Big Ball of Rage

Ad Hog

2008-05-01T15:57:00.005-05:00

Is the AdCouncil trying to say something here? Is this passive-aggressive posturing or perhaps just a disgruntled marketing agent who loves to drink and drive?

Do you hate YOUR freedom?

2008-04-25T14:18:00.007-05:00

Here is a great merger between an intelligent use of technology and a total ignorance of current social and political trends.

The Micro GPS Mail Logger

For those of you who don't want to read, it's a small, envelope sized device that is actually a GPS device. It allows you to track your own packages and parcels without bothering with a shipping company.

Notice how it has insides made out of all sorts of electronic bits, transistors, and the dark arts. All encased in a mysterious black box of intrigue and suspicion. No one will give it a second look, right?

This is one great way to clear out the inspection station at the post office It's also a great way for you to get extradited to a foreign prison and killed.

But, as you're standing there in your black hood, wires strung to your genitals, and are being bitten by guard dogs, you'll be satisfied in knowing your package of vintage Atari games arrived safely!

St. Guinness

2008-03-17T20:00:00.001-05:00

At the time that I write this, it’s five o’clock on St. Patrick’s Day. Everyone’s finished making the green-back and ready for the green beer. A few people I saw on the street were already costumed in generic green jerseys, felted top-hats and clover-eyed shades. All of this in great proximity to our celebration of the Death of Jesus. It’s glorious!

Why is it that so many of our saintly holidays have absolutely nothing to do with the actual saint themselves? It’s not enough that most of them seem to be hinged upon dates dictated by pagan ritual and rite. Instead, we give them bizarre incarnations and interpretations that even people who are high have a hard time grasping the concepts.

Holidays today come off more as fevered peyote dreams stirred about by maddening children’s stories. St. Patrick was a noble man who probably did many great things for the impoverished, the depraved, or even the Irish. We celebrate his greatness with leprechauns, top-hats, and green vomit. St. Valentine is remembered through cherubs yielding weapons, disembodied hearts, chocolate, and feigned interest in the minds of women.

Christ, our Lord and Savior, seems to bear most of the brunt of our delusional celebrations. His birth is marked by a fat philanthropist performing a B&E and then gifting children with things under what can only be deemed to be propaganda for the logging industry. All created under the employ of little-people high on sugar, held captive a the top of the Earth.

Jesus’ gruesome death, one that saw him traverse the scorched realms of Hell, is marked by rabbits, chicken eggs painted in vivid Warhol-esque colors, pancakes, and baskets of plastic hay. Children are forced to forage the soppy, half-thawed ground for tin-covered chocolate eggs. Initiating such an event today would have you drugged by the Government for the protection of those you love.

In reality, I don’t mind the abstraction and bastardization of these holidays. I just wish we wouldn’t have to fake ourselves out by treating it like it’s an actual event of singular celebration. Why pretend it’s religious in nature at all? Shift these holidays over to the free-market and private industry.

Guinness presents the All-Time Magical Bottomless Pint of His Glory and Awesomeness™ XXVII. Rotate sponsors each year, add a half-time show, some strippers, and a hat to wear for it and, damn, you’re really close to starting a whole different religion.

The Gambler

2008-02-14T17:48:00.003-05:00

Sometimes you gotta know how to hold 'em...

Mayor Dress-Up

2008-01-24T11:45:00.000-05:00

In the Megacity of Toronto, the city (or region) of Vaughn has decide that it needs an official dress-code for its' public officials. Here are a few highlights:

These are among the items that would be verboten if the dress code is approved:

Flip-flops, sport sandals, running shoes, bare feet
Hats, head coverings (except for safety, religious or medical reasons)
Ripped, wrinkled, unclean clothing
Overalls, shorts, sweat pants, spandex, stirrup pants, leggings, jeans
Muscle shirts, tank tops, halter and tube tops
Vinyl garments
Bared midriff, exposed chest, low-cut apparel

What's surprising is that people needed to be told specifically not to wear these items. Clearly, before this move, apparently town meetings were being held at the beach or a laundromat on a Sunday morning.

Muscle shirts and halter tops? WTF? What do their "Dress-down Fridays" look like? Are people showing up high and naked?

