Recycling

A woman who works in our office walked in from the warehouse and said, "It smells like a popcorn toilet bowl in here." I just looked at her because I had no idea what she was talking about. Apparently on the other side of the office there was yet another urinal cake being utilized as a air freshener and someone had a freshly nuked bag of microwave popcorn in one of their desk drawers.

Then I began to wonder if it were possible to retrofit an old toilet so it could pop popcorn. The water tank is the perfect place for unpopped corn, and if the bowl had heating elements attached to it, the corn can be popped. There's even a lid. A flush would not only dump the unpopped kernels into the bowl, but the popped corn would be forced out the back into a collection bag.

Navel oranges?

During a typically moronic office discussion, one of my coworkers said, "I know a woman who's so fat you could stick an orange in her navel." My fist thought was, why would anyone want to put an orange in there?

Oh, agony

I strained my back several days ago lifting heavy stuff and then aggravated it further by having to stand for hours a couple of days later. Wednesday morning I could barely get out of bed and ended walking around like Quasimodo at work the rest of the day while my coworkers said things like, "poor baby," and "someone get Scott a wheelchair". This morning was even worse with nausea and flop sweat. So I called in sick and went to the doctor.

Waiting rooms are named correctly. That's all I have to say about that.

I got an injection in the ass with cortisone and something else. One in each cheek. It was the most action I've had in a while, but I digress. Then I was x-rayed. I was expecting the worst, but it turned out that I only had pulled muscles and not the slipped disc I was afraid of. (A nine year old kid in the next room with back pain bit and kicked someone trying to hold him down during the examination. I was better behaved.)

The injections worked miracles and soon I'll have the muscle relaxants and pain killers I was prescribed. Then I'll really be feeling good. All that and a doctor's note saying that I don't have to work tomorrow will end up a nice birthday present, but anything's better than searing spinal pain.

Let's call it love

I think I just met my future wife in the spam folder of my Yahoo mail account:

Do not ignore me please,
I found your email somewhere and now decided to write you.
Let me know if you do not mind. If you want I can send you some pictures of me.
I am a nice pretty girl. Don't reply to this email.
Email me direclty at dstacy0@findmehigh.info

I shall call her Spamuella.

Tragically delicious

Yesterday morning I found myself in a grocery store wandering around like a zombie. I drifted into the frozen food section and glanced over the nauseous selection. Out of the corner of my eye I saw what at first looked like a picture of Osama Bin Laden on a yellow box of fish sticks. It was the Gorton's Fisherman.

Enter the beaver

I was going over some stuff at work and noticed that one of our customers has a store on Beaver Ruin Road. Yes, Beaver Ruin Road. Just how bad did the beaver ruin have to be for them to name a road after it? That must've been some serious beaver ruin. Old timers in the area often tell about it, I imagine. After a bad thunderstorm someone will say something like, "Wow, that was a really bad storm!" Then one of the old guys will spit out some tobacco juice and say, "Bad? Boy, you don't know bad. It's nothing like what the beavers did back in '26. I still have nightmares."

International relations

Things suck at work, but they have gotten slightly more interesting with the recent addition of genuine Latvian mail order bride. Well, OK, she's not a mail order bride, but she did come all the way from Latvia to marry some guy from this area that she met online. And she speaks better English than most of my coworkers. She's also really hot, but that doesn't help me much.

Tinkling terrors

The paragraphs below were a superfluous comment for the previous post, but since it was sort of long and had nothing to do with the post in question, I decided to make it a post of its own. Aren't you all just so so damn lucky?

And speaking of peeing... Last year I was in my sister's crappy new apartment. When I needed to use the facilities I was distressed to discover that the door wouldn't shut all the way. I knew my sister wouldn't barge in on me, but I still wanted the door to latch. For a lack of anything else to do, I shut the door as far as it would close and hoped for the best. (Whatever that means.)

I stood in front of the toilet and tried to concentrate. Suddenly there was a flash of orange at my lower left. I jolted slightly and looked down. Her damn cat had wedged his head into the crack between the door and the frame and had come into the bathroom without my knowing. He had his front paws up on the edge of the toilet and was looking down into the bowl. (My sister has to keep the lid down so he won't drink out of it.)

