>I Think Somebody’s A Little Squirrely

>Are squirrels super valuable in Israel? If not, do any of you have another way to explain
this?
I hope so, because I’ve got nothin’, at least nothin’ better than mental illness.

The victim, whose name was not released, said he was carrying his pet squirrel in his fanny pack when Surami grabbed it and tried to take it with him. The man stopped Surami and took his pet back.

Later the same day, the victim allegedly received a phone call from Surami in which he threatened to burn down his house if he didn’t turn over the squirrel.

Afraid of losing his home, the man complied and met Surami, who allegedly proceeded to shove and slap the complainant, as well as attempt to attack him with a kitchen knife.

The man managed to escape, but two hours later, Surami allegedly torched his bike.

Bits of Trixie goodness I forgot about.

I knew I was forgetting some things about Trixie that I wanted to say. So here are the things I forgot.

I have now discovered she likes squirrels. They tempt her whenever we walk through the university campus. Always something new.

When we’re playing, sometimes she pins my head down and sniffs my ear. I think she’s imitating me when I sniff her ears. I can almost hear her saying, “How do you like that?”

She does the funniest things sometimes. She has this tendency to let out these huge sighs, and at the perfect times too. I will have just finished saying “Oh I have so much work to do.” and from Trixie, I hear the biggest sigh. It’s hillarious. Or, right after I correct her for doing something she knows is wrong, she’ll shake her whole body as if to say, “What was I thinking?”

Whenever there’s a sudden noise, she jumps. She especially likes to jump when Steve makes a beer bottle make that train whistle noise.

Have I got them all now? I think so.

Paging the What The Fuck Department

10 Jun, Sun, 03:10:34     
Google
:  girls getting smucked to sex

What does that even mean? What could this person possibly have been trying to find? The only thing I can think of is that somewhere out there, there was a person who got hit, [or smucked as some say], by a vehicle of some kind and just so happened to land vagina first on a penis.

More Trixie goodness!

I think it’s time for an update on the Trixter, along with some things I’ve noticed because of her.

Because of her, I end up spending considerably more time loitering around the outside of the apartment building. I’m not really loitering, I’m waiting for her to do her duty. But anyway, it means more time downstairs, which means I get to observe more weird stuff. I got to see people yelling at our poor property manager and got some juice about someone having ridiculously noisy neighbours. I got to watch two people screaming at each other across balconies. I know all the kids’ names in the apartment building. Speaking of little children in the building, they seem to be leaving me alone more. I don’t know whether Trixie has simply become uninteresting, they got fed up with me going into the bushes, or maybe it’s because a cat scared Trixie in the bushes and now she won’t go in the bushes, only by the fense right beside them. Or maybe it’s because the pool is open now, so they’d rather swim. At any rate, it’s good for me!

I notice that, now that I have Trixie, people don’t say hello to me. they just say hello to Trixie. Yep, she’s the star.

People are funny. They get upset if I give Trixie a correction, but if Trixie is being goofy, they get upset because she doesn’t seem to be behaving like a guide dog should. Well, the only way to stop goofy behaviour is to say no and give her a correction.

I feel sorry for people with pet dogs who Trixie takes an interest in. They feel guilty because their dog distracted mine. I tell them not to worry about it, as long as they have their woofer on a leash.

Speaking of woofers, there’s a big one who, from time to time, thinks it would be a swell idea to bark at us from his yard and run in our direction. I have to ask someone if he’s contained in any way, because he scares me sometimes!

As time goes on, Trixie evolves and I learn more and more about her. She has changed her morning routine. She will come out onto our rug we have in the living room, flop around like a fish and snort. She now likes tug toys, and has already laid waste to one tug toy and has done a pretty good job on another one. Man, those are some pretty lethal jaws. She also thinks that the towel is the biggest play toy in the world and attacks it when I wipe her down after a rain.

She did the funniest thing the other day, although I don’t know if poor Steve found it so funny. She ran at him, sort of made a running jump and shoulder-blocked him right in the groin. He says it didn’t hurt much. Poor guy, he wonders if she has it in for him. If I’m not right there to lay down the law, she’ll try and lick him to death.