I think the general respect for work has gone from absurdly official and stuffy to slovenly and ugly. How hard is it to grab a pair of pressed pants and a buttoned shirt? I've seen old timey movie reels of monkeys wearing bow-ties and tuxedos. Even the hobo down in the train yard manages to match his dead-rat slippers with a dead-raccoon cap.

Have some respect for yourself and the position you hold. You're not farming gold in WoW. You're representing your city as a paid civil servant. Dress like you earned it.

As for me, I'm quite happy coming to work in our ordered apparel. A Panda costume and top hat. With spats!!

I'm done here.

Black and Blue Berry

2008-01-17T19:32:00.000-05:00

I've created a new game. I call it "Berry-Blocker".

How you play is you just walk down a city street. Preferably in the tech or biz section of town. As you walk down the street, look for people who have their focus buried in a Blackberry. Thumbs nervously tapping the tiny keyboard. Flicking the centre nub or thumbing the wheel trying to read the latest emails. Brow furrowed as they concentrate all of their vision on a small, tiny screen.

Now walk toward them normally; don't run. Just walk. They'll walk directly towards you, not paying any sort of proper attention. When they're in range, just stand still. Don't do anything.

If you time it right, they'll walk directly into you. BANG! (You must be at least three paces away from the person. Any closer and it's a fault)

"What did you just do?", you will ask.
Apologies will be offered.

Score 10 points. Plus 3 more if they get agitated and angry that you let them walk directly into you.

First player to 50 points wins a free Grande Mocha Frappé Papier Mache Latté from the other player(s).

Now go play in traffic!

Death of a [Terrible] Salesman

2008-01-08T23:41:00.000-05:00

Okay, I survived.

I made it out of the nightmare that was Seasonal Sales.
Let us not speak of it again.

End of Chapter Two

12 Hours of Christmas

2007-12-23T12:06:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I have to work at the Shopping in the Future-tense a straight 12 hours tomorrow. The day before Christmas and I (instead of with family and friends) will be hawking about digital cameras and cordless phones. Granted that this is a First World complaint; but, it still chaps my ass that I have to do it.

If you must go and shop on the very day before Christmas, I suggest the following:

• Abandon All Hope: You will not find what you're looking for. Plain and simple. We sold out of everything on Wednesday. What we have now is the crap that no one else wanted. Don't blame me, blame the fact we had it for a full year before you thought of getting it.

• Feeling Boxed In: Boxing Day is a myth. The deals you get are no where comparable to the Black Friday deals of the States. We sell the legacy and nearly-out-of-stock stuff on deep discount as to get rid of it. The new stuff is coming in January so we want you to buy the old stuff now. Then buy the new stuff again in January.

• Boxing Bonus Round: We actually DO have some stuff in stock right now. However, our managers are actually holding on to it for Boxing Day. We can't touch it until then. This may not be across the board on all stores, but it is in my store. I saw a huge pile of things I needed to make money and sell 'juice'. They purposely crippled my shift to benefit at 4am on December 26. Bastards, eh? Yup, YOU'RE the bastard for shopping on that day. Never forget it.

• Quit Hitting Yourself: The Boxing Day madness isn't the stores' creations. It's yours. Never forget that! We wouldn't be going insane with Door Crashers and 3am line-ups if you didn't show up in bigger crowds each year. Your insatiable thirst for gimmicks and cheap crap has created this feeding frenzy. Of course, like the conscienceless dealers they are; the stores happily oblige selling you crap and making the ne'er-do-wells operate the tills. We curse you.

• Things to stop asking for:

- Anything made by Nintendo. Why? We sold out of everything that isn't a game three weeks ago. No new shipments will arrive before January.

- Sale Items: The products that were advertised on Friday's flyer in any department. Why? Again, you're here at literally the last minute and expect no one else thought of coming in before you? We sold out of everything good or affordable on Thursday. Now you have $1800 cameras or small, crappy televisions to choose from. Hope your loved ones like gift cards!

• The Great Unwashed: I know you're not doing this on purpose. I am a last minute shopper myself. I know the trouble it can be to get out and shop; especially for things that are popular or new. But resign to the fact that you ARE shopping last minute. Accept the level of the field you are entering. You're gonna get screwed over. In fact, both of us will be.

Because as you stand there yelling at me about how the Wii must be shoved up Jimmy Hoffa's ass, I'm wondering why I'm not at home with the people who actually love me. And I'm hating you for it.

Now go hit the stores before my shift starts.

