It’s Bud The Spud From The …Big Deep Freeze?

Brad sent me this and it cracks me up. And I can vouch for how great those potatoes are, they’re…something. Maybe not something you would want to ingest, but they are indeed something. Take it away, Brad!

You know how there are some vegetables, like beans, that you can boil for a couple minutes and freeze? Well, there are some you just can’t do that with. Well my soon to be vomitting friends, my aunt freezes potatoes. Yes, potatoes. Which would be all right, if she did it the right way. You can’t do it like beans.

The way she does it, they’re not in the water long enough to know that they are even wet let alone boiled before they are in bags bound for the freezer. When they come out, ready for cooking, they look like little frozen marbles floating in water. When cooked, they are a big sloppy glop of slop that can almost be sucked up with a straw.

Enjoy your dinner.

Mmm…thought stew.

I’m just sitting here, and I have way too much energy. Like super energy. I feel like I just drank a whole bunch of coffee, make that espresso, and I have so much energy that I don’t know what to do with it. And that’s not good when you’re working at a distress line, so I thought I’d try and burn off some of this by writing down whatever the hell comes into my head.

And let’s start with a message to mother nature. Stop pissing on my head! I swear we haven’t had a sunny day in at least a couple of weeks. It’s definitely been sucky for a week straight. You can have your rain to water the plants, but is it really necessary to have a couple miserable weeks Without a single solitary break? Believe me, I’m happy snow hasn’t come, at least not snow that stayed. I heard that some slush bullshit fell from the sky on Saturday. I’m just glad I didn’t see it. But after a while, the shit weather really brings me down. Believe it or not, the dullness effects us blinks too. So, can we have some sun please?

I don’t know why this irritates me, but it does. There was a song called Gimme Hope, Joanna by Eddie Grant. As far as I knew, it was a song about South Africa and all the Apartheid that was going on down there. Now some yogourt company has altered, oh wait, butchered, it and is using the tune to sell their yogourt. Well they succeeded in getting my attention. But it makes me wonder if anything’s sacred anymore. Oh why bother asking, nothing is. That’s almost worse than a Big Sugar song being in a car ad.

And here’s something really creepy that I found out when I told a friend to check out our blog. Apparently there’s another blog with a name really close to ours, and someone on it mentioned someone with a name close to mine. Luckily it was Karen, not Carin, but it had me going for a while. I thought Steve had lost his mind for sure.

And I think I’m done. This thought stew was more like a thought soup, the kind they serve at some cafeterias that might as well be broth with a couple vegies in it. I thought I had more to say. Guess not. Well I hope you guys had fun. I’ll be back…when I’m back.

Where Was This Stuff When I was A Kid?

Animal lovers slam Choke-A-Chicken toy
Seriously, that’s honestly what it’s called. But if you don’t want to believe either me or The Register, you can check out its official website and maybe even buy one by clicking here.

And if you’re considering picking up a few for the kids on your Christmas list, think about grabbing an extra one for your old buddy Steve, because it seems like something I’d be able to have some fun with. I’m pretty sure I’ve just set myself up for some abuse somehow but oh well, I won’t be the first person to ever be torn apart on the comment boards around here.

Active Listening By The Deaf

Man. I can’t believe how people who claim to be good listeners don’t really listen. Or maybe they only listen in certain contexts, and then turn off their ears everywhere else.

I said I was in training to work with people who are trying to get out of abusive situations, and that would involve learning how to listen, right? Well, it seems my fellow trainees don’t have the talent mastered yet. I was sitting with them, and Martha Stewart came up in conversation. All I said was, “It pisses me off that just because she’s a celebrity, she can have the rules bent for her.” I’d just heard on the news that she really wanted to go to this pumpkin fest in Nova Scotia and help them raise money. That’s dandy. But she’s a criminal, which means you have to have a special visa to get across the border. And apparently, she and her 50000 lawyers didn’t investigate this until it was too late. So instead of accepting her fate and not coming, she whined and cried like a spoiled child until they made her a special visa.

After I spoke these words, all hell broke loose in the room. Crise of”don’t pick on Martha Stewart, she only went down because she was a democrat. and because she’s female.” erupted all over the place. Of course. I should expect this in a room full of radical feminists. But what flew right over their heads as they started spasming, knee-jerk reaction style, is that whole argument is beside the point. I don’t care if she was wrongly accused of ass-raping a goat. The point is she was convicted, and she should abide by the same rules as the rest of the convicts. And on top of that, she wasn’t even wrongly accused, so that shred of sympathy is gone. If some other common criminal just found out their great aunt in another country was on her deathbed and wanted to go see her, you know what would happen? They’d find out they’d need a special visa, wouldn’t be able to get it, and would have to live with the fact that they didn’t hear great aunt Birtha’s dying words as long as they lived, and no one would care. That would be the end of it. But because she’s Queen Martha Stewart, they kissed her ass and she got special treatment. That was what pissed me off.

