7/2/04

      Kirk points out an excerpt from Franken's Lying Liars, a comic about Supply Side Jesus.

      Who would win in a fight to the death: a guy with a "walking aid," or a guy with a dessert spoon? Now we know!

      Sorry, that's all I have. The most interesting thing I can say is that dinner tonight was a bag of microwave popcorn and 2 pounds of vanilla yogurt. And that's not, y'know, interesting.

7/5

      tHANKS TO yOUNG'S sYNDROME oops.
      Thanks to Young's Syndrome, Independence Day became In-de-Bathroom Day. I watched a movie I wanted to comment on, but I was sick and then I read a book and then I went to bed and then I woke up at 530AM and didn't fall asleep until 930 and then I got up at noon and did things that made me cranky and then I got carried away writing garbage in the Comments and now I just want to watch a really, really entertainingly awful DVD I got at Best Buy, The Greatest Sci-Fi Cartoons Ever Made, which I knew was no possible way going to be the "Best Ever Made," but it surprised me by also not being even made up of "Sci-Fi" (unless you count King Midas as science fiction) but also not even "Cartoons" (unless you count George Pal's Puppetoons as cartoons, and they aren't), so it's more like "Really Weird Shit You Haven't Seen Before" (except for the 40s Superman cartoons) or "Something You'd Stick in the Player When You're All Stoned" (which I'm not) and am I in the Guinness Book for World's Worst Sentence yet?

      In more interesting news--which would just about anything after that--Michael Moore has a blog.

7/6

      At least one reporter has the guts to write a detailed expose of the greatest lie of our age: The Death Star trash-masher.

      Bad Mags, a look at the bottom-feeders of the magazine industry. I haven't read through it all, just my personal interests Myron Fass and Ed Wood. No excerpts from Ed's works, although I learned a few new facts: His liquor of choice was Imperial, the Bukoff of whiskeys, and he wrote under several pen names. You can guess at least one of them. Oh, c'mon, guess!
      "Ann Gora."

7/7

      I'm taking this with a grain of vanilla: Weird Japanese Ice Cream. Maybe it's real. Maybe it's not, as it shows the containers but never the actual ice cream. And we're led to believe that there's ice cream with chunks of raw horse meat in them. Suuuure.

7/8

      Yes, I've been derelict in my duties here. Just had nothing to say. For no particular reason, I remembered an article I'd read years ago about Really Bad Job Interviews. Such as a guy who asked for 2 weeks vacation--to begin before he started the job, or the woman who reached into her interviewer's handbag, grabbed her hairbrush, and used it while talking to her. Here's a couple from personal experience.

      When I was at JCPenney, there was an opening for a new management position. Low-level in the store's hierarchy, but well-paying in relative retail terms. My immediate supervisor was doing the interviewing. Her 1:30 was 10 minutes late, then 20. "Do you still want me to send him in?" I asked at that point. "Yes," she said. "I want to hear what his excuse is."
      He turned up a few minutes later, and I sent him to her office. He exited soon after with a deer-in-the-headlights look. She followed a minute later, laughing. "I said, 'You know you're over 20 minutes late, right?' He said, 'Yeah, but there's a good reason. I have a really bad hangover today.'"
      He didn't get the job.

      Applicants who did not get to work with me at Kay-Bee Toys: Girl wearing a button that said "FUCK OFF AND DIE" on her shirt. Guy whose application for assistant manager said that his current job was as a "truck diver" on a "grabage truck" for a company that did (word that was meant to be "maintenance" but was unpronouncable by anyone not a native speaker of Martian), and who wanted to be our "ass manger." Keep your bestiality out of this, trashman!

      A manager at the next closest Kay-Bee had a productive interview with a job-seeker, and decided to hire her. A day or so later when she was called back and offered the job, she declined. It was later discovered that during the interview, when the manager was called to the front and she was alone, the applicant decided to ransack the manager's purse, steal one of her checks and write it out to herself.
      Of course, "writing out a check to yourself in your own handwriting" really wasn't the perfect, undetectable crime that she thought it was.

