Helping You Feel Better About Yourself

I’ve seen me some stupid people on Family Feud before, but I don’t remember anything that comes close to topping
these guys.

What I can’t figure out is how they made it to Fast Money. that means they had to have won, which seems impossible. And if they won, that means that the people they beat could very well have been worse, which also seems impossible.

Note for the blind people: The video won’t start playing automatically when you click the link. You have to go into the Flash movie and press the replay button a couple of times before anything will happen.

>Are You There God? It’s Me, The Law

>Back in October 2005, I posted a story about a Romanian prison inmate who
filed suit against God,
claiming that the lord took bribes, didn’t help him in his time of need, and was in many other ways pretty much a no good scumbag. Well, after almost 2 years, there’s finally an update.

Prosecutors in Timisoara, where the claim was filed, have decided to drop the case because
God doesn’t seem to have a home address and they can’t locate him.

And before anybody asks, no, I have no idea how or why it took 21 months to sort this out.

>Clearing the Backblog

>Hope you folks like these random posts, because with all that time I didn’t write, I’ve created quite a, well, thought backblog. I’m sure I’ll be able to write something more focused soon. But until then, have a pile of thoughts.

Remember back in another random post, I said I forgot something? Well, I remembered it, and keep forgetting to write it down, so I’m writing it down now. What was it again? Just kidding.

Has anyone else noticed that, among all the phone drones out there, the Swiss Chalet delivery phone drones are the most humourless of all? I could swear they turned their human trainees into cyborgs to be more efficient. When they pick up the phone, they greet you with something that sounds like “hellothankyouforcallingswisschaletcanihaveyourphonenumberstartingwiththeareacodeplease?” Huh? What? Where? who? I’m still stuck at Hello. Even if you make a joke, there is no laughter, there is only “nextitemplease?” Everywhere you go, you’re going to get someone who sounds like a zombie, but this is a consistent thing with Swiss Chalet. I think the lady who sold me Chalet soup when I had that brutal cold was the last of the humans.

Can I mention how much I hate hate hate writing big collaborative reports? I mustn’t be a team player or something, because I can’t stand having to come up with ideas that we both agree on, and then wrangling them into something resembling intelligible english. For the past 6 weeks, I’ve been working up at the university doing an audit of various areas of their website to tell them how well they work with JAWS. The way it works is I work in tandem with a guy with functioning eyes, and when I have a problem, he tries to tel me what he’s seeing in comparison to what I am. Then, we have to write a big report to explain it to the powers that be. Seems simple enough, right? I wish!

Every time he gets his hands on it to edit in his input, the input he adds is either riddled with errors and redundancies, cannot be called decent sentences, or all of the above. I spend more time editing the jabber than adding new input. I showed it to Steve, and after the third sentence, Steve was confused beyond belief, and he knew what I had been doing for the last six weeks. Fixing the report was so brain-sapping that I said to Steve that my brain felt like it needed to write blog posts for nourishment. Well, we know how many of those got created, don’t we? If only we always got what we wanted.

Note to anyone about to take a plane anywhere: Do not watch the show called Mayday before you go. You’ll wonder if flying is such a great idea. That show is fascinating, but lord you realize how much human error goes on, and then you wonder why there aren’t more crashes. Air traffic controlers that don’t seem to understand the gravity, ha ha, of “we are out of fuel,” engineers that are eyeballing up parts to see if they fit and they don’t, pilots punching the wrong entry points into their autopilot and, quelle surprise, getting lost. Ug. You wonder how good an idea it is to put your life in their hands. *Tries to remember* did I watch Mayday before I went to San Rafael? I know I thought about things in it through the whole plane trip. But maybe I’m just neurotic. But the show makes you realize how rare a true mechanical failure is. they’re most often caused by human error.

And because people love dog stuff, I figured I’d throw some more doggy tidbits in. I learned yesterday that Trixie is not a fan of being splashed by a truck driving through a puddle. She backed up, spun around and shook her whole body to get the water off. I just couldn’t stop laughing. Yep, I’m heartless.

