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!