She barks a lot less now. Woohoo! That was easy…I hope.

It’s weird that it took me a bit longer this time to find my rhythm. Just when I thought I had it, everything would seem like a ton of work. But I think now, things have fallen nicely into place and what seemed like extra jobs is just part of the daily routine.

Here’s a scary thought. By Sunday, I will have had Trixie longer than I had Babs. During my time with Trixie, she has had no ear infections, and the only trips to the vet were made after I thought she stepped in glass, when my dad noticed her limping a bit, and one day when she wouldn’t stop hacking and horking all over the floor and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t anything serious! Things are looking good!

I think that’s about it for now. Hopefully I’m not forgetting a whole bunch of things. Oh well, if I am, it makes for another post. Hope you guys enjoy this stuff.

Young Canada Works…to Be Confusing and Say the Same Thing in As Many Ways As Possible.

I always knew that anything to do with the government was full of redundancies and other unnecessary crap. But I had the point driven home this week.

I decided to join this Young Canada Works thing and see about finding an internship through there. I was filling out their 12-step aplication and it was making sense, until it got to the place where I was supposed to list my qualifications. This was the list of qualifications that I was supposed to look through, select 3 that I felt needed work and 5 that I was good at. I’ll comment in between *’s.

Adaptable
Analyzing
Assertive/Persuasive
Assessing/Evaluating
Coordinating
Conceptualizing
Creative /Innovative
Decision Making
Dynamic
*what the hell does that even mean?*
Flexible
*isn’t that being adaptable?*
Goal-Oriented
*wouldn’t that be part of coordinating?*
Initiating
Interpersonal Skills
Interpretative Skills
*wouldn’t that be called analyzing?*
Leadership
*wouldn’t that fall under initiating? You can’t very well lead without initiating something, and if you’re initiating something, aren’t you, um, leading?*
Learning
Listening
        *um, isn’t listening part of interpersonal skills?* 
Negotiating
*I would assume that you wouldn’t make a very good negotiator if you weren’t assertive or persuasive.*
Observant
Organized
Planning
*um, planning? coordinating? Goal-oriented? Aren’t they pretty much the same thing?*
Problem Solving
Public Speaking
Reading
Resourceful
*I guess it’s a little bit different than being adaptable, but aren’t they kind of in the same camp?*
Self-Motivating
Service-Oriented
Supervising
Teamwork
Time Management
*isn’t that part of being organized?*
Understanding
*if interpersonal skills aren’t listening and understanding, then what are they?*
Writing Skills
Other  

Ug. And I was supposed to pick 3 that I felt needed work and pick five that I believed to be my strengths. When there’s so much repetition and overlap, how do you do that?

It asked you to talk about all kinds of things that I never thought belonged on a resume. It asked to talk about your intrests, achievements, leisure and travel! I understand the first two, but leisure and travel? What boss is going to care about the trips you took with your family?

Then, at the end, when I got to the employment equity section, I got another surprise. Having a disability wasn’t on the list of minority groups of which you could be a member. I didn’t know how to feel about that. I don’t want a pity job, but I don’t want an employer to run away screaming once they find out I’m blind, which some do. I was surprised that in a government program, that wasn’t even mentioned.

All I could think was, yup, you can tell this was put together by the government. There’s all kinds of extra stuff you don’t need, and not enough of the stuff you do need.

Pencil Sharpeners Don’t Kill People, Idiots With Pencil Sharpeners Kill People

Some days I find myself thinking that we really ought to just wipe the world clean and start over. After seeing
this,
it’s safe to say that today is definitely one of them.

First it was the shatterproof ruler. Then came the compass with a soft point.

Now one of the UK’s biggest stationery manufacturers is redesigning the pencil sharpener to stop it being used as a weapon.

Helix is producing a tamper-proof version of the trusty sharpener, which has been employed by generations of schoolchildren, after complaints from teachers.

Schools have reported incidents in which pupils unscrew blades and use them to attack classmates. Some head teachers have been forced to ban them altogether.

In an announcement yesterday, Helix, which sells two million sharpeners a year, said it was redesigning its products to allay fears over their safety. The new sharpeners will have a special screw head which the company claims, cannot be removed, even with a screwdriver.