Remember when we called her Visa? Well, now she’s upgraded to Visa Gold because she really goes out of her way to be, well, in ours. Holy crap. Silly girl moves and ends up more in the way than before.

Also, remember how, in the mornings, she’d get up and flop like a fish on the rug? Well, now she’ll do it on the bare floor! Trixter, doesn’t that hurt? But if you’re having fun, knock yourself out…well, don’t do that. That’s what I’m afraid will happen! She also will shake her whole body, but she’ll be right next to the couch, so she’ll wack right into it! One day, she decided to shake her head the way she does, and I heard a loud click! Dad said that was the sound of her head hitting his knee! Ouch!

I have learned to respect that thumpy tail and its distructive power. We had to more firmly attach the basket we have on the door to catch the mail because she had wagged into it so hard! That, combined with her womping her head off it made it all crooked.

I wish I could record the noises she makes when she dreams. Sometimes, she wags her tail in her sleep. Other times, she makes these itcy bitcy barks. I have to wonder if she’s having a good dream or a nightmare. If only I could speak Trixie.

Next week, the guy who does followups for the school, who is also the guy who interviewed me last year, is coming to see me and see how Trix and I are doing. He’s coming at 5 at night so we can walk through Friday rush hour. Really putting Trixie and I to the test, isn’t he? I’m a little nervous, a lot excited, and a little nervous all over again. I want to hear him say that we’re doing well, I pray I haven’t let some things slip, I want some pointers on some things, and I hope he doesn’t think those things are stupid. Hopefully I’ll have a story or two from that.

I think that’s about it. Holy crap that was a huge post. Hope it wasn’t too long and drawn out.

Hello? Is This Thing On?

Writing this, I wonder if anyone’s still reading. We both screwed off for a good long time. 15 days? eek. Have we ever done that before? I’m too lazy to scroll through the archive and check. But I think it’s pretty rare. So rare that Ann Adams, the sweet lady that she is, wondered if we were ok. Yep, we’re ok. We just got busy for different reasons, and the computer made a meal out of my last attempt at a post. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to save the post as the computer freezes, rebooting the computer, seeing the file you saved, breathing a sigh of relief, then opening it, and all you see is c:\blog.txt. Nope, that wasn’t the post. So rather than writing that one again, I figured I’d do a random thoughts one to get me going. *hits save first.*

Something has been puzzling me for a while. I went to the store to get Trixie a tug toy. She ripped Babs’s old tug toy in half, and then gnawed the everloving hell out of one her puppy raisers gave her so the rubber was hanging off and revealing hard plastic. So I thought I’d better get one made out of rope or something. I went into this store, and the first few tug toys they showed me were stuffed animal-like things with springy legs. I didn’t want them because I thought she might get at the stuffing. But I especially didn’t want the one that looked like a chihuahua!

What is that? dog-devouring practice? “here, killer, have a tug Schitzu. It’ll get ya all nice and strong for the real ones.” Then they see the neighbour’s yappy little bichan frise and they think “Ooo! a tug toy that moves on its own!” and before you can say sit, Gurrgurrgurrgurr yipe! Yipe! Yipe! What in christ are the makers of toys thinking? Are they hoping for a lawsuit? I was lucky enough to find a tug toy that consisted of a rope with knots at each end. I’ve never heard of a living knotted rope, so I think I’m safe.

I must be really nuts because I had another weird dream about a random dog following Trixie and I home. This one was worse, though. Not only did it follow us home, it mauled Trixie so badly that it broke one of her legs. In the dream, I was with another girl and her dog, and we came upstairs and the dogs were playing. Suddenly, I thought the play got a little rough, so I came over, and found myself sandwiched by 3 dogs! Three? Um, uh-oh! Here we go again! Like in the other dream, I tried to pick up the phone, but they wouldn’t work. This time, every phone I tried to use, including my cell phone, yammered ads at me. Lucky for me, my parents showed up and took Trix and I to the vet, who yelled at me, demanding to know what took me so long to get there. This must be because Trixie got an eye and ear infection dealt with, the ear infection probably being caused by another dog licking her ears and me not getting them wiped out well enough. But man! Two dreams about random dogs following us home? Weird!