But nobody heard that. They heard Martha Stewart and started flipping out about how she was apparently unjustly treated and males did way worse than she did and got off scott free because they were republican males. Ok, perhaps. But you see those things on the sides of your heads? Ya know, they’re not just used for balance. They’re used to listen. LISTEN! L i s t e n! Next time, before you chop off my head, ears and all, actually listen to what I have to say.

Good Lord

The only problem I can see with this is that if God has as much influence as the lawsuit claims he does, then there’s no point in this guy suing him since he can’t possibly win unless God allows him to.

Prisoner sues God

A Romanian prisoner is suing God for failing to save him from the Devil.

The inmate, named as Pavel M in media reports, accused God of “cheating, abuse and traffic of influence”.

His complaint reads: “I, the undersigned Pavel M, currently jailed at Timisoara Penitentiary serving a 20 years sentence for murder, request legal action against God, resident in Heaven, and represented here by the Romanian Orthodox Church, for committing the following crimes: cheating, concealment, abuse against people’s interest, taking bribe and traffic of influence.”

The inmate argued that his baptism was a contract between him and God who was supposed to keep the Devil away and keep him out of trouble.

He added: “God even claimed and received from me various goods and prayers in exchange for forgiveness and the promise that I would be rid of problems and have a better life.

“But on the contrary I was left in Devil’s hands.”

The complaint was sent to the Timisoara Court of Justice and forwarded to the prosecutor’s office.

But prosecutors said it would probably be dropped and they were unable to subpoena God to court.

Welcome To The White People’s Happy Time Hip Hop Sing Along

I know that covering rap songs and turning them into country or folk songs is sort of an old gag, but I still think it’s funny, and since I know other people think it’s funny too, here are a couple more that I’ve just found.

Both of these tracks were done by
Jonathan Coulton,
who I know absolutely nothing about beyond the fact that he did a really nice job on them.

Have a listen to
Baby Got Back,
and
Bills, Bills, Bills,
which you’ll have to scroll down the page a bit to find.

Enjoy.

Steve, Don’t Eat It!

Here’s some nice random vomit-inducing fun for you.

I’m sure at some point we’ve all had this experience. You’re in the grocery store, and as happens every now and then, you come across something sitting on a shelf that makes you stop in your tracks, examine it and say to yourself or to the person next to you, “what the hell is that, and who in their right mind would want to eat it?” Well luckily for us sane unadventurous types somebody does eat it, and he’s even cool enough to describe the experience on his website in something he calls
Steve, Don’t Eat It!

Everything from Potted Meat Food Product to Silkworm Pupas are fair game, and he even tested out those Beggin’ Strips dog treats to see if they did in fact taste like bacon. His conclusion? Apparently they don’t.

I was laughing so hard by the time I got through all of the stories that I actually had tears in my eyes. Seriously, go read this stuff right now, just make sure that you’re not eating or drinking, and that you haven’t recently done either one.

Even More Odd Inventions

In keeping with the weird shit that people create and try to sell theme that we have going on around here this week, I give you StrangeNewProducts.com, a site that I found yesterday without even looking for it. What can I say, I’m just that good, or maybe that lucky. But either way, finding entertaining and relevant material without doing research or any other sort of work whatsoever rules.

The site is updated daily and features descriptions of all sorts of new products. Some are kind of cool, like the Sidekick Blood Glucose Monitor, and some are so completely stupid that they rival even mp3-playing breast implants, such as the Psychotronic Wishing Machine, which you really need to read about if ever you’re searching for a good reason to smash your head into a wall or find enough motivation to do it to someone else. There’s a lot of other neat stuff there too, so give it a look. It seems like a fine way to waste a few minutes every day.

Checking In, Saying Hi, Writing Things Down

I hope that everyone who celebrates it had a good Canadian Thanksgiving. Mine was great, thanks for asking. It was a good excuse for me to see my family, who I don’t see nearly as much as I’d like. It was also a good excuse for me to eat ridiculous amounts of food. The last time I can recall stuffing down so much dessert in a 24 hour period was last Christmas, but last Christmas there were 3 dinner gatherings, not 2. And through all of the eating and catching up, I still managed to learn something. That broken telephone campfire game that I’m sure most of us played as kids is a lot more fun when you’re playing with a buzz and when a couple of the people in the circle don’t have the greatest hearing.

