Monday, December 22, 2003
First off, I want to apologize for all those faithful readers who are expecting a snippet of literary genius from me. It's coming, I promise. At the end of this post, to be specific. So quit yer whinin', and remember, you asked for it. Well, you didn't really, but you'll read it, because I'm going to post it and everyone who is anyone knows this is the best blog EVAR.
Second, a shout out to my boy Tommy Shu.....that was a good rant. And I totally agree, except for one small facet of your proposal. Instead of sending the elderly to Iraq when we've stripped them bare of worldly possesions, I think we should fund research for the reclamation of seniors. I mean, come on, most drugs build up somewhere in the body, right? Or maybe that's just heavy metals. Either way, we should fund pharmaceutical companies to find a way to grind up the elderly into new and useful drugs, and save them for us when we're too old to find our own teeth. I imagine this will be my springboard into politics, so feel free to write me in whenever you get the chance come poll time.
Point the third, and the most important: Holidays. Namely, office holidays. For whatever reason, people are inclined to eat the weirdest shit imaginable in an office setting, and this desire is greatly enhanced during the holiday season. And anyone who has ever spent time in a college dorm knows that microwaves throw an enormous amount of scent off when in use.....which is directly dependent on what you're making in them. I know this is complicated, but stay with me. Now, I can understand making popcorn at work. Kind of. Well, actually, now that I think about it, why would you do that? YOU'RE NOT WATCHING A MOVIE, YOU FUCKTARDS. You're at work. I realize that the vast majoprity of the people I work with are endlessly entertained by watching their mouse move across the screen over and over, but it's not the same. And you can cram your Zone Atkins South Beach Miracle Diet up your ass, if that's your excuse. BUT I can understand making popcorn around the holidays, so I'm not going to bitch about how horrible burned popcorn smells *cough*my wife did it last night*cough*. But I will never understand some of the shit people here make.
Yeah, by now you know that when I post a pic, it has some relevance to my rant. Well, this is no different. This morning, at precisely 6:52 AM EST, some mental Olympian made fish in the nuker. WHO EATS FUCKING FISH FOR BREAKFAST? That is quite possibly one of the most replusive things I can think to cram in my yob beofre my stomach has had a chance to right itself for the day. This coming from somone who has experienced the horror of Beerios firsthand, mind you. To make matters worse, whoever did it put CINNAMON on the fucking thing. The logic that follows there is far to complicated for your lowly blogger here to decipher, so I'm not going to even try. I suspect if I were to try, I would promptly find out exactly what going apoplectic really means. So now, my beautiful little wing of office heaven smells like cinnamon fish. Hang on, let me back up. I'm still stuck on the "What the FUCK?" aspect of my situation. I have never seen a recipe for making fish that involved cinnamon. Ever. God, not even HOMELESS people would eat that shit. No matter how much cinnamon you put on it, IT WILL NOT BE A CINNABON! It is fish. FISH. It swam around in the water, breathing other fishes' crap through its gills, not being manipulated by the pasty faced youth at the local mall Bun Hut. Let me say it in sign language for you... luckily, the sign for making cinnamon fish in a microwave closely resembles me shooting you the double deuce. Who puts cinnamon on meat of any kind, anyway? I dare you to go to a restraunt and order the Cinnamon Chicken, or perhaps leg of lam smothered in a cinnamon gravy.
But oh wait, it gets better. Some of the other barely-evolved here decided that it would be best to mask the scent so it didn't offed anyone (too late). So, before I go on, let me tell you exactly what scents were already in the air here. There was, of course, the fish, and cinnamon. In addition, someone had previously made (and of course, burned.....what is so fucking hard about this? I'm calling Orville Redenbacker and Paul Neuman, and you better not be around when they get here because they will KICK YOUR ASS) popcorn. Also present was the cloying odor of cheap perfume and wet dog. I am not entirely sure how this last one happened, because it hasn't rained in a few days, and we're not allowed to keep pets here. To top this off, one of the drool factories here managed to at some point mate, and was kind enough to let thier offspring vomit on the carpet here a few days ago. Of course, that's still around too.
So, what's the best thing to offset the smell of cinnamon fish, butter, burned corn, puke, wet dog, and cheap perfume? Apparently apple. I overheard a few of the suicide-machine candidates talking about it, and I assumed they were going to spray some of that Potporri Carpet Fresh Fecal Masker All Purpose Funk Eliminator shit, which normally I would object to. But in this case, anything would be an improvement. Or so I thought.
Sigh.