      I'm looking for a pic of B-Toes to send to Cat Of The Day, and found a few early ones that never made it here, largely because the focus is fuzzy. Well, so is he, so Why Not.

      In the Cat Condo. This is one of the very few pictures I have of him in that brief transitional state between "grey eyes" and "yellow eyes": Green eyes Byron.

      Also on the Condo, a cute pic of how he used to sleep--heels over head.

      All played out, from fighting the shoelaces tied to the chair. All that white stuff? Kill Kill hair. He'll never reach her Olympic-level shedding ability.

7/9

      I've always been fascinated by Alternate Histories, so this article on world leaders and their "dementia" (ie, senility) is both interesting and too short. Millions of Russians might never have been purged, eastern Europe might never have gone Communist, even World War II might've been averted, if only a few presidents and premiers had been diagnosed and done something about it.

7/11

      Well, you can pretty much forget about anymore updates from me: I bought an X-Box.
      And Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I put about 6 hours into that today, and I feel like I'm about 1% through the game. I got it at Best Buy; the price is the same everywhere, but they were the only ones giving away a free game with it (Mech...umm, something). I don't know if I'll ever buy another game for it, actually. I really got it because Kevin downloaded a couple of discs of A) a bunch of old arcade machine ROMs, and B), Every Game Ever, from the eras of the 2600 up to the Super Nintendo/Sega Saturn/3DO. I don't know if it's really every game. I only played with it once, and tried to remember all the truly obscure or rare Atari titles I could think of to test its completeness. It did have Kool Aid Man (available only with proofs-of-purchase) and Custer's Revenge (the legendary porn title--and what could be hotttter than sex between those highly detailed Atari people? Look at the size of his schlong, it must be 3 pixels long!). It didn't have the rarest title (Chuck Wagon, another p-o-p game. This was about the dog food ad with that stop-motion stagecoach that the dog would chase into the cupboard. But that's as rare as they get). It also had a lot of fake games, like plenty of ROM hacks. Is there a video game player who hasn't always wanted to play Super Mario Brothers with Mario replaced by a shitty version of Jason from Friday the 13th? I thought not!
      I have a lot of the old games, but it's an incredible pain to hook up the 2600, Intellivision, ColecoVision (an ADAM, my firstest computer) and the Nintendo. Oh, at the flick of a switch to play all my favorites again! What joy!
      You guys may have to find other entertainment for a while.

      A couple of lists:
      50 worst songs of great rockers.
      The Biggest PC Myths.

7/12

      It's time for the countdown to my other Mystery Illness, July Disease. For the last 8 years (that I'm aware of; I may've had it longer before I noticed the trend), right in mid-month, I get horribly sick. It's like the Syndrome with atomic power, and crippling nausea.
      For a day. Then it stops.
      I know that it's an allergy. Jessica would always be sick on or about the same day with the same symptoms, until she moved out of state. But she only moved 50 miles! What grows in central CT that doesn't grow in central Mass? What plant species has every one of its members release all their pollen on the same day, for one day?
      The danger zone is the next 3 days, and luckily it's supposed to rain all 3. Jess and I once had an instant cure when a thunderstorm roared through and cleansed the air, so maybe there won't be any Mystery Pollen to make me sick.

      Spotted near BIG!Lots, a restaurant named "Taco China," serving "Mexican-Chinese Food." I've never seen a restaurant that served two distinctly different cuisines like that before (you don't see a lot of pizza place/sushi bars, for instance). But that makes more sense than an actual merger of the 2 styles. Try some of General Tso's Chicken Chimichangas! Teriyaki Beef 'n' Bean Burritos! Menudo, Hunan Style! Refried Bean Curd! Our Mu-Shu Montezuma's Revenge puts the pooh in Pu-Pu Platter!

