No What Allowed?

Wow. It’s not very often that, while browsing apartment listings, you stop dead in your tracks and laugh for five minutes at a listing…after staring at it in bewilderment for another 2 minutes.

I’m trying to help a friend find an apartment, so I’m surfing around the newspaper’s classifieds section. I found one listing that said “no crocodiles allowed!”

Crocodiles?

Yes, in fact, it said c r o c o d i l e s.

This is the listing.

No Crocodiles Allowed!
Item#:  911076      
Rate:  
$1,150  /  month
(Fixed Price)      
Address:  120 Mansion St    
City, Province  Kitchener, ON       
National        
Bedrooms:  1    
Bathrooms:  1    
Square Feet:   615       
Quantity Available:  1    
Condition:  Unknown      
Date Available:  09 Jun 2007    
Posting Date:  09 Jun 2007    
Posting Expires:  09 Jul 2007      
Posting Last Modified:  09 Jun 2007 11:23:55 PST    
 
Seller: 
greatspace

    Description

Air Conditioning: Yes    
Building Age: 1 years 
Floor Size: 615 Square Feet    
Stories: 6 
Parking: 1  
You’ll love this beautiful upscale, almost new 1 bedroom condo. Quiet residential area, new building. Stainless appliances. Electricity extra. No smoking.
Shared roof terrace. Lots of light in this unit. 

Everything else looks normal, except the part about the crocs, which leads me to say, huh? What…who…why?! In the middle of a city, there is a one-bedroom apartment listed, and they actually had to tell people that crocodiles were not welcome. No dogs? Got it. No pets? Totally understand. But are these landlords saying that they’re finding it a common occurrence that tenants are keeping crocodiles in their apartments?

I’m so tempted to email these people and ask why they felt it necessary to tell prospective tenants that crocodiles were not allowed to live there. Perhaps a better question is, where are crocodiles allowed to live? I want to know, so I can avoid those buildings.

Speaking Of Running Gags

Here’s one from the You Named That Kid What? Files.

Pat and Sheena Wheaton said they decided to name their new baby “4real” shortly after having an ultrasound and being struck by the reality of his impending arrival.

“For most of us, when we try to figure out what our names mean, we have to look it up in a babies book and … there’s no direct link between the meaning and the name,” Pat Wheaton told TV One on Wednesday. “With this name, everyone knows what it means.”

But when the parents filed the name with New Zealand’s Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, they were told names beginning with a number were against the rules.

The government office has opened negotiations with the parents about the name under a policy that says all unusual names must be given case-by-case consideration.

“The name has not at this stage been rejected,” Registrar-General Brian Clarke said in a statement Thursday. “We are currently in discussions with the parents … to clarify the situation.”

Clarke said the rules are designed to prevent names that are “likely to cause offense to a reasonable person.” Satan and Adolf Hitler were proposed names that have been declined, he said.

If no compromise has been reached by July 9, the baby will be registered as “real,” officials say.

The full article is
here,
4Real.

A New Trend To Follow

I don’t know if anybody else has picked up on this or not, but I’ve been noticing something odd about the news lately. Over the last few weeks, there has been an unusually high number of stories dealing with people whose names somehow relate to the situation that caused them to make headlines in the first place.

First there was Christopher Woods, the guy who is suing the Boost Plus energy drink people for damages over a case of endless, well, uh, wood.

A few days later there was the story of Iowa woman Suzanne Marie Butts, who is facing charges and possible prison time for stealing toilet paper from a local courthouse.

And just yesterday I came across the story of an imprisoned murderer who was caught with an entire cell phone charger stuffed up his ass. His name? Tony Pile.

I know that things like this happen from time to time, but 3 cases in as many weeks is pretty weird so I thought I’d better mention it before somebody else scooped my observation. It would suck to spend so much time *coughcough*researching*coughcough* such an important topic and have it all be worth nothing in the end. And don’t worry, I’ll be sure to report on more of these as I find them or as people point them out to me, because this is so totally a ready made VC running gag.

DVS Is Great, But This Is a Bit Much

Are you a blind person? Do you like pornography, but feel that today’s porn product is neglecting you by not paying attention to your accessibility needs? If so, then boy oh boy do I have a treat for you. Yes indeed, your life changes today. For today is the day that PornForTheBlind.org enters your world.

Thanks to this new free service, never again will you have to ask yourself or even worse a friend questions such as “just what is he doing to that woman exactly?” Or “did he really get it all on her face like he said he wanted to?” Porn for the Blind’s helpful narrators will solve those mysteries and so many more for you, and they’ll do it with just slightly more vocal inflection than Steven Wright.

But wait, there’s more!

If the ever so cheerful sounding men using the technical terms for sex acts aren’t enough for you, you will no doubt be thrilled to learn that none of them appear to have grasped the concept of holding a microphone away from their mouths while speaking into one. The inclusion of the original site’s URL’s and the exact lengths of the clips being described are also features that will surely set your loins to blazing.

So visit Porn for the Blind today.

Porn for the Blind: If this doesn’t turn you on, you’re probably normal.

Jehova’s stalkers

I got something in the mail yesterday that frightened me. It was a piece of mail from some Jehova’s Witnesses, or Jehova’s Witlesses as Steve called them. But I didn’t even have to open it to be frightened by it. You could tell it was not professionally put together. Someone was doing this from their home. Even scarier, it was addressed to us, as our names appear on the buzzer downstairs.

