Something Worse than Hold Music

Yep, I’ve found it. Something more annoying than those wonderful muzac things ya hear while waiting on hold to talk to someone at Bell or Rogers tech support because your phone/internet is fried to the tenth power. Whoever the hell designed this needs to be sentenced to listening to ten years of his own invention.

On my friend’s cell phone, there is something called ring tunes. It’s supposed to be this thing where instead of hearing, ring ring, you get to listen to music while you wait for them to fumble around in their purse, flip open the phone, etc. My friend is usually really quick at doing this, so I never noticed what happens if the purse-fumbling takes too long. But today I had the displeasure of experiencing it.

This is usually how it goes. I phone her up, and this voice says, enjoy ring tunes while you wait for your call to be connected. Then Cryptonite from Three Doors down comes on, I start to groove to it, and then she picks up the phone. But today, I called it, got the voice and the song, but she didn’t pick up the phone. I start to wonder if I’ll get the whole song, and what will happen if for some reason I let it ring for the whole song’s length. Just as the song sings, “I left my body lying somewhere in the sands of time”, it is rudely interrupted by…by…the voice! It says, “enjoy ring tunes while your call is being connected.” Wasn’t that what I was doing before your prissy ass came to babble in my ear? And it starts again. And at the exact same point in the song, perky the ring tune chick comes along to butcher the song all over again. And we could repeat this infinite loop-style, but we won’t. I don’t want to induce the same rage in all the readers that I felt whhile listening to this crap.

I ask this one question. What is the point of that? How can I enjoy something that sounds like one of those junk files that you get off kazaa? Give me something to enjoy before you tell me to enjoy it…or better yet, just leave it at ring ring. At least ring ring has an unbroken rhythm, and it is only bröken by, “hello?

Angels We Have Heard on High, Tell Us To Go Out and Buy!

Well Happy New Year, hope the holidays were good, I’m not going to even think that they were restful. After all, whose Christmas holidays are? And as for the title of this post, no no no, I’m not funny enough to come up with that on my own. That was a stolen lyric from Tom Lehrer, and although he wrote that half a century ago, he’s still right. Here’s why.

I’m sitting down to eat and the news comes on. One story is about holiday spending, and how to pay off those holiday bills. Sure, Christmas is a bit expensive, but this was insane. The news reporter was telling people to get a loan to pay off all their bills and then their debt would be consolidated. That makes sense if you have a bunch of credit card debts accumulated over a long period of time or something. But this is *one* Christmas. Are people really spending themselves into this mess over one holiday? Sure it’s a time for giving, but within reason, people!

Then it got even better. The reporter was saying debt-ridden Christmas shoppers could use their houses as collateral! To this reporter, and to the people who might need to use this option I say, “Are you high?” If you’re spending money that you don’t have, to that level, perhaps little Billie doesn’t need 1000 action figures and little Suzy doesn’t need a zillion Malibu Barbie accessories. But ya know what they do need? A home! They’ll cry just as hard watching their parents pack their gifts into boxes and try to find a place to live as they would have if they had to find another place to live and didn’t have those things. But the likelyhood is without those things, they’d still have a home. Those new things aren’t going to make their lives better, in fact what parents are teaching them is that material things matter more than the basics of a stable life, and is that the lesson they really want to teach?

What in hell is wrong with us these days? Why can’t we be happy with what we’ve got? Why do we have to make it seem like we have more than we really do? Have we forgotten what Christmas really means? Christmas is about being with family and friends, finding things to make people happy, and they don’t have to be extravagant, and remembering the best part about us as human beings, our kind side. It’s not about how fast we can drive ourselves into the goddamn poorhouse!

I’m Sleepy

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, but it’s the holidays anyway, you should be out celebrating something. The site will still be here in January when the so-called “Christmas vacation” is over. By the way, whoever came up with that term needs to be slapped mightily and repeatedly. It might be time away from the regular grind, but a vacation it most certainly is not. I always thought that the idea behind a vacation was to slow down, relax, and then come back rested and recharged with the ability to put renewed energy into whatever it is that you need to be putting energy into, not running all over the universe in an even more rushed fashion than usual. I’m not trying to slag Christmas or anything, but it seems like very few people actually get to take an honest to goodness vacation this time of year. They just trade in one set of stresses for another one and wind up coming back to everything in January even more tired and angry than they were before they left.