      Mad scientists create mind-controlling monkey-machine hybrids; Human race to be extinct next week!
      As much as I'd like my own monkey cyborg--No, not really. "Researchers have trained monkeys to 'think' a cursor around a computer screen to reveal their preferences and goals."
      Preference: Banana! Goal: Hit Bonzo in next cage with doody!

      And I thought Byron was lucky to be rescued: Kitten found swimming 3 miles offshore in Gulf of Mexico. "...the 10-week-old, 1-pound kitten had worms..." Oh. So he must've been fishing.

7/13

      I think I was sick today!
      I was extremely out of it for the first few hours awake. That's a symptom of July Disease. It rained all night and day, so that would've washed the pollen from the sky. Maybe I lucked out this year! Still 2 days to go before I'm sure, though. But it's still supposed to rain.

      Thanks to Zefiel to mentioning Pawbreakers! It's catnip in a food binding agent, shaped like a ball. Cats can play with them and eat them at the same time.
      The Kids knew that something was up as soon as I brought the mail in (note: Pawbreakers were ordered on Friday, and I got them on Wednesday--that's very fast. A video I ordered from Amazon on the previous Saturday got here at the same time). They sniffed at the various envelopes (Byron, being Byron and goofy, kept sniffing the one with the video of Footlight Parade). When the envelope was opened, they got seriously involved. Killsy, ever the model of decorum, continued to sniff. Byron, ever the goofy, couldn't wait for me to open the package and dragged the Ziploc-bagged Pawbreaker away to smack.
      When it comes to Nip, cats are either Rollers or Eaters. Rollers thrash around in it and then go insane. Eaters, well, eat it, and then get mellow. The Human versions would be "Drunks" and "Stoners." My cats are both Eaters.
      Overall, an excellent toy, no matter what class your cats are in. And at $10 (shipping included!) for 4, not a bad investment.
      If you're not interested in the product, check out this awesome cat picture!

      World O' Crap takes a look at a wingnut interview that actually has the not-at-all-leading question, "When you listen to [Michael] Moore’s language, it is hard to decipher the difference between his ideology and that of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Castro." So that's why after watching F9/11 I wanted to slaughter several million people! It all makes SENSE now!! THANK YOU, Right Wing!

       Scalzi, as always, nails the presidential choices dead-on. With a hammer for nailing nails on dead!

      Hey, look what I just bought for $20 on Amazon! The SciFi Classics 50 Movie Pack DVD Collection! I imagine that when 50 flicks are pressed onto 12 DVDs, the quality ain't that great. But LOOK at the quality! The BEST movie here is probably Robot Monster! And it includes such rarities as Mesa of Lost Women and Wild Women of Wonga, all the Gameras and even a STARMAN! MST3Kers rejoice!

7/14

      The store received a letter today, and the gas company had shortened "Bloomfield Connecticut" to "BLO CT." Good thing the store's not in Maine!

      Ever wonder what 80's arcade games in Communist East Germany looked like? Sorry, no "Super Marxist Brothers," but a game involving running around collecting dripping water in a flooding basement. Unlock the secret bonus game where you stand in line for 6 hours to buy bread and toilet paper!

      I'd heard of these guys years before and forgot about them: An early Christian sect that was so convinced religious martyrdom was the way to sit at the Right Hand of God that they went around murdering people who wouldn't kill them. Not a good basis for a continuing religion, really.

      10 Dumb Moments in Sci-Fi Cinema (and why we don't care).

7/16

      Long-Time Reader of This Drivel Chris from Canada (or should I just call people who read this page "Drivelers"?) points out that the InExOb got a mention from Metafilter. And here's a hearty shout-out to our new visitors!
      HELLO, people from that famous page I never read! Glad you found that page of mine that's been cold in the grave for THREE YEARS. I knew you were coming! I said, "What's that SMELL? It's like sweaty old rags soaked in diesel exhaust and very dead oysters!" WHOO, pull yourself away from the computer and shower for once! And now that you're here--GO AWAY! PRIVATE CLUB! NO NON DRIVELLERS ALOWD!!!!!!"
      I used to get so excited about Major Links. Who cares now? What, Metafilterian, are you still reading this? Shoo! SHOO! Go read Super Green Beret, the only really funny thing I've ever done. Then go away! This page is boring! Get off my damn lawn, ya smoochers! Reading this page will only give you Gontorrhea!
      Damn foreigners.

