Cut the Drama!

Does this drive you as nuts as it drives me? You’re scrolling down through your msn contacts. You see people’s names, a lyric or two, a funny quote…and then a complete display of overdone mush! Sometimes it’s something like “I love my honey bunny shnookums buttercup!” or something equally as nauseating. Or, if the flavour of the week didn’t work out for that person, as it’s usually these types who flock to the overdone mush-pot, it’s “Woe is me, there is a whole where my heart once was, oh how will I ever live?” I saw one tonight that brought back why I hate these displays of meaningless sap. It was in French, and the poor unfortunate soul couldn’t even spell. But what he tried to say was “I need a new spirit because this one’s empty.” I called him to see what all the fuss was about. Do you want to know what was wrong? He was just tired because he finished his exams. Wouldn’t “so tired” or “phew I’m done exams” have sufficed? Empty spirit? When I think of empty spirits, I think suicide, depression, horrible family tragedy, or something equally bad. I don’t think semester’s end.

Please, people, save the profound for when it is actually necessary. That way, if something big does happen to you, I’ll actually notice and not think it’s so much neaningless drivel. I get enough pointless sap in the
hug certificates you send me. And don’t use your msn name as a place to proclaim your undying love or infinite heartbreak. I love to hear about it, but not in that way. It’s the electronic equivalent of planting a big sloppy French kiss on your significant other or having a lover’s quarrel in front of a crowd. So disgustingly public!

I’m not saying I don’t like to hear about something that’s going on in people’s lives on msn names. It’s just when it goes right over the top that I get a little fed up. Please, people, cut it out!

The Year In Weird News

This showed up in the email today. I know none of these are fakes, I remember seeingmost of them while doing radio research and such.

NEW YORK –The Easter Bunny was hopping mad but kept his cool after being socked by a boy, a Wal-Mart greeter was sacked for showing a lot more than customers cared to see and a prep football coach was reprimanded for some eccentric licking. 2005 offered fresh tales of bizarre lust, quirky cuisine, multiple marriages and other foibles of human existence.

SAY WHAT TO ME, DUDE?
Like most everybody, LaChania Govan of Chicago got bounced around when she called her cable company to complain. She made dozens of calls and was even transferred to a person who spoke Spanish — a language she doesn’t understand. But when she got her August bill from Comcast she had no trouble understanding she’d made somebody mad. It was addressed to “Bitch Dog.” “I was like you got to be freaking kidding me,” said Govan, 25, of her reaction when she saw the bill. “I was so mad I couldn’t even cuss.” Two employees were fired after company officials went through records and identified them as being involved in the incident.

JUST WHAT WAS IN THAT RECIPE?
How about the Idaho high school boy who fed a batch of semen-frosted brownies to a fellow student and his friends? It seems the teenager was more than a bit ticked when his classmate put peanut butter in his cheese sandwich days before. As a police report said, the prankster, who has since agreed to admit to three counts of disturbing the peace, “hated peanut butter and it made him more mad than he could explain.”

GAVE A LICKING AND KEPT ON TICKING
An Oregon education board reprimanded a Central Linn High School football
coach for licking the wounds of several student athletes. Coach Scott Reed admitted licking blood from the knee of one student and the arm of another. It was not clear why he did it. Linn County Sheriff Dave Burright called the licking “bizarre” but not criminal because contact wasn’t forced. Three students said it appeared the coach was “just joking around.”

SO EASY. EVEN A CHILD CAN DO IT
An Anderson County, S.C., sheriff’s deputy was temporarily sidelined by his boss after the officer’s pistol went off during a gun safety class at a middle school. It seems the weapon discharged when a student pulled the trigger as the deputy was showing the kids how hard it was to take a gun from an officer’s holster. The bullet fired into the floor, and debris cut two students.

ONE WIFE AT A TIME
Another South Carolina deputy had a lapse of judgment, too, but his was of the matrimonial variety. Sumter County sheriff’s deputy Jay Follin was fired for being married to two women at the same time. Follin, 27, was separated from his first wife when he married his second, according to a department investigation. His second wife, the investigation revealed, was already married to another man at the time. Everything became known when the husband of Follin’s second wife filed a complaint with the sheriff’s department. The couple was separated at the time.