And in other dog news, news that I’m horribly behind on writing up here, Barbie has made it home from GDB with her own black lab named Rosamae. There’s a picture up on her blog if ya wanna see. And my final bit of doggy goodness, if you just can’t get enough guide dog school fun, *listens to a large groan from readers which is outdone by a cry of nooooo! from Steve*, Jessica is at GDB training with her woofer, Newmar. I’m sure you’d get used to calling him Newmar, but that sounds like an alien planet or a factory or something. Sorry, Jessica, he sounds like an awesome woofer, but the poor soul got quite the name. I’m sure he’s already grown to suit the name for you, though.

Ok, ok, enough dog things. Moving on to….the TV. I saw a couple of commercials that made me sit up and take notice. One was for a deodorant that provided…prescription-strength sweat-protection. What? People need prescriptions for this? How the hell much do they sweat? Maybe more people who ride the bus should get that.

And then there was a commercial for a truck that was supposed to be always ready for fun. It’s name was the Dodge Avenger. Yeah, because an avenger sounds like such a party animal. It sounds like something that would run you down when its driver was having a fit of road rage. Nothing should be called an avenger, unless it’s an army tank.

And what is with the commercial that seems to be only people singing the alphabet to a rock tune? Is it some kind of literacy thing? All I know is I’m walking around singing the new rocky alphabet. Thanks for the refresher. I didn’t need it, but thanks anyway.

Now that I can use a bunch of functions on my phone, I do things I never thought I’d end up doing, like, texting. I looked at people writing messages on their cell phones and thought, why don’t you just, er, call them? But I’ve realized that sometimes a text message is more efficient, in theory at least. But when you’re me, and take…forever..to..write…a…message, maybe the efficiency is gone. I now sort of understand why the silly codes you see everywhere were created. But I will not use them. Here I am looking for ways to capitalize letters and use real punctuation. The English language means too much to me to give in to the dark side!

The English language means a lot to me, and so does my ability to speak French, but apparently I’m losing it. The other day, I had the opportunity to speak French, I opened my mouth, and no sound came out. I ended up caving and speaking English. I felt so bad. Damn it I didn’t want to lose it, but it appears it’s slipping away!

And I think that’s about it for now. I will write more stuff, sooner than 15 days from now, hopefully.

You Left Your Dog Where?

I cannot even remotely understand this story. Here’s a short summary.

Guy, his wife and his guide dog go camping in a Wal-Mart parking lot (what the hell?).
Guy ties his guide dog to a tree.
guy and wife leave the next morning, each thinking the other had put the dog back in the camper (again, what the hell?).
Neither did.
guy is very lucky, because nice delivery man rescues dog.
Police reunite guy with dog.

How in christ do you forget your guide dog? How does that even work? I can understand losing your dog if the dog somehow runs out of your house when you’re answering the door. I can understand something terrible happening to the dog if you somehow lost control of him/her and he went out into the street. But this is just stupid! He’d had this dog for at least four years. After having your furry friend either near you or attached to you in some way, you just don’t forget him! It would be like leaving your kid at a gas station. I know it happens too, but in that case, what do we say? Wow, that’s stupid!

Hopefully I never end up leaving Trixie somewhere. If that happens by some bizarre chain of events, I’ll really have to eat my words. But until then, I’ll just shake my head and be glad that it ended ok.

For Stressed out Geeks Everywhere…

Wow. The USB gadgets keep getting weirder. This one reminds me of a toy I had when I was a kid. It was called the revenger, and people would attach it to their car’s dash. then when fellow drivers pissed them off, they could press one of 3 buttons and it made noises of a death ray, a machine gun or dropping bombs. So they could feel like they were obliterating the idiot driver who just cut them off in whatever way they saw fit.

Now, you can have a similar experience with the USB stress panic button!

It looks like some ordinary piece of technology, but if you flip up the lid, there’s a giant red button. Slam it, and either watch a simulated bomb explosion or pretend you’re punching your boss. And if you’re afraid you’ll get caught screwing around, it has something to quickly flash up on the screen that looks like a spreadsheet.

