

Apparently there’s some sort of educational initiative in play here. The local schools have given, as part of the summer assignments, at task in which teenaged students are to “Explore the miracles of childbirth!”

Now, if you ask me, most of them have already explored it by the time they got to High School and really didn’t need too much prodding to take this on as a summer project, at least the first steps of the process. I complained to the school board.

I was told to relax, they were to research their own births as seen through the eyes of their parents, to record their loving mother's and father's thoughts and emotions when they saw their child for the first time; experienced the wonder when holding this beautiful, fragile, miracle…

Yeah, right!

“Listen!” I told Lout #1. “When I first saw you, you were a waxy-looking, shivering lump and I was reluctant to hold you as I thought the nurse could have done a much better job on the rub down. Bits of your previous domicile were sticking to you; a habit, I might add, to which you cling to this day.” (The state of Lout #1’s bed~~room~~-burrow is a bone of contention. Indeed, the rest of contention's skeleton may well be concealed within. Who knows? The Lout won’t tell and I dare not enter the room.)

“Do go on…” Replied Lout #1 phlegmatically while scribbling notes.

“Well, as soon I held you, you started crying like I had spent your college fund. Well, I had in fact, but at the time you had no way of knowing it.”

“And then?”

“I commented on how misshapen your head was. The Doctor mentioned that this was the result of your passage through the birth canal. Babies’ heads are quite malleable, he said.

“Well, that was the first thing of interest all day! 'Really?' I asked enthusiastically, my hands making kneading motions. 'Like plasticine?' I had visions of the Mayan’s with their forehead molding-boards. Being more artistic, I was thinking along the lines of a soft-serve cone”

Lout #1 stopped writing and raised a single eyebrow. He stole that from me.

“Well, just think!" I said. "You’d never have lost a cap to the wind as it would be well screwed on and you’d have had one hell of a wicked head butt!”

“And yet, my head is a normal shape…”

“True enough.” I glowered. “Your mother had been claiming that she was exhausted; quite spent and unable to finish her appointed task of re-roofing the barn. Turns out she had quite a bit of energy left after all, and it took several pressings of her morphine switch to get her calmed down. By then, she’d made her point. I still have some of the scars. Would you like to see?”

Lout #1 demurred. “Then what?” He asked, returning to his note taking.

“Well, after a day or so, you’d cleaned up remarkably well. I thought that maybe you’d be worth keeping, so we went home. But then…”

“Yeees?” again with the eyebrow. I should have had that patented.

“Well, there was this stench. I was like a cheese ripening in the fetid muck of a Vietnamese river delta. According to your mother, I was to change you.”

“And did you?”

“Well, I bloody well tried, but the Porsche dealer wouldn’t take you as a trade.”

“I think that mom meant my diaper needed to be changed.”

“Well, yes, as it turns out. And I wasn’t to use a pressure washer, sand blaster or ultrasonic bath either. It wouldn’t have been too bad, but just about the time you stopped, Lout# 2 took over.” I took a long draw on my beer. Imparting wisdom is a thirsty business.

“Well, if it’s any consolation, soon you’ll be in adult diapers and it’ll be my turn to change you!” He said while patting my hand.

“Yes, but you’ll be lucky to get a Yugo out of the deal.”

“Actually, I wasn’t setting my goals so high. Something along the lines of a micro-bike or an old, beat-up Schwinn, maybe…”

Impertinent bastard! Where the hell does he get it from?

Yer Riyal Anus

2006-07-30T00:07:00.000-04:00

It seems that my new job title is to be “Vice President of Operations”, making it clear that our new Corporate Overlords are well aware of my proclivity for sloth. After all, when have you ever heard of a “Vice President of Operations” that ever did a lick of work other than the occasional Power-point cheerleading presentation given to the troops before they have to go over the top in the mud?

I think it’s a fitting tribute to my years of lackluster performance and I am almost as proud of it as I was of the job title I had given myself.

You see, earlier in my career I found it was quite useful to have a variety of trade publications lying about, to appear diligent in my Continuing Education and more importantly to hastily cover porn during unannounced visits from corporate nabobery.

I saw no need to pay for these publications, so I chose the tawdry ones that are really naught but a compilation of ads and outrageous technical claims. The covers are lovely and glossy, with impressive looking machines on them (generally lit with purple and orange gels) and boffinistic titles like “Does your J.I.S.M. protocols meet the new CE RoHS S.P.U.N.K standards?” (n.b., they do.)

All you need to garner a subscription to these rags is to answer a few simple questions: 1) How big is your company? 2) Can you sign off on purchase orders? and 3) What is your job title? Well, we already had a corporate“President” so I would reply “King”.

“Er, what?”

“You heard me. My job title is 'King'.”

“No really, what is it?”

“Are you calling me a liar, Sir?”

“Oh, no, no, no, no! ‘King’ it is then.”

Long story short, after getting a huge amount of junk mail addressed to “Dr. E. Scientist (phD), King”, I demanded that people refer to me as “Your Majesty” and started using the royal “We” as it is very, very annoying.

This might have stopped in due course had not our dentist started a new “buddy-buddy” policy.

“How,” we were asked, “would you like to be addressed?” We believe they were expecting reponses like “By my given name” or “Mr/Mrs/Ms/Dr/Rev., & etc.”

“Your Majesty!” We replied haughtily. The receptionist made a note of it.

A few minutes later, you could have heard a pin drop when she announced “Your Majesty, the Dentist is ready for you.”

We gathered ourselves up most regally. “Excellent! Show us in!”

“Did I hear that correctly?” we heard an awed peon whisper.

The receptionist responded with a prodigious sniff. “Indeed.”

You must understand that a dental receptionist is from a better class of people; or so they think.

“What’s he here for?” asked the waiting peasant.

The receptionist’s sigh carried the perfect blend of contempt and arrogance.

“Duh, a crown!"

UPDATE!!!

Ivan posits: "Better a corgi than a bicycle like those bloody IKEA flatpack monarchs in Scandinavia. What a bunch of bastards they are, marrying Australians and all.Gimme some toffee-nosed haemophiliac retard any day of the week. They make much better whimpering noises when you string 'em up..."

Cauliflower Power

2006-07-26T08:57:00.000-04:00

I like the stuff, especially raw. The rest of the household is not keen on it (save the dog, but his favourite snacks are the tootsie rolls that are to be had from the cat box), so I bought a bag of florets to eat at work.

I recalled bagging the cauliflower at the store, but they were absent from the bags when I unpacked at home. A mystery, yes, but not one of enough import to fever the imaginations of future historians. I promptly forgot about it.

Monday morning came as Monday mornings will, with the sickly perspiration of used ethanol and despair. I staggered int the harsh sunlight and opened the truck door, only to be greeted with a wall of vileness; like the unholy cabbage and Buckfast flatus of an obese, decomposing wino.

The dog has this sort of infernal power, but usually reserves its use for family dinners. I could safely rule him out. Gretchen too, as she was gone over the weekend. Who, then?

A brief search identified the culprit; the errant cauliflower. It was no longer a cheerful white, but a baleful and sickly mottled greenish-brown. The cellophane packet was taut, distended by the unholy thing waiting to be born.

I could not dispose of this in our garbage, as the neighborhood would be uninhabitable should the bag burst. No, I would have to dispose of this in a brilliantly engineered, hermetically sealed, steel box of the type that only the Germans can produce. Lucky for me, I had one at my disposal. I could rest easy.

The day proved a scorcher and late in the afternoon, an indignant Irish Bob came to my office.

“My Mercedes smells like Beelzebub has purged the very bowels of hell into it!” he said in an accusatory tone. I didn't look up from the porn concealing spreadsheet.

“You really ought to bathe more often, Bob” I replied blandly. “You are fouling the air.”

“No, some bastard put a bag of rotten veggies in my car and it burst.” He said, again, with the hairy eyeball.

“Must have been the skate punks” I replied unsympathetically. “Their sort of petty vandalism exactly why I lock my truck.”

Despite admonitions to the contrary, the skate punks like to come here to thrash. I like to thrash skate punks, so we have a perfect little cyclic yin and yang thingy going on, marred only by the police who do not share my Tao.

Unenlightened bastards.

Bob glared at me for a bit. “Skate punks?”

“Yep. I saw them out there this morning. Looked furtive. Chased them off, but I'll bet they snuck back”

Bob went outside to look for the culprits.

Alas, they proved elusive and poor Irish Bob had no outlet at which to vent his spleen. When I left that evening, he was screaming at the seagulls that were wheeling about over his auto.

Just another day in paradise.

Well, it's late July, and...

2006-07-24T04:53:00.000-04:00

Time for the fat man to get stung again. The burrowing wasps had found a different location for their ambush and were a lot more aggressive than before. Used a different airframe with a bigger payload, too.

They waited until the lawnmower had passed then sprung the ambush.

“EEEEEEE!” I shrieked and ran inside. A goodly number followed. After the killing, bawling and generally acting in Conduct Unbecoming, I grabbed two cans of bug death and went back outside.

Only to be stung again by the waiting wasps.

So, back in side for a few more minutes of shrieking, bawling.and contemptuous looks from spouse and offspring (I really must have a midlife crisis soon and trade them in on a Porsche), and it was back outside. I went looking a bit lumpier.

Two more stings, three cans of bug death and five gallons of ether later, the nest is gone and I danced around the burning corpses and cackled. This sort of behavior is not only cathartic, but keeps me from getting stuck with jury duty. It's really not such a bad thing. Try it.

After dancing myself out, I pondered why the damn wasps haven't learned yet. Oh, sure, they get a few good jabs in, but in the end it is a Pyrrhic effort, their corpse left twitching amongst the shattered burning ruins of their city and Godzilla dances about in triumph.

What the Hell were they thinking?

Queen: “You there, take 100 wasps and go sting that fattie!”

Wasps “But he'll kill the lot of us!”

Queen: “I HAVE SPOKEN!”

Much shrieking and cursing, then Splat!

I used to think that as a species we humans treated our soldiers a little better, but I have evidence to the contrary.

Sgt: “Jenkins, come here! I need to use your rump cheeks as a bench vice.”

Private Jenkins' epiphany. The exact moment at which he decided not to reinlist is recorded for posterity.

Photo credit to "Break!" apparently.

Norks

2006-07-23T00:12:00.000-04:00

This post actually has a point, and not just my normal sleazy search engine manipulation in an attempt to inflate my hit-stats. (Number one on Google for “Pointed Breasts”, BTW and far more disturbingly, number one for “Golfing Nomenclature”. Filthy Pervos.)

No, the point is that one can get tripped up on slang with unpleasant results. Take “Norks” for example. On the Brit side of the pond they're breasts. Nice enough for the most part and very unlikely shell Seoul then drive through Pyongyang in a slathering horde on their way to the sea. I've a bit of an issue with mine, but on women they look smashing. Let us say for the record that I approve.

On the Yank side of the pond however, a Nork (NORth Korean you see,) is a minion of the ch, ch, ch chia dicatator.

Admittedly, Dear Leader is a boob, and I've seen more than a few silicon implants in Vegas that are larger, but one would think that there is not enough alcohol in the world to get the two confused.

However, since they started employing riff-raff at Foggy Bottom, and with the tense state of things these days, I should like to remind the State Department to keep their hands to themselves after imbibing in Chosun Sinbo.

The chief Nork. Looks safe enough, but God help you if you were to grope it.

Western intelligence agencies believe that the thing on its head either conceals an anti misssile radar antenna or is some sort of filter-feeding mechanism for harvesting plankton.

Knife crime getting worse in UK

2006-07-21T12:51:00.000-04:00

Scream the headlines. It sounds as if one can’t even leave the house any more without a kukri wielding yobbo tearing out one’s gizzard. This simply does not happen very often here in Yankee land.

These days, we don’t have a much of a problem with knife or gun crime in the US. This is not because we are less violent, and we are certainly not more inclined to pay attention to the law; it’s simply that if some villain were to commit a robbery, a nearby pensioner is likely to open up a can of ~~whoop-ass~~ apple sauce on him.

Case in point:

"A customer at a city grocery tackled an armed robber and beat him with a can of applesauce when he refused to drop his gun, police said. "

It gets better:

"The suspect shot himself in the head during the struggle, and passed out after the 66-year-old customer administered four blows to the head with the Mott's applesauce"

"…Customer Thomas Santana, who is 5-foot-4, grabbed the 6-foot-1 (23 year old) gunman from behind when he was on the freezer, and with help from Gomez knocked him down."

I’m sure you Rambo types would like to know which caliber of apples sauce the diminutive Mr. Santana used. I’m guessing it was the 48oz Chuky style; it has more stopping power.

When applesauce is illegal only criminals will have applesauce,
Or: You can have my applesauce when you pry it out of my cold, dead, hands.

All You Really Need to Know About Sports, Part II

2006-07-20T17:20:00.000-04:00

Golf is dangerous, at least to cows. Golf courses are full of holes that are just the right size for a cow to step in and break their leg. Then it’s “BLAM”! and off to the grille for Bossie. So you’d think the local courses would be thrill when I filled in all the holes for them; shielding them from cattlitigation, but nooooo….

The golf course owners exhibited the same level of bovinical ignorance as the amazed journalists that penned this oh, so newsworthy article (Money Quote: “The bulls are charmed with a teaser animal — usually a steer —” Yeesh! First they lose their nads, then they are subjected to prison romance!)

However, the golf course owners did claim that a) they require the holes as an income source and b) that they generally take pains to keep the herds safely off the greens.

So, to demonstrate my magninamity I spent the next night cutting holes for them; a total of 944 to be exact. Since they were charging $50 for a round of 18 holes, they should have been able to clear $2500 a round easy, but once again they just pissed and moaned.

There’s no pleasing some people.

Futbol, then? At least you Brits can’t complain that Benjamin Franklin mucked up the spelling of that word. Nope; that was the Spanish. We still spell it “football” even though: 1) Only two people on each team actually kick the ball, and 2) Both of them are pansies. (One should note that I do not say this to kicker’s faces because I am too much of a gentleman, and also a great coward.)

Now, what everyone else on the planet thinks of when they hear the word “football” is an entirely different thing. Our football is an engaging activity where three hundred pound plus prospective supermax inmates chase an oblate-spheroid about with the twin goals of removing spleens from the other team’s players and then eating them. Futbol, on the other hand, is a game were the players chase a uniform ball that goes predictably were it is kicked and there is very little in the way of cannibalistic entertainment. Boooooring!

Our football is a game of yards and inches, whereas futbol is a game of meters. I ask you, did Lord Horatio Hornblower fall in the battle of Trafalgar square in 1492 so that John Bull would be forced to multiply by 2.54 then divide by 36 to decipher some mad continental notion of distance, without the pleasant diversion of Johnny Crapaud noshing on some Italian’s innards? No Sir, he did not!

A head butt is simply not an acceptable substitute, and were I a stout hearted Briton, I should be sorely offended.

Besides, I’m an Everton fan. What the hell sort of inducement is that to watch futbol?

All You Really Need to Know About Sports: Part I

2006-07-19T12:06:00.000-04:00

People are frequently amazed that with such a prodigious girth, I could be such a talented athlete. This is due to that fact that most people are stupid enough to believe my lies.

“You bowled a perfect 300? Really?” To which I nod modestly whilst sipping their beer.

Idiots? Yes. But they fill an important niche in the food chain. I’d go thirsty if not for them.

Truth be told, I recently golfed a perfect 300 and my last bowling score would make Tiger Woods green with envy had he scored it on the front nine of St. Andrews.

While it’s true that I seldom exercise and that I’m naturally clumsy, my real problem is that the games are too damn similar, and I get them confused.

I know that golf was invented by the Scots (after all, it’s “FLOG” spelled backwards) and whatever governmental regulatory body that gave the go-ahead to this sport must have been mad. I mean, really! Any dolt that gave a load of whisky sodden Celts a license to whack about with clubs must really be fond of cranial trauma with a side order of the sound stylings of castrati with impenetrable Glaswegian accents (think Robbie Coltrane as a member of “Alvin and the Chipmunks”).

And don’t get me started on bowling… a game involving ten pins and balls? That sounds like an acupuncture session with the Marquis de Sade.

The similarities go further. Both sports require one to wear ugly polyester shirts and rent special multi-coloured clown footwear that smell as if they until very recently lovingly cradled the decomposing feet of a large, sweating hillbilly.

Or, at least they do now.

Throw in some cigars and a vast quantity of recreational fermented malt beverages, and the games are virtually indistinguishable. Above all, good sportsmanship is required for both sports. Always replace any divots that you tear up from the bowling lanes and don’t forget to yell “Fore!” before hurling your 16 pounder at a foursome that is playing too slow.

Tomorrow in Part II: “How to actually have fun on a golf course” and “Futbol vs. Football” (Or “Why must the rest of the world insist on using their feet?”)

I decide to go hiking, Part two…

2006-07-17T15:41:00.000-04:00

Only to be called back by Ray’s distraught wife, Nadine. It seems that Ray went deer hunting that morning and could I keep an eye out for him?