PSST! TRADE YA SOME GOAT FOR A ROCK
Four Connellsville, Pa., men ended up behind bars after they allegedly stole and butchered a goat so they could trade it for crack cocaine. Two of the men, police said, stole and killed the 4-year-old pygmy goat and then took it to another residence where two more men skinned and butchered the animal.

40 GOATS FOR CHELSEA CLINTON. DO I HEAR 50?
Kenyan councilman Godwin Kipkemoi Chepkurgor says he offered Bill Clinton 40 goats and 20 cows for his daughter’s hand in marriage five years ago. He’s still awaiting an answer.

HEY! WHATCHA LOOKING AT?
A Pittston, Maine, man arrested after he was found peering at a teenage girl from the business end of a New Hampshire rest-stop privy has pleaded no contest to criminal trespass. Gary J. Moody was given a 30-day sentence that will be suspended if he maintains good behavior for two years. The judge cited Moody’s public humiliation from the ensuing publicity in not jailing him.

HOOD? WHAT HOOD? WE DON’T SEE NOTHING
Two Cedar Rapids, Iowa, men landed in jail after they continued driving on Interstate 380 when the hood of their car popped open and covered their windshield. Instead of stopping to fix the problem, the men stuck their heads out the windows so they could see and kept going. Two Linn County deputies took note and pulled them over.

ANOTHER STORY ABOUT THE DANGERS OF SMOKING
A man riding in a car on Arkansas 234 near the Oklahoma border didn’t go to jail following a long night of drinking. But he did go to a hospital after jumping from the vehicle in an effort to retrieve his lit cigarette. Jeff Foran was recovering after leaping from the car and landing hard on the roadway in a failed bid to grab the butt, state police said. “If anything could make him stop smoking, this should be it,” said Trooper Jamie Graver.

MAMA MIA! ALL SHE WANTED WAS SOME PIZZA
An 86-year-old Charlotte, N.C., woman spent two nights in the city lockup after police said she called 911 dispatchers 20 times in a little more than 30 minutes to complain about service at a pizza parlor. Dorothy Densmore told dispatchers the shop refused to deliver a pie to her apartment. Densmore wanted the workers arrested. Instead, police arrested her.

NEVER WHEN MARRIED
Authorities in Wisconsin pinched a 63-year-old man who allegedly had a fondness for calves. Harold G. Hart, of Neillsville, reportedly told police he stopped at a Greenwood farm “at least 50 times” to have sex with calves there. The man, however, told police he never had sex with animals while maintaining a relationship with a girlfriend or his wife.

HONEY, I’M HOT FOR YOU
A 38-year-old Oregon man wearing a gasoline-soaked cape set himself on fire before getting down on one knee and asking his longtime girlfriend to marry him. About 100 people gathered to watch Todd Grannis perform the flaming stunt for Malissa Kusiek, who said “yes.”

SHOOT. HE WAS JUST TRYING TO BE FRIENDLY
In Muscatine, Iowa, Dean L. Wooten was fired for greeting Wal-Mart customers with a computer-generated photo in which he appeared to be naked — except for a carefully placed Wal-Mart bag. Wooten reportedly told customers the store was cutting costs and the bag was the company’s new uniform. A supervisor told him to stop showing the photo after customers complained. He was canned when he displayed the photo again.

AIN’T FUNNY TO THIS BUNNY
The Easter Bunny wasn’t laughing this year. Bryan Johnson, who portrayed the holiday rabbit at a mall in Bay City, Mich., says he was pummeled in an unprovoked attack by a 12-year-old boy. “He just started hitting,” Johnson said. Johnson suffered a bloody nose but kept his cool because he figured it was inappropriate for the Easter Bunny to battle back.

More Plugs, More Rants

I Hope that everybody’s doing well and that if you do that sort of thing, that your Christmas shopping is almost done. Mine is just about finished. I have to buy things for about 4 or 5 more people, and I know what I’m going to get all but 2 of them. So, does anybody have any ideas for what I should get my Mom and Dad? If you do I’d appreciate them, they’re really hard to buy for this year. Just keep in mind before you suggest anything that my Mom isn’t your typical Mom and that there’s a pretty good chance that my Dad will be too drunk to remember what I got him anyway. I don’t generally make talking about my personal life a habit, but the guy’s so messed up that he can’t even remember which year the whole family left him, how sad is that? I love to drink and I’ve had a lot of fun doing it, but Jesus Christ, what that stuff does to some people is just tragic. I thank my lucky stars every day that I took more after my Mom and didn’t inherit my Dad’s addictive personality.