I Hate Me

2007-12-11T23:28:00.000-05:00

So it's come to this.
Tonight I loathe myself for becoming that which I most hate.

Well, not the ultimate hate of hates; but I do dislike what I've done.
In a desperate attempt to appease the dark gods of retail, I pressured a warranty into a sale. Granted, I actually gave her a free leather case and set of batteries with the purchase, the mere fact that I pushed the sale is enough for disgust.

I also had to give sales away to other sales clerks for fear that the sale would effect my 'margins'. I don't even know what that means! Yet the mere thought of one awakening from its' eternal slumber, roused by something I had done or had failed to do, struck a cold fear into my heart.

So here I sit in knotted guilt, torn between two identical deaths. One where I appease my employer and push empty air into a customer's palette or I give into my own desires to be an actually helpful human being. One ends in the end of my employment. The other is an end to my humanity.

Neither seems profitable. Neither will wash away its' greasy stain from my soul or my permanent employee record.

You will be my witness, gentle reader, that if I do not break these shackles of sales by the coming of the New Year that I shall cease to be human.

Or at least I'll have a better understanding of drug abuse.

Manage Mental

2007-12-03T23:39:00.001-05:00

I have to just quickly say that I don't think I've ever been so rudely addressed as I have tonight by my 'manager'. I'm honestly 'hurt'.

I'm working a short Christmas stint at a Big-Box electronics franchise here in Canada. You know the one. Let's say it deals with shopping in the future tense.

Normally I mockingly take things personally with rabid enthusiasm merely for the purpose of comic effect. If you know me or this website you've seen the fun I can have. Though tonight I am utterly and completely offended by the treatment by the management. It's passive-abuse; a term I'm creating here for the first time ever.

They speak down to me like no other human has before. I am not exaggerating. This is the worst I've ever been treated in my life. Truly so.

I've been routinely addressed as one would a child who just shat directly into a DVD player and fed the dog Play-Doh and beer. Or, as close as one could approximate such an event. It's demoralizing and offensive.

I really have no punch-line in here. I'm just feeling completely and totally insulted. To be honest, it's the most offended I've felt in my life.

It's disgusting and I look forward to they day I can quit.

Take the Wind Out of Their Sales

2007-12-02T20:27:00.000-05:00

Okay, so the buying season is in full gear. I'm here to just impart some quick tips on buying tech from a Big-Box. Why? Because I'm currently working retail (don't ask) and I learned a few tips of the trade. Here we go in no particular order.

• U Got No Game: There will be no one to help you in the games, music, or movie sections. These areas pay no commission and actually hurt your sales rating. Most veterans refuse to go near this section or even process them in an order.

• Just Spiffy!: A few items get tagged on occasion with extra commission. For some arcane reason this is called "spiff". This is done by either a manufacturer or the outlet themselves. This means the item the sales guy is really hyping may not actually be the best product for you. It just pays the most that week.

• Extended Finger: Warranties are, if my management is accurate, the ONLY way these companies make any money. At all. Now, some are actually worth it. Cordless phones: Yes. Digital Cameras: ask for a bundle. Get free memory or a case if you buy it.

Otherwise, make them pay. On the second day of the second year, hassle the company for whatever your warranty will allow. Go crazy with it. Just know that you could be out of said product for two months while they evaluate it. The trick is, if everyone were to actually use the warranty at any point, they'd go bankrupt.

It's like the inverse of SPAM. They count on only 2% of the people actually using it. Otherwise, they wouldn't offer it as they'd have to pay out to the tech department or for replacements on everything you have bought from them.

• Anger Management: Two things happen when you ask for a manager. Either she pretends to scold us in front of you and then we laugh at you when you leave. OR... you give her a reason to be a total prick to us for the rest of the week. Neither of them get you your DVD player any cheaper. So just knock it off.

• Self-Help: We're forced to harass you. We obviously know you're just browsing and we feel like a jackass when we have to constantly ask you how you are. Just be polite about. We won't steal your soul if you make eye-contact with us. Just say "Thank You" and we'll both move on.

• Yelling Doesn't Help: We're barely paid enough to be there let alone care. Yelling at us because we don't carry the adapter to your cell-phone won't make it magically appear in our warehouse. We just give you crappy service and bitch about you when you leave.