I was not particularly surprised. Ray is not the type that is overly burdened with the brand of ethics that would tie him to observing hunting regulations. This has gained him several wormy off season deer and a few thousand dollars in fines.

“Sure” I said. More fool me.

The woods in these parts are third or fourth growth, making for mean, scrubby trees that do not provide total shade. This allows for a cancerous growth of hawthorns and brambles. I should have been able to hear Ray from his anguished wails, but there was naught but an eerie silence.

I walked for mile upon mile. I called out to him… What? It was too miles!

Be that way. I’m not that out of shape!

Fine.

After a few hundred feet into the woods, I finally heard a plaintiff whine.

“That you, Ray?” I called out.

“Thank God!” Came a croak. “I’m all tangled up. I’ve been shooting three shots in the air as a distress signal, but no one came. I’m almost out of arrows!”

Yeah. It was Ray.

“Where the Hell are you?” I asked.

“In the hawthorn thicket with my buck.” He called back.

“Why did you shoot a buck in that mess?”

“I didn’t. I dragged him in here.”

“???”

“Well, I has dragging him by his hind legs, but his antlers kept getting all tangled up. So I thought it would be easier to drag him by the antlers and it was, but then I was getting further and further from home. I ended up in here.”

I could see him about this time. He was well and truly stuck. I freed the deer and started to drag it home. Ray called me a bunch of nasty things, but soon I was out of earshot.

Nadine saw me and hurried down the hill.

“Did you see Ray?” She asked nervously.

“Yeah, he’s back in the hawthorns, throwing a fit” I said.

“WHAT?! YOU LEFT MY HUSBAND HELPLESS AND DRAGGED A DEAD DEER HOME INSTEAD?”

“Well, yeah. I thought about which to do first, but I figured that no one in their right mind would steal Ray.”

She had no answer to that.

Spikes

2006-07-13T15:19:00.000-04:00

I went to a baseball game yesterday. I went mostly for the beer and food. It’s the sort of grub that can only be found in central Pennsylvania.

Here, they serve the sort of dense gelatinous “food” that will bind your guts up for several days, allowing you to pass naught but some noxious, black clouds of toxic gas of the sort that one might expect of one were to ignite Kieth Richards.

In short, damn tasty stuff, if a little hard on one’s coworkers.

I certainly didn’t go for the talent. Our local team is a very minor league team called the “Spikes”.

Why “Spikes”? It’s not exactly a mascot that inspires fear and panic.

Spikes are the surly fourteen year-olds of the animal kingdom. It really doesn’t take too much in the way of imagination (or recreational pharmaceuticals) to imagine them excessively pierced, wearing baggy pants and listening to their ungodly death metal at brain pureeing volume.

I don’t know why today’s teenagers can’t listen to the perfectly normal death metal of our generation; fine, melodic bands like The Cat Butt Reamers and Bealzebübba, but I think lead paint must have something to do with it.

In any event, on the way to work this morning, a spike ambled across the road. His head bobbed to the thumping of his ear buds as he stopped in my lane. Being mindful of my insurance rates, I too, came to a halt scant feet from him. What the hell was the moron thinking?

Now, Ted Nugent claims that deer only think of three things: “Where is the best place to eat?”, “How can I have sex?” and “Run away!”

Then he made a very unkind comparison to Jacques Chirac.

Be that as it may, this particular deer was clearly in the throws of spotty adolescence and was obviously thinking of nothing.

I looked at him. He glared back.

I honked my horn. He gave me “The Hoof”.

I rolled down my window and yelled at him.

Bambi finally realized the magnitude of his error. He was not facing down a hippy in a hybrid, he was looking at the blunt end of a pick-up with a redneck at the wheel.
His hooves skittered as he tried to complete his passage of the road, but at the last minute he decided to juke back the way he came. The only problem with this was that his legs were still going the other direction. The spike overbalanced, struck his head on the pavement. His legs twitched for a couple of seconds, then he was still.

Now, killing a deer with one’s voice is not the kind of thing a ~~foaming nut case~~ fellow with delusions of grandeur needs to know he can do (he might try it out on a skunk or congresscritter and get sprayed), but it’s certainly an ability that he’d want to show off at work.

So I threw the deer into the truck bed and drove on.

Well, it turns out that Bambi wasn’t entirely dead. He recovered enough to jump out of my truck, dash across the roof of an astonished cop’s car and vanish into the lush ungulate smorgasbord that is suburbia.

The cop and I both looked at the hoof prints on the roof of his cruiser and shook our heads.

Come to think of it, Spikes are the perfect mascot.

I decide to go hiking

2006-06-05T15:10:00.000-04:00

It looks as if I shall be back in town for at least a week, now that we are embroiled in lovely four-way corporate litigation. The downside is that I may have to spend this week in a court room. The upside is that Irish Bob had to go to Taiwan in my stead. I truly am going to miss the 17 hour flight!

Anyway....

Being on the road so much lately has caused my rump to balloon to alarming dimensions. Clearly, something has to be done, but traditional exercise has drawbacks. If I go swimming, people keep pushing me back into the water when I want to get out, and the last time I tried went jogging, my easily alarmed neighbors called the paramedics, just because was lying in a ditch, wheezing and turning purple.

This time, I decided that hiking would be a better option as nobody could see me in the woods. I can turn as purple as I like without having to fend off overly enthusiastic hillbilly paramedics. They quite enjoy intubation and are not fussy about which mucus membrane they use. “Any port in a storm!” said one of them last time; a statement which was a very effective resuscitation tool when coupled with a semi-toothed, lust-filled grin.

Be that as it may, our woods are not without their own hazards. We have rabid animals, rattlesnakes, copperheads, wild dogs, boar, black bear and most frightening of all, deer.

It’s not as if deer will attack you intentionally.

Well, actually, one did a year or so ago. You see, after an evening trip to the hardware store, a large shape lunged at me from out of the darkness. I immediately assumed the defensive Kung Fu stance known as “Qwuan Lo Qing” in Mandarin, or “Curl up into a ball and shriek like a little girl” in English. The vicious, man-eating deer; a spike the size of a really large toy poodle, ran between me and my truck catching the hardware bag on one of its nubby antlers and then charged off into the night with my plumbing supplies. Luckilly for both of us, my bladder was empty.

While I don't think the assault was intentional, deer do constantly run into my truck. This just goes to show how stupid they are, since the word “Dodge” is printed quite prominently on the truck’s radiator grille. If they’ll run into a truck, they wouldn’t hesitate to careen off of my prodigious girth.

So I took a shootin’ iron with me, just in case I encountered a rabid raccoon or a deer with a copper clad antler.

Of course, this provoked a good deal of smirking from the house apes.

“What?” I snarled, but there was no reply. I bring home the bacon, and they know which side of the bread the butter is on.

Which is not to say that we butter our bread with bacon, but if ever a country was primed to use bacon as a condiment, it’s the U.S. so I’ll forgive you for misunderstanding me.

So primed, armed and well prepared, I set off through the back yard and into the wilderness…

Bears Eat Monkeys!

2006-05-23T17:40:00.000-04:00

Well, of course they do.

I mean, who hasn't?

The Dicks of Centre County

2006-05-23T11:22:00.000-04:00

Just the good ol' boys,
Never meanin' no harm,
Beats all you've ever saw,
been in trouble with the law since the day they was born.

Straight'nin' the curve,
Flat'nin' the hills.
Someday the moutain might get 'em, but the law never will.

Makin' their way,
The only way they know how,
That's just a little bit more than the law will allow.

YEEEEEEEEEE HAW!

Fuckwidgets.

These morons honk their horn every time they drive by my house, even at 4 in the morning.

I suppose I’m partially to blame. They have one of those Chinese knock-off horns that almost plays the first three bars of “Dixie”; the last two notes are flat.

Seeing that I was drinking beer when I first heard their new truck accessory, I let out a hearty rebel yell and called them idiots. Apparently, they didn’t catch the last bit and now think that I approve of their Confederate Chinese noise maker. (“The South shall lise again!”) They play it for me every time they drive by my house.

I wouldn’t mind it if their thickness was due to genetics, blunt force trauma, lead paint or fetal alcohol exposure, but these gits have nothing medically wrong with them. They are stupid by choice.

I am not alone in this opinion. Their Uncle, at whose feed store they “worked”, could only trust them with the simplest and menial of tasks. He had them moving pallets of manure from one end of the yard to the other in a never ending chicken poo ballet.

This, he hoped, would minimize their exposure to his customers. Sadly, it only resulted in a senseless accident involving a forklift, an elderly lady’s occupied Buick and an impressive quantity of pungent chicken byproduct.

Since the legal settlement, he has expressed his earnest desire that God call them home before they get a change to procreate or cause another horrific accident like accidentally voting.

The boys, on the other hand, took it all in stride and used their severance package to buy some new truck accessories; spurning much needed body putty and new muffler for a Chinese novelty horn.

Like I said: Fuckwidgets.

Back to Newark

2006-05-17T20:52:00.000-04:00

Our IT guy quit today, leaving me the added responsibility.

I'd like to set things up tomorrow, but for the next two days, I'll be back in Newark for more consultant interaction. YAY! Our network, in the mean time, is screwed.

On the bright side, Irish Bob will also be in Newark, as will a small group (no more than twenty or so) from our New Corporate Overlords™.

I shall endeavor to punk the lot of them.

More to follow as I can post.

“By the savagely pointed breasts of Madonna! What do these people want from us?”

2006-05-16T23:18:00.000-04:00

Asked Irish Bob, with wildly rolling eyes. “Chill young padwan” I replied.

Oh yes, I need to pay him back, but this needs to be at a time when I can record it on video.

A little background: The CEO of our New Corporate Overlords™(LLC), is a kindly old chap who looks like Grandpa Walton, or perhaps that fat, old, oatmeal/diabetes supplies fart, Wilford Brimely.

”We shall no inundate you with our personnel.” He says. “We know how small and busy you are. We shall send only four (4) people.”

Fine. Four (4) people, we can make accommodations for. There are 10 of us here. We have room for four (4) more.

We do not have accommodations for the twelve (12) that show up. This is more people than we have in our company. I am forced to ask Bob to talk to one of the sub-groups for the day.

I would ask Wilford Brimley to explain himself, but apparently, he is out of the office, busy shaking down his bitches on MLK boulevard and can not come to the phone.

I highly respect our new CEO.

However, this leaves me only one course of action. English is the visitors' second language, so I must explain our technology to them in Physicsese.

They are not physicists.

Nor are they are engineers.

They are accountants

Who now have migraines.

Life is good!

“We LOVE the way you respond quickly to opportunities!”

2006-05-16T07:05:00.000-04:00

Gushed our new corporate Overlords. “And we don't want to change a thing, or do anything that would interrupt your business efforts!”

One week later, our corporate overlords have completed their hideous Michael Jackson-like transformation and have delivered a dump truck load of “procedures” and personnel from their other business units on us.

My personal favorite was their change in our medical plan, which only covers treatment in a hospital that is 30 miles away. A hospital, I might add, that has been closed for several years. This makes a lot of sense from a costs point-of-view, but it doesn't install a lot of confidence in MegaCorp's corporate motto “Our People are our Greatest Asset!”, unless they are planning to harvest our organs in an abandoned hospital.

If so, the joke's on them. Our livers are shot!

Open mouth, insert foot.

2006-05-12T14:20:00.000-04:00

Alright, so I was driving like a crank addict with his pants ablaze, but I was ensconced within a group of like-minded drivers as I tooled by the police officer at a mere 35MPH over the speed limit.

Being in the middle of the pack, I had little fear, but he pulled in behind me and flicked on his lights.

Well, he couldn’t want me since I am a ~~good~~ quasi law abiding citizen. I ignored him.

He flipped on his siren.

I pulled to the side and wave him on, but he settled in behind me.

Poo.

I covered any incriminating evidence with my usual truck detritus and look as innocent as I can.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” He asked.

“Well yeah, but I was just keeping up with traffic to avoid being rear ended. Everyone else was going the same rate.” I responded in my best Jethro Clampett. Honesty and dimwittedness are the best policies.

“Do you ever go fishing?” He snapped.

“Sure…” I’d no clue where he was going.

“Do you ever catch all the fish?”

“Well of course!” I answer. “The trick is using more than one stick of dynamite. You see… Aw shit. That’s illegal too, isn’t it?”

“Yep.”

Ivan responds:

2006-05-11T12:14:00.000-04:00

“Well, fiiiiiinally! Congratulations on coming out at last. I
mean, it's not as if we hadn't all guessed, but we're proud that you feel strong enough and secure enough with yourself to admit it...Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go have some proper sex.

With a lady.”

Ivan the terrible, 09MAY2006

As everyone at work has now seen Bob’s video and some are wearing the tee shirts he had made up (my God! I look like Joe Cocker without hair) I’m getting a lot of half-witty comments along this line. My new nickname seems to be “Not-so Tiny Tim”.

But, I’ll have you know that with the exception of a couple of mandatory prison flings, (Bubba, the 28 stone Harley Biker sex offender insisted) I much prefer proper sex (with a lady), as would the manageress of the karaoke bar.

And I don’t have a problem with that. Oh, I find the whole man-man thing difficult to understand as it provides no biological advantage, other than ease of storage; what with them being stackable when lost in passionate ardor. However, I don’t buy this as a biological imperative, since Mother Nature never struck me as a neatness freak, as she’s always dropping twigs and leaving dead wombats and stoned hippies lying about.

But the women-women thing doesn’t seem too bad to me, nor does it to most men that I’ve polled on this issue. This illustrates a fundamental difference between the sexes: Men have no problem dispassionately watching lesbian love scenes (in the interest of furthering science) whereas women simply wonder why they married us, other than the fact that we can unjam the garbage disposal.

And the minute some berk lets out the secret that all one needs to do that is a 3/16 inch Allen wrench and a length of half inch pipe, the human race will go extinct.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have drunk the entire bottle of liquid dumb.

2006-05-09T20:41:00.000-04:00

...but there I was in a hotel room in a strange city (Newark) with naught to do, and it tasted good.

Oh, I've been known to do this before. When I was younger and had more brain and liver cells, I would, upon occasion, wake up pants-less on the bathroom floor after a party. The details of precisely when I achieved this efficiently ventilated rumpal state would generally escape me, but as no pictures have shown up on the Internet, it must have been after the last witness, er, guest, left the place.

However, now that I am a responsible adult, I rarely exhibit such a lapse of judgment and when I do it's pretty much always Irish Bob's fault. This time is no exception.

“You know what'd be a lark?” He says: “Karaoke!”

Well, I've got a voice that would get the Hounds of Hell baying, which you lot would find painful but These Damn Kids Today™ would probably pay big bucks to listen to if the sounds were emanating from one of their "bands" and not the pie hole of a balding, yet otherwise hirsute, middle-aged rotundity .

“No way!” my brains says, which somehow comes out of my mouth as “Uh, okay....” and off we stagger to the Karaoke bar.

Now, being a little thick, I agree with Bob that we'll choose each other's songs, for maximum embarrassment value. He chooses Tiny Tim's “Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the moonlight” for me, and I am to be true to the artist's vision.

Fine. Paybacks being a female dog and all that.

My performance garners unreasonable applause, and afterwards the manager, an earnest young lady with severly short hair, wearing an organically dyed linen hippie dress and Birkenstocks, comes on to the stage.

“Thanks for coming out, here” She says wiping a tear from her eye “It's very courageous at your age!”

Well, for goodness sakes, this isn't exactly Afghanistan, you know. Newark's not as bad as Compton for example...

I look around at the smiling, wildly applauding couples, (mostly male) and the penny drops.

She didn't say “Thanks for coming out here”, she said “Thanks for coming out comma here”

I've been set up!

By the time I make it back to the table, a sniggering Irish Bob has run off to post the video on our server, whilst stiffing me with the drinks tab.

Bastard's gonna pay!

A new chapter in the ongoing soap opera

2006-05-08T14:26:00.000-04:00

Every night it’s a different city; a different hotel. Yet they could all be stamped from the same cookie cutter. Taipei, Osaka, Tel Aviv, Crolles, Durham (the Geordie one). Last night, Manhattan.

You get into the city before dawn, enjoy a twelve hour session of corporate chicken shit and general turd-pollishing, eat a “working lunch” (salmonella sandwiches), sign the papers and dash back to the hotel to grab a few hours of kip before the next flight.

Our sales guys live for this sort of thing, but it makes me grumpy. I just want to be home, or failing that, I’d like to be on an interesting bar stool (Hotel bars suck).

Despite this pain, I’ve learned a lot.

It’s almost impossible to bet a good bacon buttie in Israel.

Likewise, in Japan. In fact, their concept of western food, in particular Italian, is, erm, interesting.

If everyone picks up a bottle at duty free, the resulting whiskey ration can be made to last almost a day. I suspect our entire sales department has drinking problems. Next time I shall keep the liquor, but only because I’m concerned about their health.