      I saw one of those tables outside of a grocery store, selling Jesus t-shirts to "Keep kids off drugs!" And fill somebody else's pockets. I was tempted to buy a couple, as they bordered on self-parody:

      Under a picture of a blood-dripping crown of thorns was the title "FIT FOR A KING!"

      I'll bet that this was from a signature in Jesus' junior high yearbook:
      1 SAVIOUR
      3 NAILS
      4 GIVEN

      2 GOOD
      2 B
      4 SAKEN!!!!

      The most exciting thing that happened to me today was a message on my answering machine:
      "Hey, Ed? It's Tom. I got something to show you, it'll only take a minute, I'll be right over!"
      My name's not Ed, Tom. And now I'll never know what Thing you wanted to show me, no matter how many minutes I have. Tom? I hate you and your thing!
      The next most exciting thing was a customer running into the back of the store with her young daughter and throwing an employee out of our bathroom so that the kid could pee all over our floor.
      Wow! See what you've been missing out on Metafilterarians? Stop peeing on my floor and LEAVE! OCCUPIED!

7/17

      Some of these are very funny, some are repetitious, but here are the Amazon customer reviews for My Pet Goat, the book Bush kept reading while thousands were dying on 9/11. I submitted one, but who kows if it'll get taken (and it'll get deleted when Amazon figures it out anyway). I can't believe no on else thought of this angle of attack:

Y'all Are Missin the Point!!
Reviewer: A reader from That ranch with all the brush, Crawford TX
Everybody is sayin, what's he thinkin while he's settin there in that classroom for all that time? I was thinkin somethin very important. It was the most imporant thoughts I ever did have. When I heard they blowed up all those people, I thought "How terrible! I might be held responsible for my incompetence! How can I make this not my fault? There must be someone I can blame! Since I never make any mistakes that I recall!"
So all these kids are readin about this goat. GOAT! I think! SCAPEgoat!
Whose fault is 9/11? SADDAM, the GOAT!
Whose fault is why we're not invadin right away? DAVID KAY and FRANCE, those GOATS!
When we didn't find none WMDs, whose fault y'all think that was, mine? Nosirree, TENET and the CIA! GOATIE GOAT GOATS!
Iraqis hate us? Dead-ender goats! Abu Ghiraib? A Few Bad Apple goats! Everything else? The Liberal Media goats! Hell, remember when I fell offa my bike? I blamed the DIRT! DIRTY GOAT DIRT!
Know how I released "all" my service records, except for the 3 months that woulda proved I didn't go AWOL? The AP sued to get those, and hey guess what! The microfilm was destroyed, but ONLY for those same 3 months! And there's no paper hard copies of those months either! You got it, THE GOAT ATE 'EM!!!
So stop makin fun of the greatestiest book ever. It gave me an idea I'm gonna use FOREVER!

7/20

      Remember when, like a year ago, I wrote all those really long posts? I hope you remember them. Sometimes memories are all you'll ever have.

      Funny article on concert morons. You'll recognize them all, unless you've never been to a concert.
      I was once part of a concert jerk. When we went to see the Talking Heads Fear of Music tour (1979), we got there while the band was still setting up. When we were almost the only people there, I joked about swiping the roll of masking tape that was by the drum kit. Bethel, in her impulsive, brash way (not that all of us there weren't 19 years old), walked on the unoccupied stage and took it.
      And we paid the Karmic balance. Turned out that that masking tape kept the drummer's mike from falling onto his drums. "WHERE'S THE FUCKING TAPE?!?!" he screamed at one point. And we were right by the speaker with the drums, and got our ears battered every time the mike fell.
      Guess I owe some masking tape to Chris Frantz.