• The Commish: Yes I'm on commission. Yes I want to sell you stuff. I'm not greedy, I'm just trying to keep this job. Management has a series of magical numbers. If I don't sell those numbers, I get fired. I'm not extra greedy because I work commission. I just have a greedy boss who hates to pay even minimum wage. Don't worry, we both hate me at this point.

That may not be overly helpful but it makes me feel better. I want to go back to freelance work. I may have been whoring myself out, but at least I liked my pimp.

I'm done here.

Pedestrian, Over-Easy

2007-10-25T15:28:00.000-05:00

"What it means is that traffic will stop in all four directions, followed by a pedestrian free-for-all, where people cross the street in any direction they chose: left, right, diagonal." - CBC.ca, Toronto Edition.

In other words, nothing will really change. They're calling it a 'pedestrian scramble' or as most Torontonians already know it as 'crossing the street'. As anyone who has had the displeasure of driving anywhere downtown Toronto can attest to, pedestrians seem to dash across the street frogger-style at any damned moment.

My vote is to make very large sections of the downtown core a totally car-free zone. This is not some people-loving, altruistic, hippy sentiment towards a greener tomorrow. Instead, its' my bitter and cynical olive-branch. It's my hope to coral these wandering deadites of the Big Smoke and thereby free up the roadways in the rest of the city.

Much of Chinatown, Queen St., Kensington Market, and the greater entertainment district are already swarmed by street urchins, hipsters in throat-beards and Bay St. Commandos rendering the roads unnavigable. Let's just quarantine these areas and create a urban utopia of Chuck Taylors, RollerBlades, skateboards, and ramblers. All of them thrashing about in the once-forbidden asphalt rivers, euphoric in their ability to meander about in this concrete jungle.

Now for the hard part. The rest of the roads are meant for the gasoline chuggers only! Mean machines of plastic and steel rocketing from one end of the town to the other, nary a concern for any more wandering meat-packets drifting between the white lines. Designated cross-walks will be the pedestrian's only access for survival. And there will be no walking; only running.

There will only be two signs to indicate your access. An outline of a man running from a giant, flaming car or a skull-and-crossbones. Guess which means you get to go?

I'm done here.

Plus Less

2007-10-17T18:34:00.000-05:00

My cable service provider has taken the time to write and inform me that my internet access fees will be going up by close to $10 per month. However, I can get that money back and save myself money by paying for more features.

Normally I'll now be paying $52 per month for access. However, if I subscribe to one of their packages, I can save $10 by paying $99 to $120 per month. Therefore, by their math, 120 < 50.

That's great! By this rationale, 0 > 50; so I can stop paying them for my service and they'll be saving a whole whack of cash!

How are they able to, without the assistance of irony or dark satire, say to me that by adding more services and paying for more things I'll be saving money compared to what I'm currently paying? It's as though math is now cyclical and that by adding so much I can arrive at an amount lower than when I began.

It's like you hired a stable-boy to clean out the horse manure. But instead, he just keeps adding more crap from other horses to the pile, stacking it ever-higher into a gigantic feces pyramid.

"Don't worry about the mess," he says, "I'm shoveling negative-shit onto the pile."

LOLscat

2007-09-19T23:05:00.000-05:00

Cats are basically the bastards of the domesticated animal kingdom.

The things they do would normally be intolerable in a human. But, somehow when compressed into the personality of a 5lbs fur ball its adorable. Think about it; if your friend took a dump in your laundry room, threw up on your couch, and sat on your chest while you slept, the likelihood of you ever speaking to him again would be remote.

Cats are often thought of as being smarter than dogs because they withhold their affection for you. A dog that is universally loyal to you in spite of all that you do to him seems dim-witted and slow. A cat that avoids being in the same room as you unless fed properly seems saucy and playful.

This is not to say I dislike cats. Not in the least. I'm allergic to all animals; I just prefer to spend my time with one that doesn't look at me with contempt and disgust.

We probably give cats the same leeway that we give our jackass friends. Everyone loves a bastard. As horrible they may treat you at times, in the end there is a genuine relationship. It's just hidden beneath piles of prickish behavior and cat vomit.

I dunno, perhaps I'm being to harsh in the criticism of the cat. Originally I wrote a better post, but I eated it.

Sex, Drugs, and Metamucil

2007-09-14T18:54:00.000-05:00

Drug use is a learned behavior. I know this because 80's television PSA's would never lie to me.