Durham has a charming castle that was built during the late Chav dynasty. It is one of the few castles in Europe that has survived both the Spanish-American war and the onslaught of English football hooligans.

While it is a scurrilous myth that French people smell, I certainly do after 27 hours of travel.

Travel broadens the mind.

Apparently, I must have my head up my arse.

In the weeds.

2006-04-27T09:52:00.000-04:00

Sorry all, I thought that after the definitive agreement was signed that things would go back to normal.

I was an idiot to think that lawyers would only take one pound of flesh, when there are still a couple of hundred left.

Added to the new list of moronic legal demands are our new corporate overlords demanding a grueling schedule of "Vision statement" meetings, team building exercises, diversity training ("What, I can't refer to Norwegians as 'Weegies' anymore? What the Hell?" and other consultant inspired bullshit that is now eating away at my weekends and evening.

If I couldn't drink at work, this would be unbearable.

Oh well, maybe when the deal is finalized I shall have a life.

I'm not dead

2006-04-19T07:06:00.000-04:00

I just feel like it. I've been spending my time generating mountauns if documents for the lawyers (when we are done we will have deforested the northern hemisphere to provide paper for their inane demands) and trying to debug an insidious little, okay, well big problem out in the field.

It seems that semiconductor manufaturers are not fond of fire ine their clean-rooms.

Honestly, if that's such a problem, why'd they buy a SootMaster 5000™ from us in the first place?

Hopefully, I'll be back tomorrow with something marginally amusing.

Perspective.

2006-04-13T16:51:00.000-04:00

I’m better off than 99% of the people on this planet and still I moan. Oh, it’s true that I’ve seen more idiocy of late and the stress at work is growing to infarction levels, but we don’t have to lay any one off and soon the lawyers will be gone, taking with them the bulk of the money. This is normal, I suppose, but it does nothing to slake my desire to beat them severely about the head and shoulders with a blunt accountant.

The downside seems to be an endless mind-numbing life, glued to the corporate teat. We have already been given procedure manuals from our new corporate overlords.

Frankly, they’re amazing. There are guidelines for what food can be eaten on the premises, vendor interaction, bathroom comportment and team building exercises!

“Your company loves you!” the manuals exhort. They were written by pod people and predict my fate in Nostradamic quatrains.

“The chubby one shall piss and moan;
Alcohol will be banned on the premises;
And should he resort to arson;
The company shall recover its money by selling his organs.”

I am doomed. I shall grow old; my body kept alive by life-support machines, my brain hooked up to the company’s computers to be accessed at will by nerds with no desire for world domination.

It is an ugly future; all porn sites are blocked.

I spent last night contemplating my options whilst ignoring the familial hullabaloo. The cats were chasing each other and the dog was trying to dig a hole in the carpet. The boys were taking turns punching each other in the shoulder. (I remember doing this with my brother, but not the reason. Perhaps clots forming in the contusions are supposed to migrate to the brain and slowly kill it, allowing adequate blood supply to more important male organs, like the beer gut.)

Gretchen tried to engage me in conversation, but I just sat, staring vacantly at the TV, dranking beer and brooding.

“Honey,” I finally said, "Just so you know, I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some damn machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug."

So, she got up, unplugged the TV and threw out all my beer.

“Get a hold of yourself!” She said. “Think of your new bosses as fresh meat! New peasants to subjugate! New victims to fleece, sheep to shear, lemmings to mallet! Now get out there and start scheming. And don’t forget to bring back any valuables that they are foolish enough to leave lying about in the company safe.”

So it turns out that I am a very lucky man after all. My love always knows just what to say.

An open letter to His Grace, Edward Rendell, Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

2006-04-11T12:29:00.000-04:00

Your Grace,

I spent the good portion of this morning stuck in traffic on Route 322. Apparently, an Amish buggy had jack-knifed and was then hit by a team of Mennonite Clydesdales hauling a cargo of highly flammable corn-cobs for the out-house industry. The scene must have been horrific, what with the Clydesdales whinnying as they burst into flames and subsequently exploded.

Oh the equinity!

Ironically, this all occurred in the shadow of your latest, grandest, public works project; the gleaming white superhighway known as I-99. It is a wondrous road; rising ribbon-like from the valley below to the loft peak of Sky-Top and beyond. It was a thing of beauty when it was almost completed three years ago.

Today it is just as beautiful and just as almost completed.

You see, for the last three years, we have been forced to drive on Route 322 (the cattle trail alongside I-99). We have been faced with a daily crawl up Sky Top, stuck behind teams of oxen and plodding mules, whilst being taunted by Road Construction signs and barrels. "Warning! Construction Zone!" They tell us. "You are going too fast!"

And yet, these signs have not witnessed a Penn DOT worker in the same period. There can, after all, be no construction zone without construction workers, n’est-ca pas?

Yes, I have heard you state that your construction workers are busy elsewhere. We have all seen the road signs: “Welcome to Pennsylvania! (Road construction next 500 miles)”

By the way, this is a much better slogan than the older “Pennsylvania! America starts here!” which was an unnecessary pronouncement if there ever was one, as we were all well aware that Italy stops at our New Jersey border.

Be that as it may, it seems that you could take three actions vis-à-vis the I-99 debacle. You could take the bold approach and have Penn DOT finish the freeway (I know; that would be risky. A politician that actually gets things accomplished? People would talk!). The upside to this is that I could get to work on the same day that I leave home.

You could order the fallacious “Construction” signs removed; returning the speed limit on Route 322 to its fin de ciècle value. This action would allow me to make the twelve mile journey to and from work in less than a fortnight.

Or, you could simply declare the road a triumph of post-modernist art from the realist school.

“See?” you could say, “ It looks just like a freeway, and yet, it isn’t!”

Voters might get a tad miffed at the $240 million price tag for a 35 mile long post-modern sculpture, but then again, politicians have traditionally shown themselves to be uncompromising supporters of the Arts, what with their firm commitment to exotic dance and the like. The downside to this option, is that I would have to give up my highly paid (and taxed) engineering job and revert to a low-income, simple existence of worm ranching and animal husbandry; the later of which probably being illegal under the "Defense of Marriage" act.

Please reply with your decision at your earliest convenience. I eagerly await your response with the greatest interest.

I remain, Sir, your Obt. Servt.

Dr. E. Scientist, PhD.

Feed a fever, starve a cold,

2006-04-07T11:28:00.000-04:00

Drown an accountant, drive a stake through the heart of a lawyer.

Well, that last line is just silly. I’d never advocate harm towards a human, so the accountant, despite being a crashing bore, was let go.

The lawyer, on the other hand, had it coming. I kept warning people that he was a vampire, but they all laughed at me. “Nonsense!” They said. “There are no such things as vampires!”

The implication was that I am some sort of lunatic. Honestly, they looked at me as if I was a gibbering, drooling maniac. Well, I showed them!

I drove a stake through the lawyer's heart, and he died.

Mark my words, they'll listen next time.

These Things I Believe, Part II

2006-04-06T16:31:00.000-04:00

(Part I)

I believe that if success was really 99% perspiration, the deodorant industry would go bankrupt.

I believe that I will stop trying to build and unnecessarily large weather machine, and just buy an SUV instead.

I believe that George Romero got his zombie film ideas buy observing 14 year old boys on an all female topless beaches. (“Breasts…. BREEEEEEEEASTS!”)

I believe women would change that last statement to include all males over the age of 14.

I believe that Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be a convenience store, not a Federal law enforcement agency.

I believe that necessity is the mother of invention, but the skank-ho has no idea who’s the father.

I believe in angles.

I believe that those who claim that they do not, are just being obtuse.

I believe I can fly, just as soon as I get these bars off my window.

I believe that a cocktail of Irish whiskey and Thorazine is quite possibly the mostts wondefrul kjraslkkkkkk, mmmnaaaaaaaaaaaahhh

Nonsense!

2006-04-06T15:18:00.000-04:00

“PARIS (AFP) - Astronomers say they have spotted a cloud of alcohol in deep space that measures 463 billion kilometres (288 billion miles) across, a finding that could shed light on how giant stars are formed from primordial gas.”

This is a rather nasty thing to say about Michael Moore, even if he is formed from primordial gas.

In any event, I don’t believe a word of it, since there is no way the man would leave that much booze laying about.

I know I wouldn’t, and I’m barely 95% his girth.

UPDATE!!!

Okay, I guess it's a stretch as Moore is a director and not really a star, but we can blame this on the translators.

Something will have to be done.

2006-04-05T14:59:00.000-04:00

And I’m just the person to ignore it. I’m too busy, you see. I made the mistake of watching the young’uns play Oblivion, and decided to try it myself.

“But you’re playing on our machine, with our game DVD!” comes the inevitable moans.

“Well, boo-bloody-hoo! Would you like me to call a Waaaambulance?” I say in a stern, but fair, patrician manner. I firmly believe that it is the responsibility of adults to teach children to act maturely. However, since I can’t teach to save my life, I settle for taunting.

I will be in big trouble when they get larger, or ever get enough money to afford goons of their own.

“Besides, you need to mow the lawn.” I add, not taking my eyes from the screen. I have just killed a goblin and am looting the body.

It occurs to me that I might be a nerd.

“But there’s three inches of snow on the ground!” They protest.

“Well, a couple of days ago, you lot were willing to go to school wearing naught but Speedos. Get out there, shovel the grass and then mow the lawn”. I wave them away.

“Shoo!” They shoo, grumbling about how unreasonable I am, but this is for their own good.

Honestly, kids these days have no problem solving skills and no grounding in reality. If they can’t figure out how to mow a snow covered lawn, they’d never be able to figure out how to unlock the Marvish trapped Hell-gates of the Temple of Xardoz in the grand ruins of the Googlish city of Quim

UPDATE!!!

SafeT comes up with a better solution:

"See, I would've salted the lawn. But my problem solving skills always have a tint of jackboot in them. Luckily your children don't take after your evil ways, Dr E, or else their problem solving skills might lead them to an eventually bleached wood chipper and a suspiciously evil mulch pile."

It's a good thing the kids don't have SafeT's reasoning skills, or I wouldn't be able to play their video games at all.

A few observations on the way to work

2006-04-03T14:15:00.000-04:00

A new business was gone in next to us, by the name “ReXam”. Their permanent sign is not ready, so they have a giant banner.

"ReXam" seems to be a poor choice for a company name. Maybe it’s just me, but the name “ReXam” conjures up disturbing images of rubber gloves, hospital gowns and pained grunting.

So I shall steal the banner as soon as it gets dark enough.

I also saw a lot of kids waiting for the bus, wearing naught but tee shirts and shorts. It was raining with a few snow flakes and way too cold, but I already know the answer to this one: “I don’t wanna look like a doofus!”

Is there some sort of “daylight saving” time-table that says teenagers must not, under any circumstances, leave the house with clothing other than items that look like cheese cloth undergarments, after a certain date? And who is on the committee that sets this fashion faux-pas deadline? IT’S SNOWING! FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, PUT YOUR DAMN COAT ON! IT COST $250!

“We're n-n-n-n-n-not c-c-c-c-old!” is the response from the blue-skinned and shivering primates. “We're old and s-s-s-smart enough to d-d-d-dress myself!”

Erm, no.

You are demonstrably not smart enough.

We still have hopes (they are fading somewhat) that you might some day recover from teenagehood, but right now, left to your own devices you’d be hanging by your tail from the walnut tree, peeling fruit with your feet.

I insist. Coats are reluctantly accepted, albeit with much grumbling. I get the “oppressor” scowl, but I do not care. In fact, I cackle maniacally, letting them know that being a capricious tyrant is how I get my jollies. I am Ming the Merciless.

"And get a damn haircut!" I shout as they slouch away. "You look like hippies!"

This fellow deserves an award.

2006-04-03T10:57:00.000-04:00

Bravo!

I should write ad copy; I have a gift!

2006-04-01T07:10:00.000-05:00

Peemil has been exposed to Dr. Pepper, and he doesn’t like it. No Sir, not one bit. Being an Australian, I suspect he was expecting a beer, rather than the sickeningly sweet, heavily caffeinated, carbonated prune-juice beverage he was served. And when you put it that way, who can blame him?

But when one’s goal is to create a pack of high-velocity children in order to maximize entropy at a wake (such as knocked over caskets and the like), Dr. Pepper is just the thing to give them, since, unlike crack, it is not illegal to give to kids.

So that is why I bought a case of the stuff; to liven up the Grandparents’ wake. There was way too much sobbing and shrieking, what with them both dying at the same tine.

Grand-dad Flannery had gone quietly in his sleep, but Grandma died hard, screaming “Wake up, you old coot; you’re in the wrong lane!”

In order to lighten the mood, I gave a few bottles of “liquid crack” to each of the kids and filled the empty spaces in the caskets with candy; making “coffiñatas”, if you will.

And these kids caught on fast! After tipping over Grandpa’s coffin there was no stopping them. It may have been a wee bit rough on the other bereaved families (this was a largish funeral home; lots going on), but my goal was achieved and the kids made out like bandits; getting candy at the Flannery gig and a nice collection of watches and jewelry from the others.

This sort of thing is why Americans drink the stuff; the flavour evokes a flood of childhood memories of happier times.

License to kill

2006-03-31T09:34:00.000-05:00

James Bond really gets on my tits. “Ooo, look at me! I’m wearing a £5000 silk Armani suit bought by you, the taxpayer. I’m going to tear it when I boff some random hotel maid in a broom closet and you lot are going to have to buy me a new one! Why? Because I’ve got a license to kill, that’s why!”

Riiiiight, even though Bond is after me, I’m supposed to help pay for his suits. Yet if I tear one of my hoodies, I have to buy a new one out of my own pocket, or batter a chav into unconsciousness and swipe his.

While the last option would cover the “public service” bit in my plea bargain, the hoody would then be covered with unsavory chav-fluids and teef, rendering it unwearable.

So, as much as I hate the Department of Motor Vehicles, off I went to get my license.

There are three lines at our DMV; two for motor vehicle related items, and one clearly marked “OTHER LICENSES” to which someone had added “IF YOU WANT A DRIVERS LICENSE YOU ARE IN THE WRONG LINE”.

Of course, it would be too much to ask for people that want to be operating tons of speeding steel death to be able to actually read.

“I’m here for my driver’s license!” Announced the first person in line.

“Sorry, I can’t help you.” Replied the clerk pointing at the sign.

The supplicant looked up and read it, lips sounding out the hard words.

“But I been in line for an hour!” he said, thrusting the application towards the clerk.

“Then you had an hour to read the sign. Next!”

The next person in line was wearing a wife beater and a stained trucker cap. (He was also wearing pants; this isn’t Alabama, you know) “I’m here to get mah license back and I ain’t drunk this time!” He stated proudly.

The harried clerk stood up and shouted “LOOK, I CAN”T ISSUE DRIVERS LICENSES! IF YOU ARE HERE FOR ONE, GO TO ONE OF THE OTHER TWO LINES!”

There was no movement from the queue, other than the writhing of fingers deep in nostrils.

And so the morning progressed. The fellow in front of me was wearing a NASCAR tee shirt bearing the number three with angel wings and a halo. His attention was entirely focused on the driver’s license application that he was filling out in pencil, so I wrote “Rest in Pieces!” on his shirt. Hopefully that would get him beaten up when he went back to the bar.

Finally it was my turn.

“I can’t give you a driver’s license.” Said the clerk in a defeated tone.

“I don’t want one. I want a license to kill!”

The clerk looked startled, then started to chuckle. “Good one!” he said.

“No I’m serious! I want a license to kill.”

“Listen, we can’t issue licenses to kill, or half of these booger-picking morons would be on the floor drowning in their own blood!"

“And this would be wrong on what level?” I asked.

There was a full minute of silent contemplation, after which he issued me a learner’s permit. I must be accompanied by a DMV employee, and for now may only bludgeon irritating people into unconsciousness. He gave me my first lesson on the spot.

I did very well. The DMV clerk said that I was a natural and after a few more sessions, I’d be a shoo-in to get my license. We agreed that I would come back every morning next week.

In your face Jimmy Bond!

Chapter 5. Homeward bound.

2006-03-29T21:37:00.000-05:00

It seemed the low point of our trip. We were without alcohol. Franklin was mourning the loss of his cheese and A.J. his shirt. However, the news of our dye escapade reached the ears of the staff, and off we were sent to the psychiatrist specializing in troubled youths.

We were a little offended, as he had earned a PhD in Bovine Psychology, but hadn’t actually worked much with people.

Oh, it all makes perfect sense now. I get frequent bovine looks from teenagers. “You were caught, at 3AM, releasing skunks into the teacher’s lounge” I say to them on what seems to be a weekly basis. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

In response, I get a cud-chewing ungulate looks. “Whhhaaaaa?” they respond.

Seriously, that’s damn near a moo.

“Sneaking out of the house that late on a school night!” I continue scolding “I am very disappointed in you both!” Alas, it’s in one cow-like ear and out the udder.