But speaking of Christmas, mine has been great so far. It generally is even though living in a 3-sided family makes things kind of hectic. It’s always nice to get home to see family and friends, and when some of those people have stuff to give you, it’s even better.

But one of the things I was given is still making my head spin. Ok, I suppose it wasn’t technically a Christmas gift, but it was still given to me around Christmas, so I’m counting it. But when it was given to me isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that I am now the proud owner of several packages of frozen SpaghettiOs. Feel free to stop and read that again, or if you don’t feel like going back, I’ll type it out one more time. Frozen SpaghettiOs. It wasn’t a gag gift (at least not in that sense) that somebody put together to be funny, the Campbell Soup Company actually makes and sells these things. How they manage to sell them I’ll never understand, but somehow, they do.

For the benefit of anyone who has never had the misfortune of seeing these things, here’s a quick description for you. They’re SpaghettiOs in a bag, and they’re frozen. That’s about it really. They’re just harmless icy blocks of pasta-like substance in a plastic bag. But what I can’t figure out is who exactly are these for and who came up with the idea and why. Who was the person who sat there staring at an ordinary can of SpaghettiOs and thought to himself, “cans are stupid. Somebody really ought to put these things in a bag. And not only should that person put them in a bag, but he should also freeze them while he’s at it, because SpaghettiOs aren’t quite watery enough as they are, and I have no doubt that the extra moisture that gets into everything when you thaw it out would do nothing but wonders for the flavour and texture”? And who’s buying these things? When has there ever been a situation that would make something that is perfectly fine when canned more convenient when you need to first thaw it out and then spend the next 5 minutes trying to get it open and force pasta circles and sauce through plastic that neither one has any desire to come out of? I just don’t get it. I understand why we have both frozen and canned vegetables, but I just cannot for the life of me get my head around the need for a bag of SpaghettiOs. I’ve never seen fresh ones, so why freeze them? It would be like putting a TV dinner in a can. But maybe I should stop right there before I give somebody another brilliant idea.

Ok, I’m off to get ready for my New Year’s party now, but before I go, here’s the next part of the
Top 50 Wrestlers Countdown.
Enjoy and I’ll talk to you all soon, most likely once things have a chance to settle down a little. Happy New Year.

Thought Salad, Munch Munch!

Well hello all. I hope everyone’s having or has had a good holiday, and is now full of turkey/desserts/whatever else you might have eaten/drank over the past few days. I had a good holiday, it was pretty cool to see my sister back on this side of the pond since she spent almost 2 years in Korea teaching English. I didn’t have any huge monumental things happen to me, just your usual run of the mill holiday fun, but a bunch of stuff ran through my head, and since the next few days are bound to be chaotic, here’s the pile of stuff that ran through my head. Let’s divide it into the good and the bad, the yea and the boo!

Yea: Getting an Ipod shuffle for Christmas rocks. I think it’s the only mp3 player without a screen on it. So there’s a chance that this bumbling blink might be able to figure it out. That was like woe way over the top from my brother. Also, getting a pile of funky Korean souvenirs rocks. I now know I was born in the year of the sheep.

boo: To all you morons with guns in Toronto, piss off with your random shooting sprees. Seriously, how senseless, thoughtless, and absolutely fucking stupid is it that some armed lunatics in a BMW fired into a random crowd of boxing day shoppers on a busy street? I mean, it’s bad enough that there’s gang violence going on, it’s bad enough that young lives are being wasted over some differences in gang territory or who the hell knows what, it’s bad enough that there are more funerals needed after a shooting at a funeral. But at least those shootings were connected, and maybe there was a reason to explain why those people got shot. I’m not saying it was right that some 50 people died this year in Toronto because of that stuff. But I guess it kind of makes sense. It’s kind of like when someone gets burned after they put their hand on the stove. Well, if they hadn’t put their hand on the stove, they wouldn’t have gotten burned. It doesn’t make it any less painful, but you can understand it happening. But to fire into a crowd of completely innocent bystanders? What in hell is that? That’s like someone turning on the stove and it exploding in their face, except a stove explosion, in most cases, isn’t carried out by people with minds enough to understand that what they’re about to do is bad. IT’s an accident. Someone sticking a gun out their BMW’s window and pulling the trigger is not a fucking accident. It’s a disgusting lack of respect for human life, and it makes me sick.