Yeah, they did. They actually put a whole apple in the microwave. And oh great golly, did that make things worse. It now smells in here roughly like I would imagine it smells like a foot or so up a baby's small intestine. I decided, at this point, to take matters into my own hands, and shit a 10" log onto my desk. Well, not really. But I DID unplug the microwave.... which should be sufficient, since no one here apparently knows how to use one let alone the basic principals of electricity. If anyone else tries to put anything in there, I'm going to cram them in after it. And then I'm going to throw an handful of cinnamon on top of them and slam the door.
/end rant
Ok, so here's a little snippet of what I'm working on....anyone have anythign to say about it, let me know. I'd like some feedback.
I woke up Sunday with a D.O.T crew jackhammering my skull. The sunlight that had been invading my room through the broken Venetian blinds since dawn finally managed to bore through my eyelids. I sat up slowly, glancing at the barely functional alarm clock by my bedside. It was already 11:15. This, on some subconscious level, annoyed the shit out of me. Maybe it was the combination of a Wagnerian hangover and the morning I had wasted sleeping; at any rate, I had only been awake for five minutes and already I felt my fist of doom itching. Rolling out of bed as quietly as possible, unwilling to aggravate my throbbing cranium, I threw on a pair of olive colored cargo shorts and my treasured puke-orange Dick Clark is Satan t-shirt. I shuffled, still bleary-eyed, to the kitchen and made some semi-nutritional food; it wasn’t good enough to be called a meal, and nowhere near fancy enough to be brunch. I shoved it into my mouth as fast as possible, unwilling to subject my tongue to the taste of imitation egg, and chased it down with a glass of juice to clear the slime from my raw throat. Mmmmm, hangover food of champions. I wandered into the living room, brushing bits of unidentified food particles from my shirt. With no warning whatsoever a blood-chilling howl filled the room, plucking every fiber of nerve in my body. My head snapped up, bloodshot eyes wide and body ready to run if necessary. It was, of course, Dink. He was watching a tape of the previous night’s nature channel programming, and was analyzing it with the audio cranked through his surround sound speakers. The Bose subwoofer poomfed as a large silverback gorilla buried himself with gusto in a female. I felt my Sunny Delight wanting to return, and choked down the bile that wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I belched instead. “Jesus, Dink. Isn’t it a little early for this?” Dink laughed maniacally, and flung a Guinness in the general direction of where he must have assumed I might possibly be standing. I caught it, and put it down on the dinning room table. Hair of the dog or not, it was a little too early to start slapping my liver around. Again.
For quite a while it has been a hobby of Dink’s to tabulate precisely how many acts of sex and how many acts of violence were shown on any given nature channel flick. The wall above his bed, originally decorated in top of the line wood paneling and pictures of silicon wrapped in female slowly but surely gave way to large sheets of graph paper upon which were plotted the occurrences of said acts. From sharks ripping apart chum and crocodiles death rolling in the murky waters of Australia to albino bats in southern Brazil finding mates by echolocation and virii sexlessly reproducing, Dink tabulated and calculated every nuance of anything non-bipedal. Last time I checked violence was seriously kicking sex’s ass. Anyway, Dink seemed to think that by observing the underlying patterns present in this data he would be able to eventually predict, with Karnac-like precision, what would occur next at any given time on the nature channel— even during commercial breaks. So far his success has been meager, but tangible enough (for him, at least) to justify continued research. And since funding isn’t really an issue, no logical reason exists for him not to. I once (foolishly) suggested the idea that this data could be seen as a mirror of American society and its preferences given the choice of these two primal acts, but Dink just looked at me for a moment and remarked,
“You’re crazy. It would be stupid to apply this to Americana and all its trappings.”
“Why?” I asked. “After all, man is merely the sum whole of the animals you’re studying, having evolved over millions of years to become a society, one which is perhaps even more disposed to sex and violence than the rest of the animal kingdom. Aren’t there some basic sociological constructs that both groups share?” Dink snorted.
“Yeah, but you’re overlooking the obvious.”
“What’s that?” I asked, intrigued by the remark. In response Dirk threw back a shot of Tropicana and turned to walk out of the room.
“Animals have four legs; humans have two,” came the reply over his shoulder.
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Ohhhhhhhhhh yeah. Finally got Gens to work on my 'puter here in wage-slave land. And you know what that means? EARTHWORM JIM!!!! Oh man, I forgot how much I love this game. I would love to shake the hand of whatever cracked-out designer came up with this idea. You wanna talk about suspension of disbelief? You'll need it in spades to play this bad boy. For those uninitiated, lemme lay it out for ya real simple-like.
Once there was a worm named Jim. And he was happy, being all slimy and oozy, diggin' in the dirt and pooping his garden green. But Jim always felt the yearning to do something more, somethign bigger with his wormy life. So one year, on his birthday, all of his friends and relatives chipped in and got Jim a powered exoskeleton! Thus, Jim was able to walk among us, and fight the evils of the world!