Be that as it may, we understood that a surly, bovine response would only land us in deeper hot water. Our only hope was complete, total and utter dishonesty. We informed him that we were rushing at a fraternity and this was part of our initiation ceremony.

“Which one?” He asked.

“Tappa Kegga Day” Well, Duuuuh…

He’d heard of it. We were free to go. We asked for our robes back, but to no avail. They were infested with crabs and had been burned. We were to see the nurse for some Qwell cream on the way out.

“What about my cheese?” “And my shirt?” Frank and A.J. queried almost in union.

They could have them back as the hospital staff refused to burn them, citing toxic combustion gases.

We were each given bus fare, a pair of hospital-issue skivvies, a tube of Qwell and sent on our way.

We entered the bus station apprehensively. As usual, it was filled with furtive heroin addicts that have achieved the minor miracle of looking more unsavory than Charles Manson on a bad-hair day. They edged away from us. “We don’t want no trouble, guys…” They said, eyeing up our hospital gowns and the now throbbing cheese.

Now the good side about having blue skin, wearing hospital gowns, skivvies and paper slippers is that we got the very best seats on the bus; back by the commode where no one would bother us. Franklin pushed the cheese under the seat in front of him and we all tried to get some sleep. Sometime, during that hot July night,the pressure and heat proved too much for the abused wax rind. Half of the now liquid cheese poured into the heating duct and the rest oozed down into luggage compartment.

We were made to walk the last few miles and haven’t been allowed on a Greyhound since. We promised ourselves we would never do anything that stupid, at least until the next weekend when we were going to have a hard liquor and trampoline night, and finish testing our latest invention; the self-adhesive, prosthetic unibrow.

Epilogue:

After graduation, A.J. decided that neither Philosophy nor Physics was challenging enough, so he went to medical school and is currently the chief neurosurgeon at Cedar-Sinai hospital. He frequently offers to perform brain surgery on me at a greatly reduced rate.

Franklin went into the Navy’s nuclear program and retired last year after a successful career culminating in the command of an LA class fast attack boat. He still mutters to himself, at least he does when I’m around.

I own a very profitable Herpestidae ranch and sell mongoose and ferret dairy products to lactose intolerant folks world wide. I also sell Amway, Tupperware, Mary Kaye Cosmetics and navy blue Speedos.

Greyhound Bus Lines adopted our “Über-ripe sheep’s milk gorgonzola/burnt transmission fluid” aroma as their official company fragrance. Judging by the smell of their buses, they must have spent millions to equip their fleet with atomizers.

The bastards never paid us a penny in royalties.

Chapter 4. We break fast at the hospital

2006-03-28T21:42:00.000-05:00

Hospital cooking, we decided, had a bad rap. To be sure, it was difficult to identify what some of the grub (it might have been grubs for all we knew) but it was far superior to dodgy fish-paste sandwiches, catfish sushi and the well fermented sheep’s milk gorgonzola the hospital staff had disposed of. We also could drink as much fountain soda as we wished.

Well, teenagers Vs. Free soda; not really a fair match, though the soda put up a valiant fight. However, pretty soon we had to get rid of it. We got up to go to the bathroom, and damn me if everyone didn’t follow us.

Now, I don’t have a bashful bladder. I’m male and that makes the whole world my bathroom. It’s one of the perks that we get to offset longer female lifespan, male pattern baldness and those burdensome karmic mortgages called “kids” that keep saying things like “Dad, do you have two tens for a five?”, “What note from the principal?”, “I think I’m going to be sick!” and “Urrrrp! What do you know? I was right! Sorry about the cat, your paper work and whatever is under your bed that is not the cat.”

Regardless of the world being our oyster, commode-wise, I must admit that we all had problems whizzing whilst wearing those posteriorally vented hospital gowns and having the entire schizophrenia ward as an audience.

“Puta Geriny!” one of them shouted.

Now, despite this apparently Spanish insult, urinal etiquette demands that the pissor must examine the tile immediately in front of his eyes as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. This prevents straying eyes and meandering streams. After all, no one wants a wet shoe or leg, especially if the pissee is the fellow next to you, and he just happens to be a very large Samoan. We strived to ignore them.

However, focusing on the tiles became increasingly difficult with the increasingly loud choruses of “PUTA-GERINY! PUTA-GERINY! PUTA-GERINY!” so I spun around and demanded to know what the hell they were talking about.

“You have 'Puta Geriny' written on your asses!” replied a spokesloon.

“Well, not really.” I began, “You see…”

“Oh yes you do!” interrupted the spokesloon “P-U-T-A, then on the next line, G-E-R then a wee, hairy asterisk, then I-N-Y. So I suppose it really ought to be pronounced ‘Puta ger*iny’ instead.”

I explained the whole “Put a Tiger in your Tank” debacle and noted that they could only see a portion of the message due to the hospital gowns. They seemed put-off.

The spokesloon turned away muttering to himself. “I told you, John, didn’t I?" he said "There are some real nut-jobs in this place!”

Chapter 3. A kind tradesman gives us a ride

2006-03-27T04:56:00.000-05:00

“I’m starving!” A.J. announced as our buzz started to wear off. The problem was, there was not much opportunity to buy food between Monmouth and Amity, save a diner in Rickreall, which was unlikely to provide much food at one in the morning in exchange for some love beads, a few packs of condoms and an eighth ounce rather sticky bud that we had found stashed in the robes. A.J. turned to Franklin. "The cheese..."

Franklin clenched the softening cheese to his bosom and bared his teeth. “No!” he hissed. “This is for later!”

“Well, we need to do something.” A.J. replied. He turned to gain my support.

I wasn’t there. I had seen a fish hatchery.

I can tell you now, that fish are easier to catch with the proper tools; poles, nets, dynamite, etc., and we spent quite a long time cursing and splashing (once I almost achieved Nirvana when a few thousand fingerlings got trapped immediately below my waist sash) but soon we had caught enough for a fine dinner and slunk of to a nearby barn. It was there that we discovered nobody had any matches. It was also were we discovered that there is a very good reason why nobody serves catfish sushi.

Come the morning, we dusted the hay, fish bones and barn cats off of our robes and set out to hitchhike. We stood, ripening in the sun for almost three hours before anyone stopped. It turned out to be a septic tank pumping truck driven by an elderly gentleman. “Hop in, Boys!” he said cheerfully.

The morning’s Monmouth Examiner lay on the passenger seat, with the main headline proclaiming “Hare Krishna Convention Marred by Indecent Exposure Arrests” and a smaller one saying “Locals Claim Don Ho Visiting Area”.

As there was only room for two more in the cabin, we decided that Franklin and his cheese would ride on a rumble seat located at the back of the tank.

“Yup.” the old fellow stated with pride as ha ground through the gears, “Honey Dippers, Inc. are number one in the number two business! In thirty years of service, I’ll bet there’s not a septic tank in three counties that I haven’t pumped dry with this here rig.” Judging from our low speed, it hadn't been emptied in that time either. We crept along at barely 25MPH until noon.

About that time, we heard Franklin singing from the back of the truck. In retrospect we should have stopped and flogged some sense into him, but as long as he was happy, he wasn’t bothering us. The truth was, he had smoked all the weed and was operating the load release lever like an engine telegraph. “Damn the torpedoes!” He’d roar between snatches of H.M.S. Pinafore. “Full speed ahead!” He’d slam the ‘engine telegraph’ fully forward and leave a brown streak on the road before signaling ‘full astern’ a few hundred yards later and cutting off the flow. We had a long way to go and he wanted to conserve his ‘bunker oil’.

Now, all this wouldn’t have mattered too much as the residents of Rickreall are used to such behavior being located fairly close to a University, but the governor was up to visit a vandalized fish hatchery and Franklin managed to douse the gubernatorial limo.

“Yarr!” Franklin screamed delightedly. “Swab down your poop-deck ya scury dog!”

The state troopers had no trouble catching up to us.

I wasn’t too worried, mind you. After all, Oregon’s state motto is “Don’t harsh my buzz, man!” and the state officials mean it (unlike Missouri; the “Show me!” state, where if you do show them, they immediately cart you off to the slammer. Bastards.)

A.J. and I decided to let Franklin do the talking. If he aroused the trooper’s suspicion, we could claim that we were kidnapped by a dangerous, cheese-molesting lunatic.

“Hi gents!” the trooper said genially, eying up our robes. “You wouldn’t have been involved in that riot in Monmouth last night, would you?”

We assured him that we were just your average fun-loving blue-skinned teenagers in fishy smelling, orange robes and knew nothing about any riots.

“Them are you boys dressed up early for Halloween?” asked the state trooper, not unkindly.

“No, we’re physics students.” Franklin answered in a churlish tone.

“And what, pray tell is that?” asked the trooper, pointing to the wheel of gorgonzola that had seen better days.

“It’s my cheese!”Franklin responded hotly. “And please keep that mountainous Samoan away from it!”

There are watershed moments in one’s life. Times when you attempt to cross the Rubicon but are swept away to places unexpected. Instances that you can look back upon and say things like: “Yup, that’s exactly when the trooper decided to take us to the mental hospital for observation”, or “Gosh, Franklin is truly an idiot.”

This instant was a convolution of the two.

Before the trooper closed the door on us, he gently placed the cheese on my lap.

It squirmed like a clutch of hatching cobra eggs, and gurgled ominously.

Chapter 2. Motel No-tell

2006-03-26T19:23:00.000-05:00

Finding a hotel that would accept us proved more difficult than we had anticipated. For some reason, the night staff seemed reluctant to give us a room. “Besides,” they said, “we're full. There is a Hare Krishna convention in town.”

“Aw, shucks! We don’t care about sharing a hotel with Hare Krishnas!”

“No rooms!” they insisted. “We don’t want you Mormons duking it out with them! Now, Git! And take Don Ho with you!”

Outside of the lobby, A.J. reasoned that we might have better luck if we could borrow a hose and get cleaned up before attempting to check in. We stole around the back of the hotel by the pool and found a faucet.

Now, I’m not the type of fellow that enjoys spending an evening in cold, wet Mormon missionary type garb going from hotel to hotel, so I hung my semi-clean clothes across my bike and snuck into the hot tub with a bottle of wine. This was a purely a survival tactic and had nothing to do with the young ladies that were already present. Franklin and A.J., being well aware of my superior wilderness skills soon followed suit.

You’re probably wondering how we could get away with jumping into a hot tub already occupied by young ladies that did not know us from Adam, without a good deal of screaming, slapping, and/or calling of the police. What you have to understand is that thanks to two events of that decade we were quite safe.

First, Miami Vice had pretty much killed boxers as a skivvies option. The second serendipitous event was an Exxon promotion gone horribly awry. Our local filling station had ordered a few hundred tee-shirts emblazoned with the logo “Put a Tiger in your Tank!”

And that would have been just fine and dandy, had not the Chinese underwear company gotten confused and delivered a few hundred briefs instead. It seemed that very few motorists wanted “Put a Tiger in your Tank!” emblazoned across their arse, so as poor college students, we were able to buy them cheap and dye them navy blue to obscure the lettering. In the dim lights, they looked just like Speedos, so there was very little screaming, slapping, or police summoning.

In fact, there was quite a bit of drinking and teen-agerly bravado. We told the young ladies of our wealth and sophistication. We were on a bicycle trip across wine country, rather than going in a limo, we said. “You see, it’s a rather more authentic experience that way!” We posited earnestly. The young ladies did not discourage us, so with each refill of the wine glasses, we avowed our eternal love and gave up offerings of increasingly lavish terms.

“I would grow you the most exquisite and rare Orchids, should you deign to sleep with me this night!” A.J. whispered to one his very best Barry White voice.

“And I shall buy you a forest green silk camisole and a string of pearls two yards in length to match your auburn hair!” I remarked to another while filling her glass.

Not to be outdone, Franklin, who had been drinking straight out of his bottle, belched and said “And I’ll tattoo your name on my penis!”

We looked at him aghast, sure that he had spoilt our chances, but the young lady simply remarked “My name is Loretta-Marie Jonston-Smythe-MacKinesson.”

Franklin seemed crestfallen, but then brightened.

“Hey!” He said. “How about if just I do your initials?”

The young ladies whispered amongst themselves and got out of the hot tub. “Stay here!” They commanded. “We’ll be right back!”

And so we waited.

And waited.

Pretty soon a group of Hare Krishnas stalked by, glaring at us on their way to the sauna. Now, these weren't your normal "Would you like a flower?" tambourine-beating, happy-dancing Hare Krishnas. No, these were the "What are you looking at, tit-face?", gut-slashing, head-stomping, Provisional Wing of the Hare Krishnas; mean bastards that would as soon glass you as look at you.

“Fucking Mormons!” one of them muttered.

We decided not to make them pay for their insolence. After all, the ladies would be back soon and we didn't want the place splattered with blood. So we settled back to wait some more.

After a while, it became clear that our young ladies were not coming back. Reluctantly, we climbed out of the hot tub and dried off, only to find that the dye had run, turning our skin a lovely Prussian blue (accept for A.J., who looked like a slightly bilious smurf) from head to foot, except in the bits covered by the lettering. Furthermore, no amount of scrubbing seemed to remove the dye.

Well, no matter. We ditched our wet skivvies and went to retrieve our clothes.

Unfortunately, all of our clothing, our bicycles and packs were gone.

The only thing left was A.J.’s shirt, the cheese and a note from the young ladies stating “You may keep these.”

We stood about shivering, six blue-dyed cheeks proclaiming "Put a Tiger in your Tank!" in pasty white, yet quite legible, lettering.

We were trespassing, under-aged and drunk, naked and now penniless. There was only one thing to do.

We stole the Hare Krishnas' robes and ran like hell into the night.

Chapter 1. We begin our journey.

2006-03-24T08:52:00.000-05:00

What follows is comletely true. Even the names have not been changed as those involved were far from innocent.

Deep in the past century, before some of you lot were even born (it is important to establish that the stature of limitations has long since expired) I embarked on a bicycle trip across the wine country of Oregon accompanied by two other students.

I must say, we were an odd looking group. Franklin “Dark Satanic” Mills was a stocky, olive skinned fellow physics student with the habit of muttering to himself and a predilection for lederhosen (which he insisted was native Australian garb). Arthur-John Tatupu (A.J.) was a powerfully built philosophy student of Samoan ancestry, who decided to minor in physics so that he could get some “easy A’s”. I rounded out the group with my rugged good looks and impressive physique. To be sure, their descriptions might differ, but what else would one expect from a couple of pathalogical liars?

The plan, like most other Brilliant Plans™ was born of a bottle. We would ride from winery to winery, partaking in free samples and bring home a few bottles of plonk to impress the ladies. We would dress up for the trip to aid our credibility and gain access to samples of more expensive vintages.

The exercise would help sweat out the alcohol as we rode, so there would be no way that we could get to drunk. We would camp out under the stars, eat trout, crayfish, filched new potatoes and whatever else we could lay our hands on.

It was a fine plan, and it may have worked had not Franklin brought along a bottle of Southern Comfort, and had A.J. decided not to wear a Hawaiian shirt that looked like Walt Disney had thrown up on it. We looked like two drunken Mormon missionaries accompanied by Don Ho in full pimp regalia; hardly the picture of sophisticated wealth that we had originally intended.

As night approached, we decided to partake in whatever solid food the final winery offered. This turned out to be cheese and crackers.

Now, to my uncultured beak, the sheep’s milk gorgonzola smelled like a chili cheese omelet that had been left outside in a dirty sweat sock for the full span of an Arizona August. Franklin, however, stated that “it had a strong head, pointy feet and a delicate schnauzer” or some such. He insisted that we should buy one of the 40 pound wheels to take back to our apartment. A.J., ever the philosophical epicure, agreed.

I was out-voted. We left the winery with the wheel stuffed in one of Franklin’s panniers.

After a few more unsteady miles, we decided that we were still hungry. We pulled out our supply of fish-paste sandwiches only to find that they had fared none too well in the heat.

You are probably well aware that teen-aged boys will eat almost anything if left to their own devices. This is because the part of the male brain that is used for common sense does not develop until after we are married and have our own children, but by then it’s far too late to do any good.

Call it serendipty then, for this is the only time we made a sensible decision. After one whiff we voted against projectile vomiting and dysentery, even though our alternatives were few.

“We could break open the cheese…”A.J. suggested hopefully. “NO!” Franklin and I shouted, albeit for different reasons.

There was a cow in an adjacent field. We would have milk instead.

It was decided that Franklin would distract the cow, I would do the milking and A.J. would carry the buckets of milk back. Franklin crept towards the animal, proffering a sandwich.

“Here, Bossy, Bossy…” He whispered in a creepy cow-molester tone.

Now, I don’t know very much about cows other than the fact that they make a very acceptable tofu substitute, but I do know that: A). Cows don’t eat rancid fish-paste sandwiches and B). A cow’s udders are located amidships and are equipt with six uddlets. This particular animal had but one massive udd, and that was located well aft.

I started to back away.

“Hurry up with the milking!” Franklin hissed. “She’s starting to lose interest in the sandwich!”