It was nice to see the Leafs finally win a game on Tuesday night after a couple of shootout losses to Ottawa and a loss to Montreal on Saturday that I didn’t watch. I was one of the people who was upset before the season started about them not making a whole lot of big name signings, but I’ll say now that I’m pleasantly surprised at how well they’ve been playing. Even in losses, they’ve got quite a few guys who are all over the puck and creating good scoring chances. Now if they could only get a lead and hold on to it for more than a couple of minutes at a time, they might just have it made. But having said all that, there’s still a part of me that wonders if we could be in for another year like we’ve had in the past, where goaltending keeps them in a lot more games that they have no right winning, or even coming close in. I guess time will tell, but I’m going to make a really bold prediction here and say that we’re not looking at a cup contending team this year.

Man, has WWE been sucking more than usual lately or what? I can find good in wrestling where a lot of people can’t, but even I’m finding myself having trouble coming up with good things to say about the last few weeks of programming. I honestly think it’s some of the most boring and uninspired crap I’ve ever sat through, and I’ve watched a lot of wrestling in my life, a fair bit of it bad. The sad thing is that WWE, with the talent pool they have access to, should find it impossible or at the very least exceedingly difficult to put on horrible and unimportant shows week in and week out. Yet somehow they make doing so look absolutely effortless, it’s amazing.

Take Raw Homecoming for example. That show had an Ironman match between 2 of the best workers the business has ever seen, a Ladder match featuring 2 guys who’s names just about noone can argue come almost immediately to mind when the words Ladder match are spoken, and appearances from a huge list of legends that are rarely if ever seen outside of local independent shows or a WWE TV cameo now and then. But still, somehow, some way, the folks at WWE managed to turn what could have easily been an event that should have been talked about for months if not years to come into just another show, and not even a good one at that. A non-finish in an Ironman match? Ironman matches decide champions and end feuds, they don’t…whatever the point of that was, they don’t do that. The match was great, but in the end I felt let down, and after 30 minutes of Michaels vs. Angle, that’s not the way anybody should be feeling. The Edge vs. Matt Hardy ladder match was good, but it was over before it really had a chance to get started. You had 3 hours and an overrun, why not shorten something else, like one of the million pointless interview segments that accomplished nothing more than poorly advancing bad angles, or worse, wasting TV time on things that weren’t going anywhere beyond this 1 night? This show could have and should have been so much better than it was, and the fact that it didn’t even come close speaks to some huge problems behind the scenes in WWE in my opinion, for whatever that’s worth.

I got a call last night from one of those survey companies. No, I’m not upset about it, I don’t mind those. They’re sort of fun, they’re not trying to sell you anything, and those polls are one of the only ways you can get your government to consider listening to you, even if all you are is anonymous guy number 5423 in poll number X19. Who you are doesn’t matter, because you’re a voter, and everything related to voters and their feelings is measured in numbers, so politicians tend to live and die by them, changing their positions on just about everything under the sun based on each new set that lands in front of them. Ok, where was I? Right, the phone call I got yesterday.

It started out normal enough. The guy introduces himself, asks me if I’m over 18 and whether or not I’ve got time to answer a few quick questions, completely standard stuff. Then he launches into some questions about the province’s electrical system and my feelings on various aspects of it. How we should be generating our power, how important environmental concerns are when making such decisions, that kind of stuff. Then he hits me with one I’m not expecting.

“In the last 4 weeks, how many times have you shopped in an LCBO store, and how would you rate the service on a scale of 1 to 10?”

For those of you who don’t know what the LCBO is, those letters stand for Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which as should be quite obvious to hopefully everyone reading this, has nothing to do with hydro. I’d love to know how those 2 subjects found their way into the same survey, especially since they were the only 2 topics covered. It wasn’t a long, drawn out questionnaire on my feelings on all sorts of government-run services, it was hydro and booze, that’s all. That’s totally random and I’m overly curious about it. Why wouldn’t they have put the booze questions in a survey about health care, that would have at least made some sense. As things stand now, the only theory I can come up with as to how those 2 things became related is that lots of people drank beer during the big blackout a couple of years ago, and they would have had to get it from an LCBO location. I really should have asked, but I was kind of in a hurry and now it’s driving me nuts. Oh well, it’s my own fault for not taking the extra time to find out.

Wow, I didn’t realize this while I was writing, but I suppose this story kind of has a bit of a moral to it. Slow down, take your time, and ask questions. It’s the only way you’re ever going to learn anything.

And on that happy note, I’m going to take a few minutes and learn a little about what my lunch options are. I’ll talk to you all a bit later on.