Sounds ok so far, right? Well, think about it. Exoskeletons basically make your own body more powerful by allowing you to control very strong limbs of metal or steel with your own. So......how the fuck can you do that if you're a limbless mess like Jim? What does he do, direct little squirts of ooze at pressure sensative panels to move? Yeesh. My favorit weapon in his repitoire, however, is the whip. By this I mean that Jim commands his suit to pull his worm body out and snap it like a rubberband in the face of his foes. Pure genius. This is one of the best games ever released for the Genesis, and I guaruntee you'll never get tired of whipping foes with your own invertibrate carcass. Go get it NOW, or face the wrath of Sledgy.
In other news, Dell's customer sales department sucks. I'm beginning to think that Kinko's actually owns many, many companies (Dell among them) and regularly farms out its' star employees to sales divisions when the stupidily level needs to be ratcheted up a nothc. Example: yesterday I was shopping for a new laptop at Dell.com. I noticed that there wer two rebates listed online, in two different places, that both seemed to apply to the system I was looking at. One was for $150 ff any Inspiron notebook puchased online, and the other was a $250 rebate specific to the configuration I was looking at. I wondered if they would stack, or, in typical consumer-buggery, only the highest would apply.
So I called Dell. God help me, I called them. Enter my friendly customer sales rep, Juaquin. Yes, I spelled that right. J-U-A-Q-U-I-N. It's pronounced John. I know because he helpfully told me his name and then spelled it so I could call back if we should get disconnected (read: lest he lose a sale). So, right from the get-go I had a good feeling about Mr Ass-tastic on the other end of the line. Conversation is as follows, with inner monologue in italics for your reading convenience.
Juaquin: "Thank you for calling Dell, Mr. OMFUG. What system will I be building for you today?"
OMFUG: What? I didn't ask you to build...what the fuck? Are you even capable of building something that doesn't involve Lincoln Logs and glue, you polyp? "Uh, actually, I just had a question about your rebat-"
Juaqlyn: "What system, sir?"
OMFUG: "The Inspiron 5150, but I just wa-"
Juaqleen: "Ok, let me just start your file here and we'll get started."
OMFUG: GODDAMIT I WAS TALKING, YOU COLON SCRUBBER!!! Well, I really just want to know about a rebate."
Juaqalakadingdon: "For which configuration?"
OMFUG: (speaking as fast as humaly possible) The Inspiron 5150 Recommended solution priced at $1399 after mail in rebate."
Juaqdiesel: "We can offer you the same deal as you see online there, sir-"
OMFUG: OH, SHUT DOWN! My turn to interrupt, bitch! TEH WINNAR! Can you? Becasue I want to know if the $150 rebate you get when purchasing onlin stacks withthe $250 rebate on this configuration."
Juannaman: "I don't see what you are talking about..."
------5 minutes and countless clicks later....---------
Juanto: "Ok, well that rebate is for a different configuration, and is only available online. But I can give you the same deal."
OMFUG: "I don't see anywhere that says anything about a certain configuration..."
Juaqulyn: "Well, it's only avaiable online anyway, but we can give yout he same deal here-"
OMFUG: Don't call it a comeback...score is all tied up in the interruption annoy-o-thon, Capt. Skidmark! "So you're saying that I'll get the same price as if I ordered online?"
Juaqstrap: "No, sorry but that's only available online."
OMFUG: Ok, I'm lost... were we supposed to take a right at Making Sense Blvd.? "But you....I...."
Jaunkadonk: (tone of clear supperiority creeping into voice) "You see sir, we're offline, on the phone, so the terms are different."
OMFUG: Don't you get uppity with me you snivelling piece of camel vagina... "Yes, I understand that. But then it isn't the same deal, is it?
Juaquiaoeandsometimesy: "No."
OMFUG: "Yeah, I thought so. But can I get both rebates if I order online?"
JuaqManLoveXXX@fucktard.com: "Uh, I really couldn't say... I only deal in phone sales."
OMFUG: (Inner monologue kills self to end the pain) Ok. *cought*worthless*cough* Thanks a ton, Johnny."
So it remains to be seen if I'll get both rebates, but frankly I don't really care. I'll just be happy if I never have to talk to another Dell sales rep again. IN even more news, I'm picking up the scraps of a novel I started a long time ago, and giving it another go. I feel the urge to write lately, so I'll be posting bits and pieces of it here for your perusal. I know all my faithful readers out ther (crickets chirping) will eat this shit up.
/end transmission