And these people want people to pay $17 U.S. for it. Wow.

Chris Benoit

Carin told me I should write something about the Chris Benoit situation. She’s right and I was planning on it, but even though you’re reading what I’ve come up with, I really have no idea what to say. I don’t even know what to think at this point. I’m reading what comes out just like everybody else is, and just like them, the more I hear, the more shocked, the more saddened, the more confused I become. It never crosses your mind that somebody you look up to, somebody you see as special to you in some way, somebody you’ve almost never heard a bad word spoken about could have done what it’s looking more and more like he did. I know it’s a strange thing to say, but of all the people in and around the wrestling business, there’s almost nobody I have a harder time picturing murdering his family and killing himself than Chris Benoit. It just doesn’t seem possible, and there are moments when I think about it and I half expect that any minute now I’m going to wake up and everything will be the way it was before. Unfortunately I know that’s not going to happen, and that as today moves on and becomes tomorrow and as tomorrow turns into next week, more details will emerge, and somehow everything will get even harder to comprehend than it already is.

None of us will ever truly know what went on in that house or what was going on in the minds of the people in it, and sadly, the only ones who will ever fully understand what happened this weekend can’t tell us now. But I think it’s pretty safe to say that even if they could, sense could never be made of it. Sense can never be made of something like this, no matter how much we may wish it could. Right now and likely forever, the only things that I’ll ever know for sure are that 3 people are dead, and that even though you can’t take his accomplishments away from him, the name Chris Benoit will likely never mean the same thing as it did just a few short hours ago.

Strange Dreams are Made of Trixie.

You can tell I spend a lot of time thinking about Trixie. Why? She’s in my dreams! She’s in a lot of my dreams in very ordinary ways, but there were two that were especially weird.

I had one dream that it was one of those times that Steve and I were off to visit his family. But in the dream, I decided to leave Trixie behind! I didn’t leave her with someone, I just left her in the apartment. Everyone was fine with this, until I got there, realized that we would be gone for days, and began panicking when I finally figured out that noone would be there to feed her, let her out to relieve, all that good stuff. Then, it was too late to go get her, so we were just going to hope for the best. And the dream was over, I woke up with a start, terrified that I had actually done this. Alrighty then. What does that mean? Does part of me think I would actually abandon Trixie? Weird.

Then I had another dream that made even less sense than the other one, although I can sort of see fragments of reality in it. I dreamed that I took Trixie out to play on the flexi-lead, and the lawn was full of dogs! Dogs everywhere! They were playing, romping, having a good time. So I let Trixie loose, and we all watched the fun. Then I brought Trixie back in, and every so often, when I’d call Trixie to me in the house, I’d think I saw another dog! One time, the dog that jumped at me was yellow, and we all know Trixie is black! Somehow, I’d brought Trixie in, but another dog had followed us, and noone had stopped the dog from coming in with us. I was trying to get this mystery dog to sit, and it would not sit at all. Trixie was not a fan of our stray and kept growling at him. This was not a good scene.

I picked up the phone to call our downstairs neighbour. My thought was she knows everyone in the building, she’d know who this dog belonged to and help me get it home. But the phone wasn’t working! Every time I’d pickit up, it would either buzz at me strangely or I’d be hearing someone else’s conversation.

Finally, I wrestled this big dog without a leash past a growling Trixie and into the elevator. We went down to my neighbour’s door, but she wasn’t home! I got back into the elevator, and ran straight into my boss! I wondered what the hell he was doing in the elevator, but wondered if he could help me with this dog. He went to look at the tags to figure out where the dog was supposed to go, but just as he was about to read it, the elevator opened, he said he had to get off here, but to go to the lobby and he’d be right there to help me. But he never showed up! So there I was, in the lobby of the building, fighting with this uncontrollable dog that wasn’t mine. All I kept thinking in the dream was, “Man I’m glad Trixie’s good at her obedience.”

Man, my brain is screwed up when I sleep. I wonder what other weird dreams it will cook up with Trixie in them.