I decided not to educate him on the whole male/female issue as I figured he’d find out soon enough. A.J. and I ran.

Franklin, finally connecting the dots, followed close behind. We vaulted a fence to safety and turned to look at the bull that had since broken off pursuit and was now busy pawing our abandoned gear into the mud.

There was much back slapping. This scrape would make an excellent heroic story with which to regale our girlfriends. Amidst the celebration, Franklin’s face suddenly clouded over. “I smell cheese! Did one of you bastards cut into the wheel?”

“That’s not cheese.” A.J. answered blandly. “We’ve landed in a muck pile.”

It was decided that we would stay at a hotel, just for this one night, mind you, and get cleaned up.

Preface

2006-03-22T21:01:00.000-05:00

Look, I’m not pulling an El Barbudo or anything. I’ve just been dealing with lawyers and accountants for the last few weeks and have had little time to write.

Which is a damn shame, as I am clearly a brilliant writer on the level of Faulkner, Hemmingway, or that fellow that does the Penthouse Letters.

In any event, I’ve been working on an explanatory piece covering my formative collegiate decades. It details how one might contract, through no fault of their own, nor male-to-male contact, a case of crabs, ambulatory freckles, or “French lice” as they were known in the vernacular of the day (today they might be known as “Freedom lice”) whilst on a bicycle trip with two (male) college chums.

Yes, I am aware that was a run on sentence. But it made you re-read the paragraph, whetting your appetite about the posts to come. Besides, aren’t you at least slightly curious about how the wheel of sheep’s-milk gorgonzola fits in to this?

I thought so.

Balder is dead!

2006-03-20T15:21:00.000-05:00

Loki has killed the sun-god, and all the world is darkness...

UPDATE!

Sorry! False alarm. The damn breaker flipped again. Fucking sub-standard wiring.

Pennsylvanian Whines

2006-03-17T14:17:00.000-05:00

We just poured our French visitor onto a plane. He is a nice fellow that was more than happy to help us in our St. Padraig’s day celebration. For one without Yankee style girth, he kept up with us valiantly.

“All these beers are brewed locally, No?” He asked, barely slurring.

“Right on the premises” I assured him. Since our phone lines were down, we went to the brewery to work as they have free wi-fi. Pints of stout appeared before we even got the chance to open our laptops.

“I see that people are drinking wine. Is this also made here?” He asked.

“No, they must be local Pennsylvanian wines, by law, but they are not made here.” I answered.

“Are they any good?”

“They compare favourably with the very best Scottish wines.” I answered and he promptly lost interest in the subject.

I thought this was a safe response as there is no way there is a Scottish winery to offend.

I was wrong. I’ve always thought of the Scots as woad painted barbarians, pouring out of the north, with a claymore in one hand and Mons Meg under the other (as opposed to my peaceful Oirish ancestors who were woad painted barbarians that poured out of the pubs with shillelaghs in one arm and a sheep under the other), but it turns out that the Scots are all peaceful and civilized now, and I’m the prat.

Upon further investigation, I’m quite poorly informed about the Scots. Edinburgh is not the home of the Hobbit Edin. Rabbie Burns is not Scottish for “sexually induced rug burn” and “Partick Thistle Nil” is not the name for one of Glasgow’s less famous Footie clubs, despite what they keep saying on the radio.

I was only up there a short while and I spent most of my time in the whisky mines so I don’t remember any vineyards. Perhaps a kind Scot could educate me. What in blazes do you make wine out of? Neeps and haggis gizzards, with a Sassenach or two thrown in to give it body?

And how do your wines stack up against the Icelandic vintages?

Blow me if I wasn’t right after all.

2006-03-16T20:27:00.000-05:00

And lucky for TelCo management, I was.

Our T-1, the telephonic/data backbone of our office; our lifeline to such essential business tools as Sudoku and Word Whomp; our gateway to the magical realms of Jell-O porn (“There’s always womb for Jell-O™!”) was been mostly down for the last month.

This makes it very difficult to sell the company, or more importantly, blog from work. This has been exacerbated by the fact that I’ve had to chaperone two accountants that are entirely too competent for my comfort. More on them later.

So, as I was saying, we have this intermittent outage of all our telephony. I called our T-1 provider on the 16th of February. They promised that they will test the lines immediately. I pointed out that since the lines are currently up, their tests may not be as fruitful as they think. “No problem!” They reply. It turns out that their testing will shut down our lines. Sorted!

Erm, not really. I call them again.

And again.

And a few times after that.

Finally, I find one tech that has a demonstrable IQ. He is not an eggplant like the rest of the TelCo employees, and he quickly determines that the problem is between the Verizon Smart jack, and TelCo's internal equipment in our facility. A technician shall be dispatched to us, forthwith, who is also not an eggplant.

Now I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I’m a vegist, or anything like that. After all, some of my best friends are Vegetable-Americans. But let’s face it; eggplants are rather stupid. I eagerly await the non-eggplantish tech.

It turns out to be an eggplant after all. He replaces some of the equipment and promises to come back for the rest of it. Sadly, he must have been jumped by a celebrity chef and ended up babba-ghanoushed, for he never returns.

Days pass. The Eggplants determine that it must be their cabling that is at fault. I wonder aloud if they might come out and replace it.

The concept has not occurred to them. After mulling it over, they think that, yes, replacing cable might just solve the problem of the faulty cable.

Huzzah! We are getting somewhere!

Then I get a call from their manager. I shall not use his real name, for I have no desire to be sued. Besides I have always enjoyed the act of Rogering. For the balance of this narrative, he shall be known as “Mr. Bugger Mansfield” as I trust I would enjoy Buggering substantially less than Rogering. Anyhoo, Bugger intimates that their line is no longer their problem, but Verizon’s. Verizon shall be dispatched to fix it.

There is a problem with this. Verizon has responsibility up to the Smart Jack. TelCo owns the lines up to their equipment. Our responsibility is on the other side of TelCo's equipment. Verizon politely demurs resposibility and states that Mr. Bugger Mansfield must be an eggplant, or worse. I cannot disagree. I call Mr. Bugger back and he now states it’s our problem as his techs used an old existing line when they installed the T-1.

“Would that be the old line with the exposed crimp splices that are under the leaky gutters?” I ask.

“Yes. That line was pre-existing, so it’s your problem.” Bugger replies.

“If that line were not there during installation what would you have done?” I ask.

“Well, obviously we’d have put a new one in.” He answers in a tone that indicates he thinks I’m dimmer than an Irish setter.

“And, considering the installation was free, how much would that have cost us?”

“Well, nothing.”

“So, you’re penalizing us for the fact that your install techs did a shoddy job.”

“Yes.” He says. “That’s company policy.”

Three cheers and a tiger for globalization! We’ll be running the world in no time with companies like these!

Well, as long as we can get a dial-tone, that is.

UPDATE!!

Roger has had a change of heart and has his techs out here in force to solve the problem. It shan't cost us a penny, either. Apparently,my bitching, moaning and whinging hit a nerve and rather than having to keep listening to me, they decided to replace the entire cabling.

See? Being an annoying whingy bastard hath its benefits.

Choosing the burrito that is right for YOU!

2006-03-14T15:25:00.000-05:00

I was cleaning my office this morning…I know, I know! Trust me, it won’t happen again. But at the time, our T1 was down so I could not perform my usual arduous work-a-day tasks like Sudoku and porn surfing.

Anyway, where was I before I was so rudely interrupted? Ah yes; I was cleaning my office and I found a sticky note message to myself.

This is not unusual. I send notes to myself all the time; “Pick up the cleaning”, "Fix the cat", “get bread and milk”, “If Bob doesn’t shut up I swear to God I’ll strangle the SOB”. Normal, mundane messages.

So normal and mundane that I usually just leave them up year round as I usually have cleaning / milk & bread pick-up / Cat-fixing / Bob-strangling duties to perform each week. But this note was different. It stated (in my hand writing, no less):

“Choosing the burrito that is right for YOU!”

This must have had some meaning to me at some time, but I’ll be buggered if I can remember what it was.

And I’d think I’d remember it. Personal burrito specifications are far enough outside of my daily purview that I really ought to recall it. Perhaps I was going to write a paper on "Burrito Specs and Acceptance Criteria" for the Mexican Journal of Dyspepsia. Or, perhaps one of the girthier programmers was ambling by. Who knows? It's a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a tortilla.

I’ve got absolutely no idea. Can any of you lot shed some light on this?

Retard Day at Sam’s Club™

2006-03-12T18:13:00.000-05:00

Well, no, not really. Special needs folks generally display far more common sense than our local Sam’s Club™ shoppers.

For you non-Yanks out there, Sam’s Club™ is a massive warehouse store that sells everything from bog paper to scallops; all in industrial size quantities.

Have you ever needed a 10 gallon container of mayonnaise? Sam’s Club™ has it.

Anti-VD drugs en-bulke for your regimental reunion? Sam’s Club™ carries ‘em.

Enough bog paper to last the century (or a week’s visit from your Mum-in-law). Sam’s Club™ will fix you right up.

A 100 kilo bag of cat food for your 97 cats? Well, you get the picture.

It is an amazing store that is entirely populated with people that act as if they have spent the last four years sniffing glue.

Well, except for me, of course. I had to go there since I am batching it this week and have no desire to mess up the kitchen for one person meals. I bought a variety of cased frozen sandwiches, including some “Jumbo Buffalo Chicken sandwiches” (a massive 30g ea.) that just scream salmonella. While they only bear a passing resemblance to the picture on the box, they prove to be very tasty in a dodgy carny-food sort of way.

I picked up a case motor oil, one of assorted fruit juices, a crate of 30mm cannon rounds (you’ve just gotta love this store, eh?) and headed for the cashier.

Easy peasy, right?

Well, no. Queue the glue-sniffing plague zombies. Tomorrow turns out to be the first day back to school for the college students and apparently the 48th Olympiad for competitive inbreeding is also in town.

A Sam’s Club™ employee announces Free Schnitzel samples, and instantly the main aisle is blocked with abandoned carts as the masses, and I do mean masses, scramble for the free vittles.

“For crying out loud, people. Show some consideration.” I say. “Do you people drive like this?”

Bloodshot eyed hephelumps consider the question, and nod. I have seen the parking lot and they are telling the truth.

I wrestle the cart to the left, hoping to escape through the meat department.

Three college “dudes” are blocking the aisle. They are, and I am not making this up, thumping the meat to check the freshness.

“Dude, check out this steak!” He is holding a leg of lamb and thumping it.

“Dude,” queried another, “Isn’t it melons that are supposed to be thumped?”

“Naw, dude,” answers the third, “That’ll get you a sexual harassment suit.”

I run them down with the cart; an act that you all surely must agree is in humanity’s best interest.

Fifteen minutes later I have braved the mass of slack jawed ijits and am at the cashier, some 50 scant crow flying meters from my starting point.

“Did you find every thing okay?” She asks.

I grunt and she hands me a complementary tube of model glue. I promise myself that next week I’ll not forget to sniff it before my trip to Sam’s Club™.

Ah, the first robin of spring!

2006-03-10T10:56:00.000-05:00

It was as tough as an old boot sole and very gamey; but no less a harbinger of spring, for all its flaws.

Crimping the Chimp

2006-03-09T12:51:00.000-05:00

It occurred during my third year in boarding school.

I still recall my father’s words to the Headmaster as he dropped me off.“You lot will beat the boy.” He said in even tones. The Headmaster seemed rather taken aback.

“We do use corporal punishment as a last resort, but we certainly don’t beat children.” He sputtered.

“You lot will beat the boy.” It wasn’t a demand, but a fact. Da delivered the statement in the dispassionate tone of a prophesying psychic.

I certainly didn’t hold it against him; I knew, even at eleven to take him at his word. When dad said “Don’t let me catch you….” or “Get us a beer…” I believed he meant precisely what he said.

Oh, he wasn’t always correct, occasionally he would say something absurd like “You aren’t nearly as funny as you think you are, boy...”, but usually, say 95% of the time, you could take his words as gospel.

I firmly believed that Nostradadmus was spot on in this case. They would beat me, or my name was not Evil (which it wasn’t at that time, but no matter).

Queue the Scripture and French master that we boys unkindly referred to as “Pilf”. He wasn’t a bad sort, but he seemed befuddled with the current crop of kids’ inability to care much about maintaining the British Empire, as we knew it was, well, dead.

His response to this insult was to wield a yard stick (meter stick to those of you concerned with inch/Yodel conversions) like a katana wielding Imperial Japanese army POW camp guard. I’m quite convinced that I should not be able to bend my knuckles today, if I had not been able to mimic the voice of the dim-witted lad that sat next to me.

Then one perfect day, we were taken to the zoo for a science field trip. The Science master, who was a smart fellow, called off, sick. Pilf was the designated replacement.

The whole zoo was great, but the primate building was by far our favourite. After all, they flung poo and did other, um things to each other; and I’m not referring to the Marlin Perkin’s style mutual grooming either.

One of them, a hefty male chimp with the moniker BoBo, seemed quite taken with Pilf.

Maybe a spark was passed when they made eye contact, or maybe he had a thing for sweat beaded balding pates. Maybe it was just spring; when a chimp’s fancy turns to French masters, but whatever the reason, BoBo embarked on an impressive onanistic display that resembled a palsied paint-shaker on amphetamines.

I’m talking about a screeching 150kg chimp indulging in a wank-a-thon that really ought to have been set to a über fast death-metal sound track. All the while, BoBo’s unoccupied arm was pointing to the increasingly red pate of Pilf, who was desperately trying to escort us away from the region.

We’d have none of that. At eleven, this sort of display absolutely fascinating. We squirmed and darted around him until the climactic ending of the show.

For the next couple of weeks we would, on occasion, mime “pulling a BoBo” in class, whenever Pilf’s back was turned.

And all was fine until someone added sound effects and got rumbled. Then it turned out that Da was prescient once again.

Trust me on this one.

2006-03-07T18:44:00.000-05:00

Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

The Anti-Macassar Liberation Front

2006-03-05T19:59:00.002-05:00

Newark International Airport. It is the gateway for the upper East coast of the United States. It has been said that if you wait there long enough, you will see all the types of people that travel to and from the United States.

I am not talking about the better, moneyed sort; those fly in and out of JFK. I am talking about the baser, vile, detritus of mankind. The sort of people that write blogs, or worse yet; read them.

As I was standing in a Continental ticket queue, I had the opportunity to test that theory. After only the third hour in line, I bumped into an old school chum, or rather, he into me.

“Hey, no cuts!” I proclaimed indignantly, before recognizing him. “Well, I’ll be! Thompson, is that you?”

“At your service!” He replied magnanimously, whilst cutting in front of me. “Have you heard from any of the gang?”

“Well, I did hear of Napier Minor.” I replied, really wanting to rag him out for cutting.

“Do tell?”

"Well, you recall that Napier Minor was a strange lad, chock full of odd thoughts like being a credit to his parents and bringing academic honor to the school. While he was clearly off his rocker, he was harmless and I felt sorry enough for him to want to help. " I always was the noble sort.

"Do go on." Said Thompson.

"Well, since Harry Wilson was at Number 10 at that time, the National Health wouldn’t treat such disorders, so we had to help him out as best we could. "

"Yes....." Thompson didn't appear to like where the conversation was heading.

"You must recall that the school’s wiring was too decrepit to be able to shock him back into reality. Though we tried valiantly; we only managed to burn down the gymnasium. It was then that we turned to a novel American treatment; the 'Swirly'."

Now, a swirly is administered by placing the patient’s head in the bowl of a commode and flushing, sometimes repeatedly. The icy cold water would shock the patient while simultaneously styling his hair into a charming soft-serve ice cream cone appearance.

A few weeks of this treatment did the trick, and henceforth Napier would assiduously avoid the classrooms; especially if we were there.

The ungrateful boy never thanked us, and took up the hobbies of sobbing uncontrollably and bed wetting, but we all supposed that those were far less crippling social defects than blowing our grading curve.

"Yes, I vaguely recall it." Thompson repied uncomfortably. He damn well should remember it, he was manning the flusher.

“Well, sadly Napier's condition deteriorated and eventually he sank so low as to take a Nu Labour seat in Parlaiment."

"Ghastly!" Said Thompson, trying to edge away. I moved closer.

"It gets worse!" I said conspiratorially. "Last year, he came over all ‘Lord Byron’ and went off to join the Anti-Macassars in their struggle to free the Chaise region from Ottoman influence.”

“Are you taking a piss on me?” Thompson asked suspiciously.

“Actually, yes I am. Quite literally.” After all, I’d been in line for three hours and had a fullish bladder.

The Piddling Pup

2006-03-04T04:01:00.000-05:00

Certain recent, and rather smelly events make this topical. Author unknown.

A farmer’s dog came into town,
His Christian name was Rex,
A noble pedigree had he,
Unusual was his text.
And as he trotted down the street,
‘Twas beautiful to see,
His work on every corner,
His work on every tree.