But enough about that. While we’re talking about Christmas, I need to say something. I am by no means a religious person, but can we please knock off all of this “holiday tree” bullshit? It’s a Christmas tree. that’s what it’s called, that’s what it is. It’s a symbol of Christmas in the same way that a menorah is a symbol of Hanukkah, but you don’t hear me talking about the menorah like it’s nothing more than some sort of fucked up candle holder. What ever happened to live and let live? Sure, Christmas is everywhere, but it always has been. We live in a part of the world where the celebration of Christmas in either it’s marketed or religious forms is taken part in by a majority of the citizenry, and there’s no good reason to change that because we also live in a part of the world where everyone, be they majority or otherwise, is free to celebrate whatever he wants whenever he chooses. If I want to wish somebody a merry Christmas on my way to the mall where I’ll then proceed to spend way too much money on shit that my friends are probably going to hate and bring back as soon as the stores open up again, it’s my right to do that. By the same token, if you want to be a miserable prick because somebody has the nerve to be who they are, it’s your right to do that, just don’t fuck with my symbols while you’re doing it, that’s all I ask.

It’s kind of strange being back in my own house after spending so much time away from it in the last little while. I think that in some ways I still haven’t adjusted to living alone, because every time I come back here I’m always amazed to discover that everything is still exactly where I put it before I left. I’m not sure if I’ll ever entirely get used to that.

Ok, time for a couple of plugs.

Salty Ham’s countdown of the Top 50 Current Wrestlers is still rolling along, and the second part of it is now posted
here
for your reading pleasure. Or maybe pleasure isn’t the right word, you make the call.

And before I go, I wanted to let everybody know that Flagg is back! He writes about TV now, and just like before, he’s still all kinds of awesome. You can check out his newest column by clicking
here.

Ok, I’m gone for now. I’m sure you’ll hear from me before too long, but just in case you don’t, have a safe and happy holiday season no matter what you’re celebrating. that even goes for you politically correct sacks of shit out there who don’t want me to celebrate anything. What can I say, I’m feeling charitable, it is Christmas after all.

Breathe In The Name Of The Law!

Mayor wants to ban death.

“The mayor of a Brazilian town is trying to bring in a law making it illegal for residents to die.

“Mayor Roberto Pereira da Silva, of Biritiba-Mirim, came up with the idea because the town’s only cemetery is full.

“He wants to bring in a law that would see relatives of people who die before their time face fines or even jail.”

I’ll never understand the whole “before their time” thing no matter how many times I hear it, especially when it keeps coming from those people who think that everything is “God’s will.” If it’s God’s will and he does everything when it’s time to do it according to some sort of “divine plan” he’s cooked up, then how can any death be a premature one? When you’re supposed to go, then you’re gone, no matter how or when you go. You can’t have it both ways, pick a side and stick with it. Mark that down as another problem I have with the whole religion thing. Too many logic gaps for me.

As a small side note, this story has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with physical space, but I needed to throw that out there because those “God knows everything” people drive me endlessly up the friggin wall.

If There Was a Net God…

I read the ten net commandments from the Spyware Weekly Newsletter, and they’re bang on. Anyone who doesn’t already follow these rules should start. I guess I’m partially breaking no. 2, but only in the safest possible way.

Note: When he says every second Tuesday, he means the second Tuesday of every month.

1. Thou shalt not buy merchandise found in pop-up ads or spam.
2. Thou shalt not post thy email address, phone number, address or social security number to the internet, nor shalt thou post anyone else’s.
3. Thou shalt not forget to update thy Windows every second Tuesday.
4. Thou shalt not connect to the internet without installing an antivirus, nor shalt thou begin a scan without checking for updates.
5. Thou shalt not connect to the internet without installing a firewall.
6. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s credit card number, nor his bank routing number, nor his social security number.
7. Thou shalt not enter thy credit card number without seeing the tiny padlock icon on thy status bar.
8. Thou shalt not reply to the email from the Nigerian banker.
9. Thou shalt not forward chain letters to thy friends and family.
10. Thou shalt not use “password”, nor thy birthday, nor thy children’s names, as thy password.