First of all, telling teens that drugs are "bad", "wrong" and otherwise verboten only makes them seem all the more cooler. What better way to get back at 'the man' than to smoke the reefer, spark a spliff, or bite the wax tadpole (or whatever the term is now).

Drug use is alluring for these reasons:

It makes you feel good
Feeling good is illegal
Illegal stuff gets you laid
Getting laid feels good.

If you want them to stop, you have to make a clear association between drugs and things they already hate. You need an automatic gut reaction to the mere thought of drugs. And there's nothing more gut-reacting than the idea of old people having sex.

That's right: Septuagenarian Porno.
Seeing two old people doing it while smoking pot would completely eradicate drug use among every possible age category below 60. Hell, it might even be a solution to childhood obesity.

Now of course you'd only show this when the kids are ready. Make it part of Driver's Education somehow. Show the reel of the car crashes, then loop in a few minutes of Ethel and Arthur passing the doochie while passing a kidney stone. Sure the kids will be horrified and maybe even scarred emotionally, but that's clearly better than smoking marijuana.

Seriously though, any message that tries to convince kids that this glorious magical mind fruit is Satan's weed is a wasted effort. You can't chastise the kids into behaving properly by drumming the rules into their hormonal crazed minds. Being rational and sober about anything is foreign to them. It just doesn't work. Spend some time on YouTube and you'll see.

Kids never do what's rational or good for them. Hell, they can't even light a fart on fire properly.

Trust me, I know.
And knowing is half the battle.

The Math Doesn't Work

2007-09-12T18:38:00.000-05:00

Attention: All but my autonomic functions are now carried out by either calculators, Mac Widgets, or Wikipedia.

It has come to my sudden and humiliating attention that I have off-loaded nearly all of my higher-brain functions to a distributed system of gadgets and wiring. I allow the web and internet to serve as my memory. Calculators, spell-check, and graphing systems serve the entire necessity that used to be my Left Brain.

The fact that even basic arithmetic eludes me to this day would depress my high school Math Teacher even further, if he hadn't already realized that I'm in the arts and a blogger. Two identifiers that show I've completely abandoned reason and order.

What makes this finding all the more humiliating was that I came to this realization in public eye and on record. It was in a rudimentary employment application in which I was to abstract and sum-total a series of numbers. All of them involving cash money. Quarters and nickels mainly. I should have known immediately that I was in a losing struggle. For you see, money and me have a weak relationship; the other barely conscious of what the other actually does.

Like losing a $3 lotto ticket to a blundered skill-testing question, I had to retreat empty handed and feeling ashamed for trying. My giant toe-head hung low in failure this day.

I figure my skills are best left to the realm of the unreal. Drawing pictures of ponies and mastering fonts are the mental challenges best suited for my ilk. I'm in art for a reason: I'm bad at math.

Also, there's rarely live nude models in accounting.

Rated "M" for Meh

2007-09-06T19:45:00.000-05:00

"Those viewers watching with small children should be advised: This topic deals with mature subjects"

It's not the small children we have to worry about, it's the giant children that frighten me.

Typically this warning is inserted into a news program for times where the subject is going to include violence or sex. Though granted that most news is only about violence and sex for obvious reasons. The adage of "if it bleeds, it leads" is an honest one because news about a car crash on the I-90 involving a truckload of clowns is far more interesting than the pollen report.

With that in mind, having children in the room when you're watching any news program is abuse. For one reason, you're boring the child into narcolepsy. Secondly, you're stunting their appreciation for information. TV News today more closely resembles the front page of Digg on a Friday; mindless headlines with puddle-deep inspection. The editorial banter from the reporters and journalists is akin to the comments section, but with fewer mentions of 'cock'.

Instead of watching the news you should read the news to your children. This way you get the same feeling as the news-anchor; reading the text out loud to an emotionless, soulless, unblinking set of eyes. The camera always watches, but it never actually looks at you, man!

Or if you're like my family, watching the TV news during dinner is only something to chew to while you wait for another commercial to yell at.

Now, of course if this were an actual emergency, you'd see me running away from my desk.
Good evening, and good night, America!

Wait for it…

2007-08-31T00:35:00.001-05:00

"No American has died of old age since 1951." - DISCOVER magazine

Perhaps we just have to wait a little longer?