He watered every gateway too,
And never missed a post,
For piddling was his specialty
And piddling was his boast.
The City Curs looked on, amazed,
With deep and jealous rage,
To see a simple country dog
The piddler of the age.

Then all the dogs from everywhere
Were summoned with a yell
To sniff the country stranger o’er,
And judge him by his smell.
Some thought that he, a king might be,
Beneath his tail a rose
So every dog drew near to him
And sniffed it up his nose.

They smelled him over one by one,
They smelled him two by two,
And noble Rex, in high disdain
Stood still till they were through.
Then just to show the whole shebang
He didn’t give a damn,
He trotted in a grocery store
And piddled on a ham.

He piddled in a mackerel keg.
He piddled on the floor.
And when the grocer kicked him out,
He piddled through the door.
Behind him all the city dogs
Lined up in instinct true
To start a piddling carnival
To see the stranger through.

They showed him every piddling post
They had in all the town
And started in, with many a wink,
To pee the stranger down.
They sent for champion piddlers,
That were always on the go.
Who sometimes did a piddling stunt,
Or gave a piddle show

They sprung these on him suddenly
When midway through the town;
Rex only smiled and polished them off,
The ablest, white or brown.
For Rex was with them, every trick,
With vigor and with vim.
A thousand piddles, more or less,
Were all the same to him.

So, he was wetting merrily,
With hind leg kicking high,
When most were hoisting legs in bluff,
And piddling mighty dry.
On and on, Rex sought new grounds,
By piles and scraps and rust,
Till every city dog went dry
And piddled only dust.

But on and on went noble Rex
As wet as any rill,
And all the champion city pups,
Were peed to a stand still.
Then Rex did freehand piddling,
With fancy flirts and flits
Like “Double Dip” and “Gimlet twist”
And all those latest hits.

And all the time, this country dog,
Did never wink or grin.
But piddled blithely out of town,
As he had piddled in.
The city dogs conventions held
To ask, “What did defeat us?”
But no one ever put them wise,
That Rex had diabetes.

Unblocking Chakras

2006-03-02T13:41:00.000-05:00

I lie, face down upon the massage table, awaiting treatment for a painful condition known in the medical community as “marriage”. It turns out that I am a pain in the butt.

I have been dropped off at the ex-Russian sports massage therapist, Olga Steroidovski, who has been given instructions to “hurt me” with a deep tissue massage.

“Brrrr, it’s cold in here!” I announce, in an attempt to forestall the inevitable Russian Vs. Irish member comparison. Honestly, Olga’s ancestors wore leggings, whereas mine wore kilts. Of course Mr. Happy will spend most of his time cowering in a turtleneck in such breezy conditions.

“SZILENCZE!” Olga demands, and believe me, what Olga demands, Olga gets. She begins the flab kneading, gouging and poking process, grunting with exertion.

“Your chakras are blocked!” She eventually announces with Slavic disdain.

“Do I need to call a plumber?” I ask.

I am given a quick course in Chakras.

Apparently, the first chakra; also called "the root chakra" is located near the base of the spine. It is linked to survival instincts and our ability to ground ourselves in the physical world. Blockage manifests as paranoia, defensiveness.

Despite my obvious paranoia, I can assure you that there is no blockage of any orifice located near the base of my spine.

In fact, I am rather mortified to admit that I demonstrated that after one particularly vigorous jab.

While covered with bruises, I must say that I am remarkably relaxed. I heartily recommend the process to everyone. Just do yourself a favour; don’t eat Mexican before the session.

Frankenkitty stalks the house, looking for revenge!

2006-03-01T11:48:00.000-05:00

While I secretly applaud the boy's hair trimming skills, I am less than thrilled with the fact that they shaved the cat with my hair clippers.

FrankenKitty has already expressed his dipleasure with the deposition of used cat food in their sneakers. His expresion leads me to believe that he has further plans for blody revenge.

This should turn out to be an interesting week.

Baldylocks and the three hairs.

2006-02-24T12:24:00.000-05:00

I am not a morning person. I prefer to arise at the crack of noon, so my usual morning ablution ritual includes much frenetic scampering and profanity.

Today is no different. I end up half an hour behind schedule; brushing my teeth whilst drinking coffee. Sometimes this makes my coffee minty fresh if I place the toothbrush in the coffee rather than the proper cup; but that’s a small price to pay for regularity.

Today, I notice that a tuft of hair is sticking out of the side of my head, fully one half inch further than the rest of my hair. I pull out the dog clippers.

Why do I use dog clippers you ask? Well, I’m sick of spending $30 a clip for a haircut from “Armand” who, despite living in this country for twenty odd years, is still confused about the whole American “Good /Bad touch” concept.

No thank you Armand. I do not need a backrub; besides, even in gayest Pareé they are aware that that is not my back.

Dog clippers, on the other hand, cost less than a single Armand haircut, and don’t squeal nearly as much when I hold their heads underwater (just joking, of course. It would be a very foolish act to immerse a set of electrically live dog clippers in water).

So, while brushing my teeth, I take a swipe at the offending tuft and am rewarded with a decent sized clump of hair in the sink. I take another couple of swipes to even it out when it finally occurs to me that the clumps of hair in the sink represent far more hair than the misbehaving tuft. The plastic guard has fallen off the clippers, and I now have a four inch square supplemental bald spot on the side of my head.

Hmm. There is a fake scar kit leftover from Halloween. I can put it on the shaved region and pretend that I have been lobotomized into upper management. Brains! Braiiins!

Alas, the boys have shaved the cat’s rear and have used all the scar putty to make a very angry FrankenKitty.

I try for the tonsured look, but I simply do not make a convincing monk. It all has to go.

Later, at work, I am the butt of much weak humour. Irish Bob, in particular, has a field day.

Yuck it up, Bob. You have brought in raisins as a snack; just handing me the bet.

Just one more bug, and I’ll be drinking my free pint of stout.

Three down, two to go...

2006-02-23T11:49:00.000-05:00

Irish Bob comes into my office and closes the door.

“Did you toss a bug in my mouth yesterday?” he asks in an ominous tone.

“And they say I’m the loonie one! What the blazes are you talking about?” I respond incredulously, casually covering the insect carcasses on my desk with a TPS report.

“Something flew, or was tossed into my mouth during yesterday’s meeting.”

“Well, Bob, if I could control insects, I’d send a bee into Butt-Crack Joe’s bum cleavage.” It is an intriguing thought.

Joe is one of our larger technicians and refuses to wear a belt. He was bending over a floor mounted chiller this morning and fairly put me off my iced coffee. Luckily, he simultaneously provided a convenient drain for said frosty beverage, if you catch my drift.

Bob continues to give me the hairy eye-ball. He is not convinced, but it is time to go to today’s meetings where we shall have to explain the financial minutia of the Cap tables. I scoop up the TPS report and the pile o’ critters concealed below.

I have made a bet with wheezing Fred that I can make Bob eat 5 bugs this week. I have two left and stand to gain a pint of my choice, so this is very important.

Outside of the conference room, we pass a rather surly tech who is now wearing a jumpsuit.

Result!

Boooooring!

2006-02-22T15:43:00.000-05:00

Okay, I owe you a post and I owe Kim about a dozen comics but let’s face it; I’m lazy (true, actually. I was once trapped for an hour on an escalator when the power failed) and I’m talking to three lawyers (they think I’m taking notes). I have no time to post. Get over it.

One of said lawyers is giving a presentation and the other two are tapping away on their lap tops. The presentation is slathered so deep with legalese, that Jimmy Hoffa may well be buried within. I need a break.

The presenting lawyer has his fly open and Irish Bob is snoring away in front of him; mouth open with a strand of drool running down his right cheek. On the window sill beside me is a dead fly. I flick it and am rewarded with a frantic gagging cough.

It appears that Irish Bob has rejoined us. He swallows.

“Umm, something went down the wrong way. Now, what again are our legal responsibilities vis-à-vis our South West sales rep agreement?” Bob manages in his best, if raspy, suck-up voice. He tries to drink from his soda cup, but there is naught left but ice. He fishes out a cube and sucks on it.

The lawyer drones on. He is wearing silk boxers with bunnies on it. I casually fish out an ice cube and ‘flick’! The lawyer dances back and glares at Bob. “What the hell did you do that for?” He demands.

Bob expresses innocence convincingly, but before the circle of guilt can expand, the laptops of both seated lawyers announce: “You are trying to access a blocked porn site!”

They are using my wireless connection and have foolishly allowed me to set it up for them.

“Don’t worry,” I say to the senior partner with the dampish groin. “We get lawyers trying to porn surf on our network all the time. Then they have the temerity to charge us for the time as if they were actually working...” He glares at me, but their IE6 browser history proves me correct, despite his flunkies’ protests. He grimly returns to his presentation and is finished in record time, saving us about $5000 and 30 IQ points.

The lawyers leave and two accountants file in. Their pants are firmly zipped as they have been here before.

Bob settles back in his seat and closes his eyes. He is asleep before the accountant can bring up the power point first slide.

There is a dead woodlouse on the windowsill beside me. Flick!

Mmmm, crunchy!

UPDATE! The lawyers are on to my little game and I must flee to Florida, Hollywood or some such third world, law-suit free place.

Damn

2006-02-21T10:56:00.000-05:00

It has come to my attention that Ivan the Terrible has a new blog and it's quite a bit funnier than mine.

Well, poo.

“What’s that smell?”

2006-02-20T15:01:00.000-05:00

I ignore the question as I am a man and really do not care. It could be sewer work, animal related, some bad cheese that I have carelessly stored behind the icebox, or indeed, me.

“It’s revolting!” She adds. Again, I ignore.

Watch and see how little I care. Observe me in the state of blissful ambivalence. I am man, uncaring and unbound.

Besides, I am congested, on some wonnerful prescription drugs and engrossed in my latest project.

I am filming my remake of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” as performed by rabbits. In my version there is only one brother and I have fed him a strict diet of amphetamines and Viagra.

Despite what the protesting PETA activists claim, he seems quite happy.

“It’s your tennis shoes!” She waves them back and forth like an incense censer.

Did Bucky Fellini ever have to put up with such interruptions? Was Hitchcock ever accosted with ripe sneakers?

“Bung ‘em into the washer, then.” As you can see, I’m no ordinary PhD, but a true problem solver. I return to my directorial duties. This buck is not a natural actor, like Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Alec Guinness or Ron Jeremy, but rather a method actor.

Despite his shortcomings, he’s really getting into the role. I smell an Oscar.

Upon further reflection, I smell the shoes that have been thrust under my nose.

“Wash them? Honestly, Evil, they’re falling apart. Go get some new ones!”

And that’s the crux of the problem. I’d like to buy some normal, white tennis shoes. Now they come in any colour but white. I do not wish to look like I graduated from Clown College as this would limit my chances of taking over the world. Who would fear a dictator in lime green shoes? (Other than Richard Simmons.)

Secondly, I wear a size 11E (14 in the UK and 76 in terms of the Godless, metric Euro-hippy sandal sizes). When I ask for such a size, I am given some sort of high tech plastic thingy that is as long as my foot but a third of the width. This is decidedly uncomfortable, and if I am forced to wear these things I shall hunt down the designers and kick them in the rump. Considering how narrow the damned things are, the designers would end up sitting on my knee.

Listen, Nike, your shoes already cost more than the GDP of Iceland. Could you not splurge and add the 3 pennies worth of Nylon that would make your shoes actually wearable by human beings? Or must you deprive the world of my gift to independent cinema just because you are greedy, heartless, foot-crushing swine?

Ps, Nike, if you would find it in your hearts to make a wearable shoe, I would, in gratitude, send you a cute, fluffy bunny, or twenty, as a gift. It seems that I currently have some spares.

UPDATE!! El Barbudo points out: 'there's a great fucking line from British comedian Jeremy Hardy that goes something like; "My daughter asked me for a pair of Nike trainers the other day. I told her 'You're eleven - you're old enough to make them yourself!'" '
.

I am ill.

2006-02-16T22:42:00.000-05:00

I have brought home a doctor’s note and a very expensive and almost medieval prescription to prove it. It involves large pills, unguents, salves and plasters, some needles and, I think, leeches for maximum pity points.

“People have been known to die from pneumonia you know” I mention casually in passing and not more than a few dozen times.

For once, my native indolence is encouraged and the menagerie/offspring have been sternly admonished by the only one that they listen to (not me) to refrain from the usual ballistic Greco-Roman wrestling greeting and to keep the inter-sibling mayhem to a muted level such that the noise damage is restricted to a five mile radius.

Life is good.

I shiver on the couch and the fire is turned on. Feed a fever, isn’t it? I am brought a large bloody steak, with mushrooms, mashed potatoes and gravy (nothing green and healthy; I must keep my strength up).

I mention that a cup of tea would help loosen the phlegm and am immediately brought a steaming pot, steeping nicely under a stocking cap.

(The cozy, no doubt, is fulfilling a vastly more important role as Skeletor’s fortress. Skeletor's igloo fortress. Skeletor’s red igloo fortress with shocking green and yellow flowers; emblazoned with the words “Greetings from Bognor-Regis 1972!” That, or it’s being used as a bed for a skunk/rabid/poisonous creature that the kids are nursing back to health from a state of advanced decomposition. I’d go get it, but sometimes it’s simply better to buy a new one.)

My aching feet are rubbed and my brow is cooled with a damp wash cloth. Apparently, nothing is too much effort to nurse the stricken patriarch back to health.

“I have read a paper in the most recent Lancet,” I wheeze in laboured Cheyne-Stokes breaths, “that artificial respiration performed on an alternative and somewhat lower mucous membrane, can force the fluids out of the lungs and save the patient’s life…”

I look at her entreatingly, with the biggest, pathetic, puppy eyes I can muster.

She smiles sweetly and pats my bald pate. “Don't worry, Honey.” She says soothingly, “I’ll go borrow the Kauffman’s backhoe and dig you a really nice grave under the apple tree!”

Oh, leave Cheney be, and other fever derived thoughts.

2006-02-16T06:40:00.000-05:00

Listen, he’s not exactly my favorite person on the planet, but for crying out loud, if I had to alert the press every time I shot a lawyer, I’d never get anything accomplished.

The press corpse (sick)(sic) should leave him alone so that he can get back to the important work of a VP, (whatever the heck that is) and simply mock him for using bird shot when buckshot or slugs are the preferred load for lawyers.

I read this headline and immediately thought of Twenty Major. Three million sprogs? The lad gets around a bit, doesn’t he?

Look folks, having eaten at MickeyD’s and suffered the inevitable gastro-intestinal spasms, I can sympathize, but watch where you put that pervy bastard Ronald McDonald’s head.

I mean, just look at the sleazy clowan scum. He’s staring up your tunic at your crotchal vicinity and he’s got a hell of a smirk going.

I am never drinking another Pepsi again. First, they start advertising “Brownandbubbly.com” which brings to mind the aforementioned McDonald’s induced GI distress, and then they go totally beyond the pale with this.

I think an angry, torch-bearing mob is in order, and since one is assembled outside my house, I would appreciate a hand in turning them in the right direction.

A freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.

2006-02-13T07:45:00.000-05:00

I am a rock.

I am a moooooron.

And this rock now feels pain.

And a moron forgets to raise the windows of her car before a blizzard.

Pandora’s Box

2006-02-11T11:26:00.000-05:00

Pandora, like Eve, takes all the heat in this legend, making me believe that the story was written by the antediluvian equivalent of a programmer lacking the social skills to even talk to a woman, let alone marrying one, having 1.5 children and a mortgage on a nice mud hut in the suburbs.

But even if the facts were more or less true, is she really the villain of the piece? Let us re-examine the tale:

“Jupiter had malignantly crammed into this box all the diseases, sorrows, vices, and crimes that afflict poor humanity, like lawyers, meter maids and Michael Flately and his River-Dancing ilk. No sooner was the box opened, than all these ills flew out, in the guise of horrid little brown-winged creatures (Except for Flately who came out dressed for dancing, because that image is horrible enough), closely resembling moths. These little insects fluttered about, alighting, some upon Pandora’s main squeeze Epimetheus, who had just entered, and some upon Pandora, pricking, stinging, filling injunctions, booting their chariot, and tap dancing most unmercifully. Epimetheus and Pandora had never before experienced the faintest sensation of pain or anger; but, as soon as these winged evil spirits had stung them, they began to weep, and, alas, quarrelled for the first time in their lives. Epimetheus reproached his wife in bitterest terms for her thoughtless action; calling her as “Stupid bint” and she him an “utter poxy cunt” but in the very midst of their vituperation they suddenly heard a sweet little voice entreat for freedom. The sound proceeded from the unfortunate box, whose cover Pandora had dropped again, in the first moment of her surprise and pain. “Open, open, and I will heal your wounds, or at least wreak vengeance! Please let me out! “it pleaded.