Think about that for a while. That means that someone had to stand down there, write down everybody’s apartment number and names as they appeared on the buzzers, and then go out and carefully hand-mail all the junk-mail they wanted to send us. Doesn’t that seem like a scary amount of effort? Why do they want to convert the people in this building so badly? And why not use that energy for something, ya know, productive?

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Make Shitty Movie

When people ask me why I never go to the movies and why I don’t care when stuff comes out on DVD, I always have a million ways to answer their questions. And as of this very moment, I now have
one more.
Yes, “Monopoly: The Movie” could soon be coming to a theatre near you.

FILM director Ridley Scott is preparing the most unlikely movie of his career: a feature-length version of the venerable board game Monopoly.

The 69-year-old British film-maker, whose hits include Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, has been offered the pick of young actors to help turn the property game into a comedy thriller.

William Morris, the oldest theatrical agency in Hollywood, has promised Hasbro, which owns Parker Brothers, the manufacturer of Monopoly in the US, that the cream of its stable of 2000 actors will help create a blockbuster movie.

Scarlett Johansson and Kirsten Dunst are being considered for roles. Hasbro, which claims that Monopoly has been played by 750 million people since the 1930s, wants the film to feature “sexy young people” in an attempt to attract teenagers to board games.

Comedy thriller? Ok then.

I’ll admit I’m somewhat curious about this movie, mostly because I can’t figure out how they intend to shoehorn the hours upon hours of madcap excitement that is an actual game of Monopoly into 90 short minutes. I’m not sure if that’s the plan, but I hope that’s what they’ve got in mind. If they try to go all true to life on us with this one we’re going to end up with something slightly longer than watching Ben-Hur 3 times, and I don’t think anybody wants that.

Tone Death

If the urge strikes you to go to the Philippines, and while you’re there, you feel the need to go to a karaoke bar and sing, make sure you *can* sing. If not, you may die. That’s what happened to a poor unfortunate soul named Romy Baligula. He was halfway through a song, I don’t know what song it was, and 43-year-old security guard Robilito Ortega yelled to him that he was out of tune. He kept on singing, and our security guard just couldn’t take any more of his caterwauling, pulled his service revolver, and silenced him with a bullet to the chest! Our singer will never sing again, he died instantly.

If you think that’s too weird, the article says deaths and fights often happen in the Philippines because of people singing out of tune, and songs like Frank Sinatra’s My Way had to be removed from the list because apparently, a lot of us can’t do the song justice and violence breaks out too often because of people’s warblings.

Ooo! I have an idea! I know how we can get rid of that warbling whore! Let’s send her to the Philippines!

Follow My Nose To What?

Last night, we were watching Cops. I don’t know what it is exactly, but something always draws us to watching crime shows, and I think the most amusing ones are Cops and To Serve and Protect, just because the people getting arrested come up with some pretty weird excuses for why they have drugs on them or why they’re down in the alley where they got nailed.

Anyway, last night, they had to bring in a dog to chase someone down, which is always fun. But it got me thinking. Police dogs are supposed to sniff, right? That’s how they find their man. But I know dogs love to sniff everything, and any scent is interesting to them. So how do the police know if the dog is really on the trail? How do they know it hasn’t caught the smell of another dog, a nice plant, or who knows what? I know they’re trained, yada yada yada, but they can still get distracted. It was just a question that crossed my mind last night.

You Have A Collect Call From…Your Cheap Offspring.

Isn’t this a sad statement? According to snopes, Father’s Day is the busiest day of the year for collect calls. Next in line is Mother’s Day, followed by Valentine’s day. Aren’t we a classy bunch? We can’t even pay a few bucks to say we love our parents and significant others. Tomorrow’s Father’s day, and I wouldn’t think of calling dad up and then making him pay the bill. That’s evil!

Every day, I am convinced more and more that we’re doomed. Screwed, broken beyond repair, up the creak without a paddle. This is just another sign.

Beating A Who With A What Now?

Steve told me about this story, and he’s right. The next passage contains the best words to be written down since a police officer said someone was punching vegetation.

Durango, CO
11:08 a.m. A man on Westwood Place said his girlfriend was beating a miniature Chihuahua with a spatula.

And that’s the whole story. That leaves me with so many questions, and so many images. Steve said he saw this little gem somewhere, and my curiosity got the best of me. I through the words “beat chihuahua with spatula” into google, and voila!

So now, the questions, the images, and the fun! My biggest question is…why? Why would you beat a chihuahua with a spatula? Did it just eat part of your lunch off the spatula and you got mad? Why?

And…it was a miniature chihuahua. Is there any other kind? Have I been living under a rock and there are giant chihuahuas running around? I guess there are chihuahuas and teeny chihuahuas. And if that’s the case, the spatula was probably bigger than the poor little creature.

And…how scary is this woman that her boyfriend didn’t just stop her from beating the chihuahua? Why did he have to call the police? I can understand calling the cops if you saw your neighbours wallupping their little yappy mutt, but your girlfriend? Come on! Maybe he was afraid he’d get the spatula next.

And last but not least…how did it end? Did they take the chihuahua away? What happened to the girl? Don’t leave me hanging like that!

All I know is that whole scene would have been odd to witness. Maybe the images in my head are funnier than it could have possibly been.