A primary school in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancs, has banned sharpeners after a pupil slashed another child’s neck and a Derby junior school imposed a ban after children were found stamping on them to remove blades.

A Question for The Wrestling Fans

Am I the only one who thinks that Monday’s WWE draft lottery is totally useless and a complete waste of time? I must be, considering how excited people are getting about it. All of the analysis and argument I’m seeing and hearing over who should go where and why is driving me friggin nuts. Change this, revitalize that, freshen up storylines there, create new feuds here, just shut up already! And by shut up I don’t mean stop talking about wrestling, I only mean save your thought energy for things that actually mean something.

Like I said up top, the draft is pointless. If you don’t believe me, you need to go back and watch pretty much every WWE show from at least the end of 2006 until now, and especially everything from the Royal Rumble on, and then you need to answer a few questions. Questions like how many times have we seen someone from one brand show up on another for no good reason and then just stay there? Or why are there no single brand PPV’s anymore if everything is supposed to be separate? Or how many times have guys from one brand come out on another’s show and cut a promo or wrestled a match like it’s no big thing, and how many times have the announcers treated it the same way, not even caring that some Raw guy is taking up valuable Smackdown TV time? And then there’s the biggest question of all. If the wrestlers and announcers and management don’t respect the boundaries of the brand extension, why should we?

In a world where until last Monday we had tag champions who were singles wrestlers on separate shows and where ECW pay-per-view angles are the most prominent thing on RAW, what good is a draft going to do for anything? WWE has done nothing but repeatedly pound into our heads that the brand extension doesn’t mean a thing, so why should we care that they’re messing with it? The only thing the draft is going to change the face of is the WWE.com roster page. Everything else is going to remain largely unchanged. Sure we might get some different match combinations, but we would have gotten those anyway without the 3-hour ratings grab disguised as a major event. You can’t expect me to believe that without a lottery we’d never have the chance to see Jeff Hardy against CM Punk or Randy Orton in a feud with Jimmy Wang Yang. Anything you think the draft might make possible is already possible now. this isn’t a real brand split like WWF and WCW was. What we have now are 3 shows produced by one company that tend to feature different guys from week to week, but whenever they want it to, that can change just because they said so.

So while everybody else is on the edge of their seats Monday night waiting to see who the next pick will be, I’ll be watching Raw like it’s any other show, and bracing myself for the hundreds of angry columnists and feedback contributors who’ll be putting out articles in the next few weeks about how not much has really changed and how WWE sucks for the same reasons it’s been sucking for years now.

Feel free to disagree and to take a shot at selling me on how great this is going to be, but I’m afraid you’ve got an uphill climb and it’s all WWE’s fault. I want to catch a great big case of draft fever and look forward to Monday night like I did when I was young, but when something is designed to be so obviously meaningless, I have no choice but to treat it that way.

Ok, I Think I’ve Just Officially Heard It All

This
is one of the most ridiculous explanations I’ve heard for anything in the entire history of ever.

A Rochester man who said his poor eyesight caused him to molest his girlfriend’s prepubescent daughter was ordered to prison today.

Monroe County Court Judge Frank P. Geraci Jr. sentenced Eric Kennedy, 38, to 12 years behind bars for repeated sexual contact with the girl from February 2001 through August 2004.

Kennedy was arrested last year after the girl, now 13, reported the abuse.

While being interviewed by police, Kennedy blamed the girl, saying she placed his hand on her body.

He also said he had poor eyesight that might have caused him to mistake the girl for her mother, with whom he was living.

I can safely say that not many people in the world have worse eyesight than I do, and in the nearly 30 years I’ve been around, even being as dumb as I am sometimes I’ve never managed to molest somebody by accident. I’m not sure who this goof thought he was going to fool with that one, but thankfully it turned out to be nobody. I hope they tack a few extra years to the end of his prison sentence just for being a humongous fucking idiot.

Today’s Stupid Joke That Made Me Giggle Like A Moron

With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person, a death which almost went unnoticed last week.

Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote “The Hokey Pokey”, died peacefully at the age of 93.

The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin. They put his left leg in, and then the trouble started…