Pretty Weirdness

I hate to throw something like this on top of Carin’s great post about the shelter, but like they say, the show must go on. By the way, who are They? I know a million people have asked that question, but none of them have ever been able to answer it. Ok, there’s always
this guy,
but I’m not counting him since he just decided to become the answer last year in a rather creative attempt at cashing in on his 15 minutes of fame, and surely the real They have been around longer than he has, so his little publicity stunt means next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. And it’s at this point that it dawns on me once again that I sure do spend a lot of time thinking about stupid crap. I’m not sure how healthy it is, but hell if I’m stopping, it’s somehow worked for me up to now. Why tamper with marginal success I always say.

Wow, I actually had to look up at the title to remember what my point was supposed to be. Guess my fingers kind of got away from me for a minute there. And is it just me, or does that last sentence sound far more disgusting than it should?

Ok, after all that, let’s talk music!

Does that new INXS song “Pretty Vegas” weird you people out as much as it does me? I don’t know about you guys, but whenever I hear that song I always have to stop for a second and remind myself that this is 2005, that’s JD Fortune singing, and that Michael Hutchence is most certainly still dead. He might still be hanging from the hotel doorknob for all I know, but wherever he is, he ain’t singing on that song. But even though I know that, the lengths to which Hutchence 2K5 goes to sound exactly like him are extremely frightening to me. I’m so bothered by this that I can’t even enjoy Vegas for the not bad song that it is. Maybe it’s because I can’t get over the fact that I was fooled into thinking it was an old INXS song and it took me like 4 minutes to realize I was wrong when I’m usually the guy who knows that kind of thing in about 4 seconds, or maybe it’s because I can’t get the damn thing out of my head, but whatever it is, this song has started driving me nuts. It’s gotten to the point where I’m seriously considering dropping way more cash than anybody should have to for an INXS album just for the sake of hearing what the rest of it sounds like. Isn’t that sad? Ok, you don’t have to answer that. But please, somebody, tell me that I’m not alone. Or better yet, send me a copy of the album or at least hook me up with a few mp3’s so I can get a sense of whether the whole sound-alike thing is a marketing ploy designed to sell albums to idiots like me or something that should legit scare me. Whatever the answer ultimately ends up being, there needs to be one so I can finally get my mind back to a state of relative ease.

And on a final note,I’d just like to point out that about 93% of all of the Christmas music I’ve ever heard in my life is really, really bad.

More later.

Big Fuckin Post, No Fuckin Title!

Yep, I gave up. After sitting there for a good 20 minutes trying to find a title for this post, I just threw one in. Hey, at least it’s a title of some sort. Sorry I haven’t written in a while. I really don’t know where this week went. I guess that’s what happens to time when you get closer to Christmas. But I’ve been thinking about something for a while, and tried to post about it, but oh no. My computer had other plans for that post.

Like I said a while ago, I started volunteering at a women’s shelter. I knew going in that it might be heart-breaking. But I guess I expected the heartbreak to just smack me in the face like it does sometimes at the telephone help centre where I volunteer. But I’m figuring out slowly that the things that rip me apart aren’t in the obvious, but in the subtle.

Let’s just run through a few things that have happened over my few shifts there. At the beginning I didn’t know the way there because the address is confidential. So they were meeting me and showing me the way. As we walked towards the door, the staff walking with me stopped me, turned and talked to someone else. She said very nicely, “Hello, are you looking for some apartments? I live in the area, I know it well, do you need some directions?” It turned out to be a man. After gently directing him away from the shelter, she told me she wasn’t sure if he was trying to sneak in and get past the staff. That freaked me out. How often do they have to politely fend off people from trying to get inside? And One day, would I have to do this too?

When I finally get to the door, I am told it has cameras, shown a keypad where you punch a door code that I still haven’t been given, and a doorbell that connects the person on the outside of the door to someone who speaks over an intercom speaker. I understand the reason for all this security. I mean, the women in here have x’s that aren’t exactly friendly and when they drop by, it’s not to bring the women some cookies and maybe a nice card. But even understanding it doesn’t make it any less forbidding. Then, the door opens, and I have five seconds to get through the next door.

So I’m now inside the walls of the shelter. At first it feels sorta homey. I can smell some rice cooking, I can hear some music playing and some women talking. And then I hear something else. A baby crying. This should add to the homelike atmosphere, but it doesn’t. It shakes me and brings me back to reality. This is a shelter. A shelter for women and their kids to get away from someone who’s beating them. That means, what has this poor baby seen already? In this baby’s brief life, what has he or she had to go through? What does this world seem like to this little baby?