I couldn't pee with him like this, so I picked him up and put him in the bathtub so he could drink the trickle of water coming out the faucet. If I'd inadvertently splattered a little on him while I was taking a leak I knew I would have a difficult time explaining to my sister just how it was I had managed to accidentally pee on her cat. But with him in the bathtub, I could sort of pee in peace, although he totally spoiled my concentration.

Commercialisms

Several posts down I was griping about seeing an AARP commercial that used a Buzzcocks song. Well, it's happened again. A few days ago I was watching TV and heard a familiar bass riff. It was the Jam's great "Start" being used to sell Cadillacs of all things. (If you're not familiar with this song it has the same bass line as the Beatles' "Taxman". And if you're not familiar with either the Jam's "Start" or the Beatles' "Taxman", I have some bad news for you: your record collection probably sucks. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.)

So lets review my outrages. I've heard the Buzzcocks in an AARP commercial and in a car commercial. I've heard the Jam in a car commercial. I've heard Stiff Little Fingers' "Gotta Getaway" in a video game commercial. I've heard Iggy and the Stooges' "TV Eye" in a minivan commercial. I've also heard the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" (sans lyrics, of course) in a minivan commercial. I've heard an early Ramones song in a commercial, but I can't remember what it was. (Was it a cellphone company?) And I've heard a Feelies song in a Citibank commercial. Good god, have I left any out?

I hate this sort of stuff. It's bad enough to hear classic rock stuff like Zeppelin and the Who in commercials, but it's really annoying for me to hear great, more non-commercial stuff in commercials. (Non-commercial in the sense that most of the bands listed above didn't have any US hits.)

Naturally, if I were in the Feelies and Citibank offered me a bunch of money I'd take it, but it still irritates me to hear music that a lot of us (like me) think of as thumbing its collective nose at big time rock'n'roll success being used to hawk crap I can't afford.

If companies are going to do this sort of thing, why not at least make it interesting? (Although using "Heroin" to sell minivans is pretty interesting. Or maybe just deranged.) Why not use the Buzzcocks' "Orgasm Addict" in a Viagra commercial? How about Big Star's "Holocaust" to sell Prozac? And now that I think about it, the pharmaceutical industry would have a field day with alternative/indie rock stuff. But I don't want to give anyone any ideas, not without a commission at least.

Found money

Last night I dreamed I found a $500 bill in my wallet. Oddly, I wasn't that surprised. Even odder was that the bill had a picture of Mr.T on it.

How to succeed in business with even a really stupid idea

Sometimes the best ideas come to us in the dead of night. Sometimes not.

I woke up last night and suddenly had an idea for a business: a store that sold nothing but laxatives. The name? Laxative Land!

Curse you, Red Baron!

I dreamed I was reading the newspaper comics and in one strip Snoopy had diabetes and the punchline was that he couldn't find his insulin.

You'd have thought that Charlie Brown would be taking care of this sort of thing rather than having his dog manage his own illness, but maybe since the damn dog can type (among other things), Charlie Brown figured he'd be fine looking after himself.

Brrrr!

It's still to cold to blog. Hell, it's too cold to do anything except eat and sleep. Too bad I can't get paid to eat and sleep. But only if I didn't have to leave home, of course. No reviewing hotel and restaurant for me. Nope. I just want to get money for not leaving the house at all. Better yet, pay me not to get off the couch. I'll need bathroom breaks though.

Get a job!

It's too cold to blog! It's 62ºF in my office.

Meanwhile, I have a shot at getting a really nice paying job. (It's more than twice what I'm currently making, which isn't saying much since I'm paid in balloons and whoopie-cushions.) I have to go and take a test and fill out an application on Tuesday morning. And it's only a five minute drive from home. Problem? I need at least three references. Who the hell ever has references? I never have them. I always end up with these weird family friends. God only knows what they say about me if they're ever called. I need real references. Anyone out there want to be one of my references? Seriously. I'm not joking.