This strikes me as an odd statistic because I gather it implies that there is a clear distinction between death from 'old age' and that of organ failure (or any another possible result of a body weakened from simply the state of being old.)

As though there's a metaphysical hour glass that ticks down our time within a precise limit. It's as though there's a cosmic 'best before' date for each one of us. The hour strikes, the pin is pulled and like air out of a balloon our body deflates from loss of spirit.

It reminds me of a joke from Steven Wright:

"My friend goes, “Oh, those people are going to die instantly.” Well, everybody dies instantly. It’s the only way you can die. You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive, then you’re dead. He says, “There not going to die of natural causes.” I said, “They’re getting hit by a train. Naturally, they’re gonna die.”

Death itself is binary. Either you 1 are a 0. Religion, well that adds '2' into the options.

The colorful and even clinical methods to describe death are methods of pushing it further back along the line of 'stuff we don't know'. Keeping it mysterious means we can keep it a fairy tale. Only the bad guys lose. And it's not so bad, really. I hear kittens are involved and you get All-You-Can-Eat Ice-Cream. Unicorns, somehow they fit in too.

Personally, I think the aforementioned statistic merely denotes when they stopped some easy answers and started noticing they could go into detail. Perhaps expanding on what we know of a this great amusement park in the sky on which we must all some day catch a ride.

And we better act fast. I won a free Season's Pass and it expires in the fall. I think…

Where Be Dragons?

2007-08-21T23:36:00.001-05:00

The last time I was at a Brick-n-Mortar bookstore I was in to browse the shelves for inspiration. Personally, I find the various titles on the covers to be a long, bemusing poem.

I see myself to as one of the DIY denizens. I prefer to immediately try to hack the layout logistics behind the store. I try plotting the X Y co-ordinates within my primal brain's spacial memory. It's about the skilled hunt by use of the old tools from a by-gone era. An ancient world that only saw Google as a misty star on the morning horizon.

I brave these dense worlds of dried, dead-tree forests not as a form of machismo, but as one of final conquest. The last untamed worlds are those that can be created inside our minds. These newly found books take hold in the soil and grow the gnarled jungles of imagination. I trek on not merely for the glossy periodicals and sandal-wood candles, but for a fertile ground to gather crop for my future.

For I like big books; that I cannot lie.

Mouse Trap

2007-08-21T21:44:00.000-05:00

Something needs to change.

Either I need to learn to relax or find some sort of big-person chew toy to occupy my tense jaw as I get visibly irate more and more lately.

For example, a friend had been borrowing use of my Mac recently. He's a Mac user himself so he is well versed in the verbiage of the operating system. However, I also own the obfuscated brain-fart known as the "Mighty Mouse". This devise is admittedly a spiteful compromise between the one-button Apple dogma and the multi-button crowd.

He repeatedly called to action the various nonsense enacted by this mouse. Windows would scurry or fly away as he tried to click on them. Secret hidden gems of applications flew to the fore front when none were requested.

A failure of the product reflected poorly on me and my machine. It seemed somehow obtuse and inferior; creating haywire antics from an otherwise highly advance computer. It was HAL's toe-headed cousin drunkenly vomiting up utter chaos onto the desktop.

Personally, I like the mouse. Nevertheless, like a dead-squirrel toupee, it embarrasses me when we're together in public.

From now on, I'll just lug out the old standard USB mouse when anyone comes by to use my machine. Its' ugly, tangled cord in the throws of complete defiance of form, function, and the future itself.

Face University

2007-07-29T00:50:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick tip, kids.

Don't put stuff online.

Too often are today's youth busted by putting the asinine things they do on Facebook or MySpace. If anyone, I would expect the Gen-Y and post to realize that anything that hits the digital realm will be Google cached, Flickr'd and 'Tubed.

It's you and your buddies doing a Keg Stand in your Junior High. It's those sexy topless shots you sent to your boyfriend. They're the candid phone-cam pics of you doing blow off of a mule at the underground grow-op. And they're all destined to show up in your boss' inbox on the following Monday. Or worse; your parents' blog.

Next time, plan ahead. At the next Donkey Show you attend or the next Nude Mile, do you and your career a favor. Nix the cameras and leave the phone at home.

Or at least have the courtesy to tag the photos "Political Career Enders" just so we all know where to look.

I'm done here.