I walk to the office to check in and see which kids need a babysitter. I get there and the phone rings and someone’s prescriptions come in, and she doesn’t even have the money to pay for them, so they have to be paid for by the shelter. Then I start to notice the state of organized chaos that is the norm here. As one of the staff starts to deal with the prescription, a woman comes in, cannot speak English at all, and the staff on the phone has to hand off the phone to someone else because she’s the only one who can speak Spanish, so she can talk to the woman who’s just walked into the office. Can you imagine not only needing to run away from someone who has probably controled every aspect of your life, but on top of that, not having the ability to speak the predominant language spoken where you are? Not being able to ask for help? Having to hope that the person offering help is an excellent reader of body language? She’s just lucky that there is one person in the shelter who can speak Spanish fluently. But what happens when that person goes home?

I’m told there’s a little girl who needs a babysitter. So I meet up with her and we go off to play. She decides to play with a jack in the box. But the character refuses to come out of the box. So the little girl says to me, very calmly, “I know how to fix it.” With that, she picks up the jak in the box and smashes it down hard on the floor. My mouth opens a little and then I manage to not make a big deal. I say to her, “Oh, I don’t know. I think you might have scared him. Now, he might not come out at all.” Then, with the next crank, the little guy pops out. I find this whole situation freaky. Think about it. She got what she wanted by smacking the thing around, just like I’m sure her mother’s abuser got what he wanted by smacking her mother around. I know the jack in the box doesn’t have a mind and it was just a strange coincidence, but it was the wrong kind.

Back at the office, someone comes in and wants to speak to the staff about donations. What she has is not anything huge, but what it is seems to be needed. It’s a bunch of clothes and blankets. Then I got thinking about how these people usually arrive. With nothing but the clothes on their backs, and maybe a kid’s favourite toy if they managed to grab it on their way out the door. And they’ll likely be leaving soon, having to start all over again from scratch. How does one do that when they don’t even have the money to pay for their prescriptions?

I come back a couple more times and the little girl really wants to see me and is talking to me. As I go to leave I say, “I’ll see you next week.” There is a pause and the staff with me says, oh no you won’t because she and her mother are moving out on the weekend. I give the little girl a hug and tell her I hope she likes her new place. And that was the last time I saw that little girl. I wonder how stable her life has been up to this point. Has this been the only time of Chaos? Or has it been a series of moves, always hoping the next house, the next town, the next man, will be better?

Then I think about how it’s going to be the whole time I’m there. The high turnover, the constant change of faces. I know it’s a good thing that they’re not stuck there long, it means there’s hope for a new life. But for me, It also means I’m going to have to grow a thick skin and not get attached to anyone there, because likely before I know it, they’ll be gone.

As I go to leave because my shift is over, I have to hit a big button to activate the intercom and ask if it’s safe to go. She says it is and I step back into the parking lot, the street, the seemingly normal world. Then I wonder how normal it is, or how many other strange worlds are spinning in their own little orbits all around me. And then I think I should stop philosophizing because nobody needs a big pile of philosophy. Whatever I may think, I know this. It sure didn’t need much time to simultaneously scramble up my brain and make me thankful for how good my life really is.

Cheap Plugs And Pointless Awards

Ok, time for me to whore myself out a little.

The good people over at
Salty Ham
are in the middle of celebrating 2 years of existing, and there are a lot of things going on over there right now. Among them is the Top 50 Current Wrestlers list, the first part of which you can read
here.
I wrote stuff there, go check it out if you’re either a wrestling person or a Steve person. Do Steve people actually exist? Probably not, but I can pretend.

And I know that this has nothing to do with anything, but as of Tuesday night, I’m convinced that pop music is pretty much dead. They actually presented something called the Ringtone of the Year Award during the Billboard Music Awards that night. Why do ringtones need their own award? You know who deserves his own award? The first guy to get so pissed off when he hears one of those fucking things in a public place that he kicks the person square in the nuts and shoves his cell phone up his ass. Then again, watching the Billboard Music Awards in the first place is a pretty good indication of what sort of state pop music is in, ringtones or no ringtones, so maybe I’m just getting way too worked up about this. That being said, piss off with the ringtones already, would ya please? It’s a phone for God’s sake, not a fucking jukebox.