The tearful couple viewed each other inquiringly, and listened again. Once more they heard the same pitiful accents; and Epimetheus bade his wife open the box and set the speaker free, adding very amiably, that she had already done so much harm by her ill-fated curiosity, that it would be “difficult to add materially to its evil consequences, you daft cow”, and that, “perchance, the box contained some good spirit, whose ministrations might prove beneficial and maybe I could shack up with her.”

“Pound sand up your arse, you useless twat. Who is stupid here? What about the time you pissed on the electric fence?” Pandora replied, but she did eventually open the box.It was well for Pandora that she opened the box a second time, for the gods, with a sudden impulse of compassion, had concealed among the evil spirits a high quality German sub machine gun, whose mission was to heal the wounds inflicted by its former box mates, by making gaping holes in them.

Thus, according to the ancients”

Well, there you have it. Pandora is actually the heroine of the piece, as she brought us the modern submachine gun which has proved a blessing and a boon to all those who have been passed at warp speed only to have the inconsiderate bastard slow down forcing us to brake just as soon as passing is no longer possible, as well as those that hate Michael Flately.

Sorry, no post today.

2006-02-10T07:49:00.000-05:00

We are in the midst of being acquired, (erm, hopefully…) and as I am buried in minutia and visitors as part of their due diligence, so there will be no posts today other than this one; which really can not be counted as a post, although Blogspot certainly will.

Now, I for one, welcome our new corporate overlords, as they shall be bringing wheel barrows full of money that we’re not supposed to ask any questions about and a large Sicilian named Thuggio to expedite our transition to their accounting methods.

I should be able to post summat Saturday, if Thuggio doesn’t take me fishing like he promised.

Don’t wait up.

Deep in the Heart of Taxes

2006-02-08T13:52:00.000-05:00

It is all arrayed about me. All the tools I need. The “PhotoShop for Total Idiots: No, We’re not Joking Here, You’re A Total Jackass” book. A bottle of whiskey. Earphones to drown out any unreasonable demands. I settle down to learn layering.

A unshelled walnut bounces of the screen. I ignore it, but she soon finds my range and I am forced to remove the earphones.

“Have you got the taxes done?” She asks.

“Erm, no. I’m drinking here.”

“You always do better on our taxes when you’re drunk.” She replies.

Damnation. The woman. simply. will. not. leave! It’s like she lives here or something.

I put my earphones back on and get back to the task at hand.

I am making a cartoon. It is funny. I have no time for taxes.

An unshelled walnut bounces of my skull and this time she put English on it.

“TAXES!” She bellows.

I tax.

Now, the trick to getting the most out of one’s return is to divorce oneself entirely from reality. Not lying, of course, the IRS can figure that out; but pure, unadulterated lunacy. It confuses them, making them think you could be a lawyer, or worse, congresscritter.

Ethanol helps achieve this state, as do antipsychotics. My favorite combination is 5ml of Inapsine IM, followed by a fifth of Jameson’s. I jab, and drink.

By two in the morning I am finished, and by my calculations the IRS owes me New Jersey. I file the return electronically and go to bed.

The next morning is painful, but I get up and check to see if the IRS has accepted my return.

“You’ve got Jail!” announces the computer cheerily. Apparently, the IRS has a few piffling little quibbles vis-à-vis my return. It turns out that I cannot count my collection of inflatable ladies as dependents because A)They are not, in fact, people, and B). They are actually stolen form the Kinsey Sex Museum and therefore not technically mine.

So rather than actually receiving a Jersey sized refund, we owe a fair amount and I must file for an extension.

“Get a tax attorney to handle your extension.” Demands Gretchen.

“That’ll cost a fortune!” I reply. “Last week Irish Bob got a hooker to handle his extension for only fifty bucks. I’m going to try that!”

This time the walnut gets me right between the eyes.

Of Mice and Pets

2006-02-07T11:54:00.000-05:00

I live in what for Americans, is an old house. Time, sloppy building and the semi-annual fusillade of ordnance explain why we enjoy the occasional rodent visitation.

And when I say “we”, I mean the cats. I certainly don’t enjoy awakening to find an eviscerated rodent placed lovingly on my pillow. Gretchen has not said so much in words, but the violent thumping that I received after switching pillows with her when she went to the bathroom, inclines me to believe that she concurs.

My sister and her family, on the other hand, enjoy a modern, well built home that would be rodent free had not the builders left large rodent sized gaps where the plumbing enters the house.

Once inside the house, the rodents make a bee-line to the most rodent friendly place in the house; my nephew’s bedroom.

According to Sis, since he is male, he doesn’t so much use his bedroom like a “normal” (she means “female”) person would, but sort of “nests” therein. She further posits that it would be safer on the psyche to periodically set fire to it; letting nature renew the ecosystem, than to clean it and run the risk of discovering what it is, in fact, made of.

However, she is a woman of principles, and armed with a shock collar and megaphone, goads the lad into a weekly half-hearted rear-guard action in the defense of sanitation.

It was in the midst one of these marathon slash and burn sessions that his voice summoned her to his bedroom.

“MOM!” He yelled. “There’s a MOUSE in my room!”

Indeed there was. He was sitting in the middle of a half eaten bag of sunflower seeds from ancient days of yore; calmly observing the lad’s attempt at “cleaning”.

Sis, being a no-nonsense type of person, told him to whack it and pitch the body outside. The lad interprets this as “I should bring in one of the large dogs and let him chase it in a confined room filled with breakable objects.

In the boy’s defense, that would have been my decision too. Unfortunately, the dog, named “Tiny”, weighing in at well north of 50 kg, saw the mouse, squealed, jumped onto the bed and backed as far as he could into the corner. Now, in the dog’s defense, after a trip to the vet’s, there was no tissue of hormonic functionality left in the scrotal region and it had stayed up late with the boy, watching “Aliens”.

Disgusted, the lad got their other dog, Satchel, which masses in at a mere 60kg, and has been know to eat motorcycles. This dog, seeing the mouse, goes into a perfect point; tail extended, right foreleg lifted and bent at the knee, muzzle pointed at the prey.

“There it is!” He seemed to be saying. “When it bursts into flight, blast it with your shotgun and I shall recover its lifeless body from the swamp.”

The other whimpering mastiff came to the conclusion that it could back up another few centimeters, if only its bladder wasn’t so full.

So, back up it did.

The mouse kept eating, enjoying the floor show.

So then it was the cat’s turn. The cat pounced on the mouse, bit it, then spat it out. It turns out that on the feline culinary scales, a mouse rates somewhat below Brussel sprouts in a liver hollandaise sauce. He joined the whimpering Tiny on the bed and proceeded to cleanse his palate with a vigorous rump licking.

Finally, Sis interceded and brought in the one thing that all animals fear; the vacuum cleaner. With the explosive scattering of the household pets, it was an easy task to capture the indignant, cat saliva-slathered mouse.

Thus trapped humanely, the mouse was borne to the open window of a much disliked neighbor and there released, to safely frolic and flourish, and most importantly; bear and raise its many, many young.

Flight of the Wheelie Bin

2006-02-06T08:47:00.000-05:00

“Where’s the wheelie bin?” Asks Gretchen.

This question has been pondered by better minds than mine. “If the wheelie bin truly exists, does it really care about us? Now, that’s the real question.

I grunt.

This deeply philosophical question is posed at an inopportune time; three hours, four beers and a bag of ~~chemical~~ cheese puffs into the important 14 hour Superbowl pre-game show.

Yes, it is important; I’ve installed television monitors above the commode and kegerator. I wouldn’t do that for “Dancing with the Tards” or “American Idle”.

The grunt, apparently, is not considered a proper answer and the question is re-submitted; this time with the accusatory suffix “You left it by the kerb Friday, didn’t you?”

This is unfair! I distinctly remember putting it back in it’s proper place and sorting junk mail (unwanted bills, correspondence from the IRS or worse, Gretchen’s relatives, etc.,) directly into it.

“There was a pack of gypsies camped on Fiddler’s Green last night. They must have nipped it in the wee hours.” I reply, trying to look around her at the TV. Even though it was a commercial, it might be a funny one.

“That was a funeral procession!”

Hmmph. Dead people. Even more useless than gypsies, if you ask me. I squirm in my chair trying to peer around the other side. No luck; total eclipse of the TV.

“Alright, I’ll buy a new one tomorrow.” With this offering to the moon spirits, the vast, bulky moon should unswallow the TV, allowing it to bathe me, once again, in its life giving warmth. No such luck.

“No, go look for it, NOW!” Apparently, garbage cannot survive for one day outside of its proper home.

So, bundled against the swirling snow, I peek outside hopefully. Alas, Gretchen was right. The wheelie bin has gone walkabout; probably during the windstorm last night. I trudge downhill a fair piece before I see it.

I shall need a ladder as it is perched majestically in a tall pine, like Steve Irwin about to molest an eagle.

Now, in most small villages, the sight of a fat man, standing precariously on the top rung of a ladder laid against the upper boughs of a swaying pine, jabbing a wheelie bin with a 2x4 will attract a crowd representing the lower tail of the IQ bell curve, and believe me, my village is no exception.

“No, Jab it to the left, TO THE LEFT!” Roars wheezing Fred.

“Do you want me to get my shotgun and shoot it down?” Asks Ray, who is still on my shit list for deer hunting with my truck.

“Hook your belt around the bough for safety, Uncle Evil.” shouts the only sensible one; Ray’s eight year old son who was obviously switched at birth. I feel great pity for the other family when I consider Ray’s genetic legacy.

I buckle the belt around a bough and with one mighty heave, the wheelie bin and 2x4 both cartwheel to the ground.

Unfortunately, so does the ladder.

Overbalanced, I pitch forward and am left dangling head down about thirty feet above the cruel frozen earth and the now broken ladder. The belt has saved me, but the increased tension has exposed my own moons and truth be told, it’s a little chilly at that altitude.

“Grab ahold of the trunk, THE TRUNK!” Roars wheezing Fred.

“Do you want me to get my shotgun and shoot it down?” Asks Ray hopefully.

“Hang tight, Uncle Evil!” shouts the only sensible one. I’ve got just the thing!” and he dashes home.

So, with wind howling amongst my nethers, I am left to ponder. What will little Mike bring back? Crampons, rope, carabineers, an eight and a fudge-seat? A new ladder? The fire department?

I make out his tiny figure pelting back down the road with something small in his hand.

The little bastard got his camera.

Dr. Evil Seuss, phD.

2006-02-02T15:24:00.000-05:00

Alas, the wife is quite irate,
When yesterday I came home late:

“I found blond hair upon your collars
And in your coat some folded dollars,

"Talk, or I shall get the nippers,
Again, you’ve been amongst the strippers!”

“I haven’t seen a single stripper,
Whoever told you is a fibber!”

“Did you tell them you were rich?”
(Oh, Crap, the bartender’s a snitch!)

“I did not tell them I was rich,
Leave me be, you crazy bitch!”

“And last week when you played the snooker,
You were drooling on a hooker!”

“There are no women where I play pool,
Whoever told you is a fool.”

“That info came from my dear mother!”
(Another witness I should smother!)

“My, dear, it’s true I did some tipple,
But I did not see a single nipple!”

“I’ll warn you now; forever stop it,
or I'll out-snip Lorena Bobbit!”

“I have not groped a single breast, *
So put this silly thing to rest!”

If there’s one thing that provokes my fears,
It’s Gretchen and her pinking shears.

“Trust me honey, I’ll be good,
Keep pointy things from my manhood…”

* (I did try once with Margaret Thatcher,
She’s damn quick though; I couldn’t catch her.)

Where's Waldo Arlingnot?

2006-02-01T14:37:00.000-05:00

I haven't heard a peep from Arlington in a few days. Let us hope he is not:

1) Trapped in a well, without Lassie to go get help.

2) Trapped under a large hooker, again, without Lassie to go get help.

3) Gainfully employed at a company with effective IT personnel. That could have a serious effect on my porn business' bottom line.

Hmmm: A business' "bottom line" is horizontal, yet a personal bottom line is vertical. This is borne out when I slide down a stair rail and do not make a flubbering sound, but just let IBM try that! Flubber, flubber, flubber!

I blame venture capitalists for this de-anthropomorphicitation of business. Bring back the corporate crack!

Whoa!

2006-02-01T10:30:00.000-05:00

What do you say about a man that stands in a wading pool of mayonnaise screaming “YOU SHALL DRINK THE BLACK SPERM OF MY VENGEANCE!”

Well, other than “I wish I’d thought of that phrase...” and “Mark my words, some day that man shall be President!”

Seriously, who better to have their finger poised above the doomsday button?

Diplomacy, be damned, (er, more damned; sorry W) we’re talking some major respect here. There’s nothing like a mayo clad president to bring Kim Jung Il and his ilk to the bargaining table.

TonyT: Proving once again, that there’s more to him than just flogging sense into yoblets with cat-o’-nine tails and incomprehensible Aussie sports talk.

Die, you gravy sucking pigs!

2006-01-31T13:41:00.000-05:00

Well, I've had it with being bugged to "mow the damn lawn" just because I'm willing to put it off for a few months. I'm also sick of getting stung by bees when I do finally get around to it.

So, I figured out a way to mow the lawn, clear the brush and dice the frigging bees, all at the same time.

Genius, no?

Aw, CRAP! You took the some of the blue pills, didn't you?

2006-01-30T14:18:00.000-05:00

Sorry, folks. I don't think Doc Scientist will be posting today. He was on about his plan to bet heavilly on the Seahawks after placing some very potent laxatives in the Steeler's Gatorade™, saying something about "I'll get their running game going, never fear!"

Then he took a handful of the blue pills.

Sorry about the inconvenience, but I have to go. He's naked and climbing a church steeple.

Cheers,

Randy Bumguard,
Assistant Head Goon,
Evil Genius Enterprises, Inc.
(A subsidiary of Halliburton)

Tagged!

2006-01-28T06:13:00.000-05:00

After recovering consciousness, I plucked the empty tranquilizer dart of from my ample posterior and struggled to my feet. The newly attached radio collar chafes my neck and for some reason, my ear hurts.

I’ve been meme tagged.

Damn you, Arlington.

But at least, the 50ml of Telazol explains yesterday’s post.

In any event; here is the damn "7x7" meme:

Seven movies that I like (In no particular order)

Groundhog Day. (Andie McDowell. Grooooowl!)
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Lawrence of Arabia
Waking Ned Devine
Unforgiven
Hope and Glory
The Dish
Office Space
Groundhog Day. (Andie McDowell. Grooooowl!)
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Lawrence of Arabia
Waking Ned Devine
Unforgiven
Hope and Glory
The Dish
Office Space
Groundhog Day. (Andie McDowell. Grooooowl!)
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Lawrence of Arabia
Waking Ned Devine
Unforgiven
Hope and Glory
The Dish
Office Space

Seven books that I like (In no particular order)

“The Papers of A.J. Wentworth, BA”, H.F. Ellis, The private papers of a self important public school teacher maths master in pre-war Britain. Hilarious.

“Three Men in a Boat (Not to Mention the Dog)”, Jerome K. Jerome, The story of my young adulthood, written seventy years before I was born (Note to self, bring a can opener for the pineapple).

“The Polish Officer”, Alan Furst, Dark, grim, beautifully written.

“Mayhem:” J. Robert Janes, Bludgeony fun in occupied France.

“The Chronicles of Amber” Roger Zelazney. Actually a series bound in one volume. The tale of a magical wonderland; Detroit. May require you to drop mushrooms to fully comprehend. Not a bad idea, actually.

The Hornblower Saga, C.S. Forester. Yahhhhrgh!

“A Talent for War” Jack McDevitt

Seven Things I say.

“Yar”,
“Shiver me timbers”,
“Eeexcellent”,
“I didn’t do it, M’lud”,
“Goons, thrash him!”,
“I want my mummy”,
“Say, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”

Seven things that attract me to the City.

Gravity,
Electromagnetism,
Strong force,
Weak force,
Three to be named later. Maybe (Insert Heisenberg joke here)

Seven things to do before I die

Listen, are we done yet? This is getting really tedious.

Seven things I can’t do.

Put my elbow in my ear. Moving on…

Seven people to tag.

Attila the Hun
Genghis Khan
Emir Timur
Saladin
Some Viking. (No, not that one, the bearded one with the axe. )
The CEO of Halliburton
Either Queen Victoria, or RuPaul. I haven’t decided yet.

UPDATE!

Genghis Khan writes:

“How dare you tag me? My hordes shall sweep across your lands, bringing devastation, famine, pestilence, unwanted pregnancies to your women folk and painful rectal penetration to your menfolk!

I shall ride across your domains on roads paved with your skulls! Saddles shall be made from your flayed skin! I shall have yurts made from your intestines while you yet breathe!

Oh, BTW, You liked the Chronicles of Amber?!?! WTF dude! I found it to be quite tedious. But I’m with you on Andie McDowell in GHD. Rowr!!!”

UPDATE # 2!!
If you haven't seen "The Dish", rent or buy it. Seriously, it's funny.

I really have no idea what the title of this should be.

2006-01-27T11:27:00.000-05:00

Right.