Wedding Bashers

2007-07-22T11:22:00.000-05:00

Here are just a few quick tips for anyone planning to have a wedding party. Over my lifetime I've been to quite a few weddings; most of them family but a few have been friends'. As someone who has been both a guest and a groomsman, I can assure you that I have plenty of experience in this arena.

Firstly, plan out the wedding details on paper first. Establish what it is you wish to do for the event. Figure out your caterers, tableware, center-pieces, and food. Determine what you will serve as entreés, hor-dourves, appetizers, and buffet. Decorations, flowers, programmes, menus, cards, and books: figure out all that you want. Plot out every minuscule detail of this wedding with the finest granularity you can imagine.

Tally up the costs. If you can't be precise, be safe. Always round up to the nearest dollar when you can. Be sure to divide the cost accordingly on a per-guest ratio.

Now do this:
1. Take that money and buy gift certificates from BestBuy or the Olive Garden.
2. Send that to your guests instead of an invitation.
3. Go elope in Las Vegas.

Nobody wants to be at your wedding. Nobody wants to put on a tux in 90º heat and sit in a gothic cathedral on a Saturday. Nobody wants to dance with a stranger's aunts and uncles doing the Chicken Dance. Nobody wants to watch the flower girl throw a tantrum in the buffet line. And nobody wants to hear a saccharine 90 minute meandering essay about how you two finally hooked up.

Just send me a picture and a cupcake. I'll send you the card with the money afterwards.

You're welcome.

Golden Gorilla

2007-06-25T09:19:00.000-05:00

Steve: "Seriously, what the Hell is the gorilla doing in the server room?"

Jimmy: "Well, he got in there an knocked out our main I.T. guy. Now he's using that mouse as a mace to guard him. I think that means they're married now."

Steve: "What else has he been up to?"

Jimmy: "The gorilla's been uploading LOLcats to all our client's pages and texting "poop" to all our corporate blogs. It's a real mess."

Steve: "Why the Hell did we hire this goddam gorilla?"

Jimmy: "He said he knew Cocoa."

Original image taken from my local Yellow Pages' cover.

Mr. No Pants

2007-06-21T15:52:00.000-05:00

I submit to you, gentle reader, that the garment industry today has virtually no idea as to the physiology of a modern male. My evidence? Pants.

The illustration provided (Figure 1.) demonstrates the industry's view of the typical male.

Notice the total lack of hips, pelvis, and crotch. This is helpful in designing the low-rise and slim fit jeans. No ass means the design can flow straight from belt to cuff, all the way around.

Also worthy of note is that the legs are two-dimensional. Perfect for the slim legs and tapered jeans. The foot is the largest part of the human male's legs and therefore only they need to be taken into account. The legs also represent nearly two-thirds of the total height. Plan accordingly!

Finally, notice how cash money virtually shoots forth from the customer. This is a constant state of being for the average male. $250 for "pre-aged" jeans is the working base price for all lower-body apparel.

Okay, so I exaggerate. But honestly, who the Hell are they made for?
And why does that man seemingly need NO room in the crotch?!

Actually, don't answer that.
Just hand my my track pants without laughing.

Nice and Fat

2007-06-15T15:02:00.000-05:00

Dating is a baffling and mentally taxing ordeal. As with everything I do in life, on a date I’m usually out-witted, out of place, and completely out of my league. Therefore it should come as no surprise that lady luck sung me a sour note on the social scene just recently. However, it was a cast-off remark during the typical kiss-off that pissed me off. Those two little words that have haunted me since I first noticed girls not noticing me: “Too nice.”

“Nice” is “fat” for guys. Let me explain…

Here’s a mental exercise: replace “nice” with “fat” and imagine it being said to a girl by a guy at the end of a date.

“I really like you. You’re really funny and stuff. We really connect on a whole lot of levels. But... you know.. you’re too fat.”

In reality, it probably is said a lot of times. But only one of these two statements actually makes the other person instantly a jackass. One is mean on the outside, the other is mean on the inside. Which is easier to deem as shallow? Now which is easier to fix?

What especially chaps my ass about this term is that it’s a perfectly justifiable method of disregard. It’s a back-handed compliment pulled out and used as consolation. The implication is that of fault and weakness. It’s really an insult. We know it’s an insult. We read between the lines. It’s spiking the ball on an already cruel victory. It’s just a sweet way to be a total jackass.

So instead, next time ladies, do every nice guy a favor: just call him “too fat”.