God, I'm pathetic.

What?

I'm getting some added responsibilities at work that include having to do a detailed report on a regular basis. (No raise, though. Bastards.) The guy who's going to train me to do the report told me that I would be good at it because I was "very tedious". I'm thinking he meant something like meticulous, but you never know. Maybe I am tedious.

Old

A few days ago while watching a bit of the network news to make sure the world hadn't come to an end while I was frittering away my life with my head in a series of books, I saw a commercial with a familiar song being used as background music. It was a Buzzcocks tune, "Everybody's Happy Nowadays", a classic blast of catchy buzz saw British punk circa 1978.

What was it a commercial for? The goddamn AARP, you know that organization for old people. Of course the original members of the Buzzcocks (sadly reunited to cash in on the current cheap punk nostalgia of people who didn't even exist in 1978) are pretty damn old these days.

The internet? Meh

I haven't been blogging or reading blogs over the past week. In fact I haven't spent much time at all online. I've been reading lots of books since Christmas and these days I'd much rather read on the couch than sit in front of my computer with a string of drool coming out of my mouth while I flip through endless websites. I can drool just fine on the couch with a book.

Oh, the agony

The unspeakable Jammies has tagged for a meme. Something about grabbing a book that's close to your computer, noting the title, going to page 123, reading the first five sentences on that page, and then copying out the next three sentences. Or something along those lines. No idea why anyone would want to do this, but such is life.

The closest books to my computer are a dictionary and a big-ass Mouser catalog. So instead I just reached over my right shoulder and grabbed a volume from the shelves right behind me.

The volume? Sane Sex Life & Sane Sex Living by H.W. Long, M.D. (I even found a reprint online.) The subtitle of the book is "Some Things that All Sane People Ought to Know About Sex Nature and Sex Functioning; Its Place in the Economy of Life, Its Proper Training and Righteous Exercise". The book was published by the Eugenics Publishing Co,. Inc. in 1937. Yes, eugenics.

If you're wondering why I have this book, I buy old, weird sex education books when I find them. They're quite amusing. And educational. Which probably goes a long way to explaining why I'm single. But I digress.

Oh, the sentences. They're not that interesting, but here goes:

But it paid to wait, for their doing so proved that the bride had two weeks of "free time" in each month, and this was worth all it cost to find out! Take time!

And now let it be added that it is a great accomplishment for a husband and wife to be free from a fear of pregnancy as a result of coitus.

These sentences refer (I suppose) to what's usually called the "rhythm method" or what I like to call the "How did I end up with all of these goddamn kids method".

Now the bad part. I'm supposed to tag three people. OK, first I'll tag Sara because not only will she not do it, she probably won't even know she's been tagged. Then I'll tag my sister just for the pleasure of pissing her off. Heh-heh. And, lastly, I'll tag Sherri even though she's probably already been tagged. So there.

Phoning it in

Sherri posted this new meme thingy that looks intriguiging. Actually, it just looks like an easy to way to do a post without breaking a sweat.

What you do:

1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. In the Search box, type your birth month and day (but not year).
3. List three events that happened on your birthday.
4. List two important birthdays and one interesting death.
5. List any holidays
6. Post it.

Simple! Whatever. [Grumble.]

My birthday's March 24th.

1. OK, three events. Hmmm... In 1832 a group of men tarred and feathered Mormon leader Joseph Smith Jr. In 1973 Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon. And in 1989 the Exxon Valdez, with a sleeping drunk at the helm, ran aground and dumped an ass-load of oil on the Alaskan coast.

2. Two important birthdays. I have several interesting people sharring my birthday and I recall writing a post about it once or twice over the past few years. Here's two: Harry Houdini and Wilhelm Reich.

3. One important death. Only one? But there's so many. OK. Jules Verne.

4. Any holidays? How about World Tuberculosis Day? Party down!

Free and weird

Some Russian has gone and scanned what looks to be the entire text of Codex Seraphinianus. This can't be legal, so enjoy it while it lasts. One day I hope to be able to afford a copy of this book.