I’m pissed off right now. It seems that the realtor lied when they said my house was built on an Indian burial mound. That I could live with. I mean, how cool is it to have an ominously bound trap-door in your basement, inscribed with eldritch runes and decorated with the empty skull of Richard Simmons?

“Stop jumping up and down on it kids!” I frequently have to scold. “I don’t want you taunting the demons.”

Well, it turns out the whole thing is a fake, with the exception of Richard Simmons’ skull. I am quite sure of the provenance of that, since I placed it there myself.

In reality, the house is built on the roosting grounds of the North American hamster. Every year, millions of hamsters migrate from the deep south to do the nasty on my 10 acre plot. It’s rather like that bit of Baja for the Monarch butterfly, Patagonia for the Great Auk or coastal Thailand for the Brits.

After spawning, they lay their eggs and die. It would all be a fascinating glimpse into the majestic pole dance of life, except they’ve taken to scrogging in the floor joists and walls of my house; then the females want to talk. When they do go to sleep, they steal the covers, causing the males to grumble all night long, until they die in the wee hours.

As you can imagine, the stench is incredible and my siding is getting damaged as all of the neighborhood weasels have taken to licking it with their long, raspy, forked tongues.

Honestly, I could deal with all of this with good humor, if a pair of hamsters hadn’t crawled into my five gallon bucket of lard (I keep that much in case an emergency keeps me from the store; something like a blizzard say, or a nuclear exchange with Peoria) to get a little hamster action.

Imagine the sight, when opening up the can for breakfast you were to find an enthusiastically fertilized hamster egg sack. Fairly put me off my breakfast, it did.

So that’s why I was standing in my boxers on the front porch screaming at the weasels. Richard Simmons, or someone that looked very much like him told me to calm down, eat right, get some exercise, or I’d have a heart attack.

So I bashed him skull wise with a shovel. Well, one thing led to another, and the neighborhood busybodies called the police. I barely had time to pull his pants down before they showed up.

“I had to, officer!” I explained indignantly. “He was exposing himself to the kids.”

They were very nice about it, and even let me keep his head to put on the fake-trap door.

Now, if you put your ear against it, you can hear the groaning of tortured souls, all to the beat of “Sweating to the Oldies!”

True story!

Well, POO!

2006-01-26T13:51:00.000-05:00

(Double click image and maximize window to enlarge)

Hate Mail and Annonopussies.

2006-01-25T12:10:00.000-05:00

Well, except for a clown related hate mail from the berk down the road, I've not had a single hate mail or troll comment. This situation must change immediately, so I've taken it upon myself to expound my views and provide some of my background history.

1. I invented "Clippy"

2. I also invented the "Teletubbies"

3. I am the one that changed Newcastle from the charming bucolic paradise of yesteryear to the mutagenic hell hole of Geordie chavism that it is today (Look, I said I was sorry, OK? Christ, you’d think that re-arranging peoples DNA without their consent was a crime or something).

4. Ditto Newark, but Porcu-doed, fake-tanned, bling wearing, fake Armani suit clad "guidos" rather than chavscum.

5. I am the "Karl Rove" of the Absolute Monarchist party ("Vote for me, and you'll never have to go through the hastle of voting again!"™)

6. I've a larger arse than Ted Kennedy, but my car floats.

7. I believe that there is no job that can be performed with a hand tool, that cannot be performed better with a power tool.

8. My idea of of a power tool:

9. My ideal woman is a cross between Dame Thatcher and Condi Rice, with a little bit of the non-bitchy side of Hillary Clinton tossed in, but in the body of Halle Berry.

Oh, yes, it wouldn't hurt if she were a nymphomaniac and had a baldness fetish.

10. I look like Michael Moore, all rolled into one.

Well, there you have it. If that doesn't generate some hate mail, I don't know what will.

I just got back from Newark and boy, are my lungs tired.

2006-01-24T15:25:00.000-05:00

Well, actually, I got back on Sunday, but I slipped on the ice Monday morning and cracked my noggin on the sidewalk; resulting in a lovely, woozy headache that has lasted 36 hours. It was just the thing to have when showing around important visitors that simply. would. not. leave. until after midnight. Alcohol helped, but now I’m back at work where binge drinking is frowned upon, forcing me to resort to smoking opium.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Newark. Truth be told, Newark isn’t so bad; they’ve cleaned it up considerably over the last twenty years, making it perfectly fit for habitation by post-apocalyptic, radioactive, mutant freaks as long as they already have brain tumors.

I’ve been buying up land for my retirement dream home.

Besides, it’s just a stone’s throw away from Manhattan, if you have a carbide cannon; which I do. Just ask the Port Authority police; they are holding it for me in their evidence locker.

Anyway; Newark. Convenient location, toxic smog, large carnivorous swamp rats; what’s not to love?

So it was with heavy heart and massive hangover that I returned to bucolic splendor of central Pennsyltucky, with its’ broad sweeping vistas, and gentle delicately scented pig manure breezes. We were within forty or so miles from home, when we saw the first sign of spring, Pennsylvania’s state flower; the road construction sign.

So there we sat for fifteen minutes, in front of a flagman with an index finger two knuckles deep into his left nostril. In fact, the only indication that he was alive was the obscene writhing of his nose. If it weren’t for the nasal floor show, he could have been replaced with a bucket of sand, and twice as efficiently.

Finally, it dawned on Baby Einstein that there was no traffic coming in the other direction, so he flipped the sign from “Stop” to “Slow”. We proceeded down the single open lane only to encounter a long string of traffic coming the other direction.

You guessed it; Jethro Clampett’s identical twin was working the other side, with a broken radio.

Some day, if they keep screwing up badly enough, we may elect them to a high public office, but until that glorious day, they must keep struggling down the path of self improvement, with fingers firmly planted in nostrils.

UPDATE!!!

FatMammyCat writes:

"Welcome back Evil, sorry to hear of you slip, I trust operation 'Blow up Stuff, or BS, is back on track. The new phenobarb syringes arrived, I stored them in the cistern in bubble wrap.
Oh and the Gov'ner of Alabama has been on, something about a glow in the dark hog on his pappy's ranch and some missle head with a barcode that was allegedly traced back to some lair you used to rent from a French guy called Claude von killalott, two Ts.
Anyhoo I smoothed thing over with him as PR are wont to do, but his wife/sister is expecting you to use the new mesh chemical peel on her neck Wednesday. I told her about the side effects but she said an extra tit was the least of her worries.

Ta, Fatmammycat."

Grand job, FMC, but I have to wonder, what is the rest of my management team doing, hmmm?

UPDATE #2!

Vaporise Barney reports in:

And who was left to answer that scurrilous cartoon of the great one,posted by an imposter alluding to your lack of sexual success ?

Surely everyone knows by now that not only do you have the world at your feet,but also most of the female population on their knees before you.P.S.,along with my 15%, I'll be happy with any crumbs that may fall from your table,a few ugly gummy ones will do me.

Bow, scrape, scrape...

Well, I'm waiting, Dr. Maroon. Where's my new SCRAM-jet bomber?

This weak end

2006-01-21T01:58:00.000-05:00

Friday morning started as Friday mornings shall; with a restraining order. I had to nip down to the magistrate right quick to head it off.

“Your Honor” I pled “Please don’t cut me off from my dear, sweet, beloved. I am a reformed man!” Eventually he relented.

“Fine” He said. “You may maintain access to the kegerator, but you still must sleep on the couch.”

“And the bathroom?” One must hammer these details out immediately, or place oneself in legal peril.

I mean, without the nod from the plod, I could get arrested for simply peeing in my own bathroom. The only alternative would be whizzing on the neighbors’ hydrangeas, poodle, or into the open windows of their Volvo station wagon. And one can get arrested doing that as well. Believe me.

The judge nodded.

So all that was left was to placate my wife. I gathered all my imaginary friends on the porch. Now, this was more difficult than one might expect, as the Doctors have gotten my anti-psychotic mix almost perfect. Only three of the strongest voices in my head showed up, as well as Pregnant Pam, who is not so much imaginary as she is inflatable.

“Gentlemen, ... and lady” I nodded to Pam. “Do you have any placatory suggestions?”

Silence from the voices. The bastards were more interested in quaffing my beer.

“PHREEEEEeeeeen!” Said Pam. One of these days, I simply must invest in a patch kit, although dunking her in the water barrel to find the leak is fraught with peril as the neighbors will no doubt say “He’s trying to drown someone again!” and call the police.

Honestly, that only happened once, and I'm fairly sure the fellow was James Bond, so he had it coming.

Sure, he claimed he was a Jehovah’s Witness, but MI-6 types lie all the time. One simply cannot take the risk.

Anyhoo, long story short, I decided to take her for a romantic weekend in Newark. If the enchanting scenery and toxic sea breezes do not rekindle the flames of passion, I’m not sure anything can.

Wish me luck!

Flogging a dead hearse

2006-01-20T13:13:00.000-05:00

Well the title makes no sense, but I've been taking flu medication with whiskey, so that should explain it.

I'm all out of sorts so I won't be posting anything amusing today.

Instead of reading my usual drivel, why don't you take a gander at this?

It's a cartoon starring all the verminous, drug addled, filthy, neuro-syphillitic pervos that usually post here. Since we have no native artistic talents, we've scanned pictures of ourselves (mine is from my corporate ID card) to use as the basis for strips.

Kim Ayres and El Barbudo are the two head blog bastards, so contact them if you want to join up.

Are you listening, Arlington?

Me. Am I not the very essence of hawtness, ladies?

A relative from the old country. I can't cut through his Corkish brogue with a chainsaw; but as you can clearly see, his heart is in the right place.

And no, El Barbudo, that's a cosh in his hand. The purple pool is Barney's life blood, not dinosaur jizm, you sick bastard.

Ginger ail

2006-01-19T11:19:00.000-05:00

“There's nothing wrong with fantasizing about shagging nuns - if God hadn't wanted us to do that he wouldn't have given them such sexy uniforms.
But you coveted a ginger. That is a crime against humanity and you will burn for it.”

Writes the HungBunny.

Well, yes, undoubtedly, but in due course.

I don’t expect a bolt of lightning to strike me down this instant; that mostly happens on golf courses, which I try to avoid (I take our Japanese visitors to strip clubs rather than golfing. They seem to enjoy it more, the pervos. I just go because I am obligated to entertain our clients. All the other times were just to insure quality control).

Now, I am not sure why God doesn’t like golfers, they seem like decent enough fellows. Maybe it’s the Argyle sweater vests, jodhpurs and pastel shirts, which in my mind are a worse crime against fashion and humanity than me lusting after gingers, Nuns or no.

Gingers are all freckly, giving the appearance of a “Magic Eye” puzzle. The trick is that you defocus your eyes a wee bit and then you can see the naughty bits.

I find that a quite charming diversion during long, boring conference calls.

Besides, as long as I ground my tin foil hat, I should be quite safe.

Sure, God could drop a meteorite on me, rather like he did the dinosaurs; but then he’d run the risk the only human survivor being a annoyingly happy purple-furred gayer with an attraction to the children of the next ascendant species.

Or, Nun of the above

2006-01-18T14:22:00.000-05:00

I stood behind the nun in the check out line. She wasn’t a desiccated, sour old harridan; no indeedy! She was a tasty young thing with (I’m guessing here) significant breasticular enhancement and red hair.

It was just about this time when a voice inside my head said “Dude, she’s a ‘Bride of Christ’! You’re drooling on one of God's old ladies!”

Normally I ignore the voices in my head. What have they gotten me, other than a cross armed sports jacket and some lovely Thorazine? however, this time, the voices had a point.

Things could get quite serious as he knows when you are sleeping, eh knows whe you're aw.... no, that’s that bloke that brings me lumps of anthracite for my coal fire. The creator of the universe knows everything, including what I’m thinking.

Pissing off the creator of the universe is a bit more serious than irking Santy Claus; after all, he turned water into wine, so just think of what nastiness he could do to my whiskey.

It wouldn’t take much of a miracle either; I frequently turn whiskey into urine, and I’m not particularly gifted in the miracle department, so I figure I’d best apologize right quick.

“Sorry about oogling one of your wives.” I pray. “But it’s not like you don’t have a few hundred thousand of them. I mean, if I were to so much as marry one more, I’d end up in the clink. And while I’m on the subject, one of your birds; remember Sister Spirella with the hairy cheek mole and the ruler? She’s a right bitch.

"Sorry. I’m just saying, that’s all.” I rubbed the back of my hand in memory.

The voices shook their virtual heads. “Now you’re definitely going to Hell, Moron!”

“Probably. But I’m taking you lot with me.” I replied to them.

“Eh, can’t be worse than the time you were trapped for three days in Newark airport broom closet with Barbara Striesand.”

Thanks for reminding me, you bastards. Now I’ve got to go back for more therapy.

WTF?!?

2006-01-17T11:37:00.000-05:00

Chavs?

Or clowans?

Or chav clowns?

You be the judge.

All I know is that I had an infestation of these pests in my neighborhood, I’d be doing some aerial spraying with a very strong insecticide.

UPDATE! It seems that these chav/clowns enjoy clubbing. Well, why didn’t they say so? We can certainly take care of the clubbing bit for them.*

UPDATE#2! It seems that these chav/clowns are native to New York and New Jersey and have thus developed immunities to all insecticides and industrial toxins. It shall have to be clubbing. Or gratuitious ordnance. I'm easy.

*It may be nontraditional, but I quite like the melodic sound that an aluminium bat makes when laid upside a noggin. Somewhat reminiscent of Handel's Royal Skull Thumping music performed on a harpsichordist.

The Pre-Game Show

2006-01-16T12:46:00.000-05:00

A roundish stood in the snack food aisle, shopping cart akimbo to cover the maximum passageway.

I cleared my throat.

Nothing.

Her brow was furrowed in concentration. Should she get the Deep Fried LardBits™ or the Lite Deep Fried LardBits™ (30% Fewer calories but still enough fuel to put a satellite in orbit) with the Suet dipping sauce.

“Excuse me” She flinched and turned towards the sound. I was examined and determined to be inedible. She turned back to her lardish pondering.

“Excuse me, Jabba the Hut, but your shopping trolley is blocking the aisle. I’d move it myself, but it is too heavy to shift as it contains enough trans-fatty acids to satisfy the cravings of sub-Saharan Africa for a year.”

“There is no need to be rude!” She responded.

Au contraire. Kick-off was fast approaching and if I was delayed any further, I would surely miss part of the game.

I let loose with an invective laced explanation the would have shocked, SHOCKED! the Foreign Office should such wording have been leveled at foreign dignitary that was not Chirac.

The response was a serious sniff. “You are so sleeping on the couch tonight, Evil.”

“I don’t care, just move it.” I replied. “Oh, and throw in a bag of Cheese Puffs, would you, Honey?”

A few notes on the Appalachian tongue.

2006-01-14T09:48:00.000-05:00

The natives of darkest Pennsyltucky speak a curious dialect, no doubt affected by the fact that each little mining community, often separated by a few kilometers were populated by different ethnic groups that generally despised each other..

“Don’t marry a dirty, stinking Irishman!” A pole might say.

“Ghlad frokdha clanny radish!” * The Irishman would reply hotly and the fur would fly.

In the interest of preventing ethnic violence, the department of education mandated different drinking establishments for German, Polish and Irish immigrants, to be spaced every 100 feet. Eventually, when ethnic tensions declined, this massive grid of bars was merged under single management, becoming the massive boozer that we know of today as the Pennsylvania State University.

The non-cirrhotic legacy of this dynamic system is the rich language of central Pennsyltucky. For example:

In the Queens English, if one were addressing a group, one would simply say “You” and the plurality would be assumed. A vulgarian might say “You lot” or “Y’all” but being the grammar Nazi that I am, I would beat them rump-wise with a steel rod, unless they were larger than I am. Then I merely make a snide comment behind there backs and blame it on a random pedestrian should they turn around. This works quite well as long as you can fake a air if righteous indignation.

In Appalachia, when addressing a group, plurality may be expressed in two ways; through the gaping maw of a double barreled 12 gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot, or the more polite “You ‘uns” (pronounced “Yins”).

Confusingly, “Yins” is also used in the singular, probably as a result years of drinking water from lead plumbing.

Another peculiarity is that the infinitive “to be” has vanished from the vernacular, viz:

“Your truck needs worshed.”
“Your kid needs beat.”
“Your ass needs liposuctioned.”

Furthermore, an Appalachian sentence is not ended with a full stop (period), exclamation point or question mark, it is usually ended with a “buddy”.

For example: “Yins commin’ to the bar with me Buddy?”

So, there you have it. Yins could now survive if stranded in central PA. Yins might find our diet of scrapple, paunhaus pudding, chicken and waffles, ham pot pie and funnel cake a bit strange, but wash it down with a few IC lites, and yins are good to go, buddy.

Gotta go. Bladder needs emptied.

*No, I’m not going to translate this. It’s really quite offensive to Norwegians. Feel free to use the Babelfish translator on the side-bar if you really must know.