Yea: well now that I’ve let out I guess the heaviest part of the post, I’m happy to hear that that horrible excuse for a television show “growing Up Gotti” has been canned. God, that show just drove me nuts whenever I watched a bit of it. I think it’s about x-mob-boss John Gotti’s daughter raising her 3 obnoxious teenagers, and being a super bitch about everything to everyone. I mean, to do a whole episode about preventing her son from going to college in Boston just because she doesn’t want him to leave the nest is a waste of TV time. I’m glad the ratings agree with me, and, good riddance, hopefully those boots that are made for walkin’ don’t get slammed in the door on the way out.

Boo: What is with the huge amount of porn spam today?! Is it porn spam day or something? Or maybe it’s Give a Few Grannies Cardiac Arrest Day. Seriously, I opened my spam folder, and just about puked. I usually get a mix of spam trying to sell me cheap software, spam trying to make my absent member bigger, spam selling me cheap drugs of all kinds and mortgage deals, and the scams from Mrs. el googoogoo from the state of walawalablablabla trying to get my banking information so she can make me rich beyond my wildest dreams, and, sprinkled in there, some really nasty gems describing the porn I can have a look at if I just go to their site. They’re not just, well, making vague references to what I can have. You know the ones. There’s usually references to children or animals, and lots of descriptive words like oozing, squirting, dripping, ok I’m going to stop before I lose my lunch.

Well, today, I had nothing in my spam folder but those gems! What is with that? Talk about your Christmas gift.

yea: That’s some awesome not so wintery weather. Hey there, mother nature! If you can hear me, you can just keep doing that for a little while. Any time I can be spared from freezing all extremities off in the bone-chilling cold would be awesome. I know, I’m a giant wimp, and I should just deal with it, after all, this is Canada. But we can all find something we don’t like about where we live, and this is it for me.

Boo: I’ve run out of stuff to say. Unless a miracle happens, I probably won’t get around to writing anything up here until after Newyears. So happy Newyear everyone, and stay safe so you can come back and read more in 2006.

Merry Christmas Everybody!

Well, it’s early, and I’m getting ready to head home to my parents’ house. Ah my parents’ house, with the good food, family, and…dialup! Eeek! So if you don’t hear from me in a little while, that’s why. Plus, I’ll be doing the family/friends-visiting trek that’s always insane. So before I disappear into the wild blue yonder, I just want to say, have a safe and happy holiday everyone, and I’m sure I’ll be back with stories in the new year…if not sooner.

Did You Ever Wonder?

The other day when everyone was sure we were going to have the snow storm to end all snow storms, I had the oldies station on because they’re better at giving updates on weather and local crap, and I noticed something. Have you ever noticed how, in songs, when they talk about girls, I can’t say always, but a lot of the time, it’s in child-like terms? Little girl? Child? Baby? And the guy is her…daddy? And when you think about that, don’t you find that a wee bit disturbing? Do we all have some kind of latent pedophilia going on?

I remember being confused by that as a kid. I remember thinking briefly, why is that man talking to his baby like that? Babies are those things that go waa waa and are in strollers right? And then it happened so much that I guess I figured out that it wasn’t an actual baby he was talking about. But now that I’m grown up, I feel like I’ve gone full circle, because I still think it’s weird. Does anyone else think so? Or have I lost my marbles?

People are Funny

I was walking home through this giant pile of slush that is our town right now, and something happened to me that I should have mentioned when I was bitching about the things people do when I’m walking around. I got off the bus, but it had stopped a bit short of the curb. So someone was good enough to warn me about that, which was cool. Now here came the fun. I walked forward and my cane hit a giant bank of snow. As I’m trying to figure out the best way around it, a voice said very slowly, “She’s going to walk into a huge pile of snow!” Ok, instead of taking up play by play commentary, how about saying, “Go left.” or “go right.”

But that one I can sorta understand. Maybe she was thinking out loud, just really….really…slowly. But it made me think about something people do. They love to talk about me in third person when I’m right there. Sometimes it’s to the person I’m with. “Where is she going?” and sometimes it’s to each other. “Look at that girl with the cane. How old do you think she is? Where is she trying to go?” It’s like they think I’m deaf. How about asking me? You might get an intelligent answer.

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.