Musings, observations and other useless drivel.
…unless you’re drinking it! My Dad is going in for a “procedure” this week and he has to drink SIXTEEN eight-ounce glasses of liquid chalk (a gallon, essentially) in a four hour period to get ready for it.
To put this in perspective, this is TEN AND TWO THIRDS cans of Coke (except, you know, it’s chalky and lacking all good high-fructose corn syrupy goodness of soda):
My Dad’s actually a Pepsi drinker, so I guess it should look like this:
But you get the idea…
Hey, it was a tough week and I DID catch an early movie (Jumper; I had to see it ’cause I read all the books; kinda goofy though).
Nice fire, huh? And yes, that IS a TiVo’d episode of Judge Judy up there. How sad 🙂
Whilst dining at lunch today, I witnessed a middle-aged woman take a stack of about THIRTY paper napkins for her lunch with her and a single companion. WTF???
Look, unless you have some serious hand-eye coordination issues or you need to make an impromptu toilet-seat ass-gasket, there is NO reason to need that many napkins. She could have made a napkin muumuu out of it, for Christ’s sake (granted she was wearing a muumuu ALREADY, but you get the point).
Next time, please just take a napkin or two and move on, or just bring your own frickin’ bib.
While I was sitting and “thinking” this morning I was internally debating various ideas on toilet tissue. Though in this amazing country we probably have more than 700 choices for this one function, I feel is basically comes down to two things:
Dealing with #1 (no pun intended), the obvious choice is two-ply; it is fluffier, softer and better yet creates a thicker barrier between “the handle side”, and you know, the business end. The only downside is that when starting a new roll I invariably get it started BETWEEN the plys and then end up pulling it off the roll with it making that pulling apart noise that you can get when dismantling forms that are in triplicate.
And for those of you who say two-ply is more wasteful and therefore less ecologically sound than one-ply have no idea how much extra hot water I would have to use washing my hands after using one-ply before I felt comfortable. Trust me, two-ply is better for the environment in my case.
Dealing with #2 (DEFINITELY no pun intended), there really isn’t anything to decide; it’s a given. Over the top if you don’t have a cat, from underneath if you do. It’s to avoid this:
I just finished a book about a guy who wins a spaceflight from a “Richard Branson-esque” private spaceflight company. Tragedy ensues (of course, else it would have been a much shorter book), the pilot of the craft is killed after they are up in orbit (for what was supposed to be a “three hour tour” and YES, the guy does reference Gilligan’s Island in the book) and all communication is lost between the ship and the ground. Or WAS it?!??
Anyway, this guy knows he has enough air (and enough Powerbars and water) to last five days; he tries unsuccessfully to do what it takes to bring the ship back down (he was given some rudimentary training for a few days before the flight, but I would assume it would be like trying land your tandem freefall parachute jump yourself after your instructor has died while strapped to your back). He eventually settles down to sort of accept his fate, as it were.
However, there is a laptop on the ship so he starts typing his life story: the things he did right and wrong, the things he wished he had done different, etc all in the hope that perhaps one day his children might be able to read it. What he doesn’t know is that laptop is set up on a live download link to earth (which still works) and that a hacker kid in New Zealand (stay with me) has found the feed. He sends it to friends and eventually it gets to the media and after a day or two the whole planet is aware of this crisis in space and is following his words as they are being written. They are scrolling on the bottom of news channels and all over the internet and on the big screen in Times Square; the whole world has basically stopped what they were doing to see this play out and see what this person has to say. He writes hundreds of pages (he has the time, after all) detailing his greatest joys, his deepest sorrows and those choices that he most regrets.
The kicker is that the guy in space has no idea that anyone is seeing what he is writing. This results in his telling some quite personal information including a lot of detail of his first sexual encounter but eventually he just starts telling what he has learned in life, the mistakes he has made and what he would do different if he had the chance.
The chance that the people watching his words now DO have.
Needless to say, the effect on those watching was great, with people having realizations about themselves, their loved ones and they way in which they have lived their lives.
So my question to you is: “What would you say if the whole world was listening?”
I took a picture a couple months ago of my sales guy Greg driving us to Tucson:
Yup, that is Greg eating a donut, drinking coffee, talking on his cellphone and steering with his knees (and passing a Prius). Fortunately for me he has a GREAT deal of skill doing this (no doubt due to years of practice).
I finally got used to this scary sight and suddenly he got a Blackberry:
It is a sad commentary that a Blackberry takes SIGNIFICANTLY more attention than eating, drinking and talking on the phone all at the same time. The guy swerves all over the road now! He did better with knee steering!
Help.
When I got out to my car this morning, it was cased in some strange, very cold crystalline substance. After pondering this (from a distance!) for some time, I realized that it was ICE! WTF??? This is ARIZONA! It doesn’t FREEZE here!!
If I wanted to deal with that kind of weather, I would move back to Vermont, where the photo below depicts a typical morning from October through April:
I know you flatlanders think it’s all maple syrup and autumn leaves there in Vermont, but it ain’t…
So my friend Brant found the following for sale on craigslist:
“For Sale – beautiful pink “vagina couch” that I made in art school and no longer have space for. The couch is large: measures 5′ 3″ long, 3′ 3″ wide at the middle, and stands 2′ 3″ tall (and is heavy like a couch). The pics are from my portfolio and are several years old; as a result, the couch has some scuffmarks and stains around the bottom from being moved, but otherwise is in excellent shape. A professional upholsterer helped me build the couch, so it is also functional and durable as a piece of furniture. The couch must be picked up in Mendocino, a 3-hour drive north of SF. I am asking for $600 and a loving home! Call Willow at [deleted] or reply to posting. “
I’m not going to ask my friend what search terms he was entering to come across this beauty. One plus is that I’m sure there are a lot of men out there who could benefit from the large scale female anatomy lesson it offers (myself excluded, of course :).
Me, I would feel bad if I ended up getting a bunch of cracker crumbs and spare change from my pockets in it. You’d never get them out.
Okay, it is probably more appropriate to say that I am not a sea monkey MASS murderer since it appears that my previous error in judgment allowed some of the sea monkeys to survive. Evidence below:
Whew. That’s a load off.
So while driving to my reps office yesterday, I had two different people over a ten minute period throw cigarette butts out their windows while driving right in front of me. It REALLY used to piss me off when I rode a motorcycle as I was hit with hot cigarette butts while driving down the road. WTF?? Do they think that it is not litter?? Why don’t you keep your butts in that spotless ashtray in your car? Oh, that’s right. It makes the car smell bad.
So instead you throw it out the window in a city that about zero percent humidity and dry brush that can light up like kindling. If you can’t even stand having old butts in your ashtray can you understand why we don’t want you smoking when we eat dinner?
Pigs.
Wayne's Whirled 