      The long version of one of my favorite Move On ads from a few months ago. Pretty depressing, really, but it truly captures a retro version of the B&W cartoons of the Last Depression.

      Anorexia: Psychological problem or a hard-wired evolutionary survival mechanism?

7/21

      The Voynich Manuscript: Does it contain in its indecipherable depths the Secret of Life, or is it a 400-year-old con job?

      Running Scared: "Ashcroft's performance confirmed the suspicion held by many that the Bush administration is in the cynical business of spreading generalised, promiscuous anxiety through the American populace, a sense of imminent but inexact catastrophe, for reasons that may have little to do with national security and much to do with political advantage. In the past three years, in the name of homeland security, a vast, coast-to-coast, combined surveillance and people-scaring apparatus has been assembled, on a scale, and with an intimate reach, never before seen in a democracy."

      That there God, he sure does move in them mysterious ways: Looking around and finding the world as it is to be pefect in every respect, Jesus uses the Second Coming to put in a cameo appearance at a True Value hardware store. "Blessed are the keymakers," says Jeez!
      Click the picture link to see a close-up, although he looks more like Richard Harris in "Camelot" to me. And you'll get to see Mr Peebles, the Official World's Smallest Cat! He's 2 years old and looks like kitten Byron at 7 weeks, except with eyes and ears proportionally-sized to a cat's head.

      Speaking of cats...

7/23

      Every time you lose your keys, they turn up in the last place you'd look.

      In the tradition of News of the Weird and This Is True, DumbAss Daily.

      Heh...somebody just found this page by searching for "cute kitten." Well, they found what they were looking for!

7/24

      Vote in the World Stupidity Awards.

      How to get rid of a hangover. Yeah, sure. The only way to get rid of a hangover is to not get one in the first place. Most of these "remedies" are well-based, but try them before you go to bed, not after you wake up with your head exploding. (Simpler: drink a lot of juice or water, take some ibuprofen and B vitamins, wait until you've cleared your bladder. Simplest: Don't get drunk on the damn first place!)

      A long, but if the topic interests you, fascinating look at the first "real" PC game, the UK's Elite. "Sales of Acornsoft's Elite would finally reach a total of almost 150,000. There were only 150,000 or so BBC Micros in the world at that point, so the ratio was almost 1:1, one copy of Elite for every computer that could run it."
      If you had an 80s computer (I had a Coleco Adam), it'll make you feel old when the article begins by informing the readers that, No, they didn't have mice back then. And it stored things on cassette tapes! Made from TREE BARK! AND WE LIKED IT!

7/25

      I went to see Shaolin Soccer today. It's not out on video for another month, and wandering around the country in limited theatrical release. But it's well worth seeing if you get a chance. Fun-NY! Knowing nothing about soccer (like me) doesn't hurt, although knowing a bit about kung fu movie cliches doesn't hurt. Plenty of silly CGI and wild imagination, which sometimes is downright surrealisitic, as when Team Shaolin plays Team Moustache: Asian girls with dreadlocks, warpaint and extremely fake beards. Their real opposition is an evil team named--what else--Team Evil.

      I am now X-Boxless. I only bought it so that I could get a mod chip and play that disc of old school games. Turns out that for some reason, Darth Gates don't like that idea, and has changed the circuit boards so that it'd require some major soldering to mod it--major enough that Kevin thought it was too much work, and he built my computer. I felt guilty about returning it to Best Buy, but if I didn't, I'd just dropped $150 to play Knights of the Old Republic. But they took it back without a question, and didn't even charge me their 15% restocking fee.
      Next stop: Game Stop. Kevin's idea was to buy a refurbished one that might be version 1.5 or lower (the ones made before 4/04 can be modded by a chip that just slips on). We took seperate cars and I got there several minutes earlier than him, and when he walked in and saw me at the counter thought, "What, there's a problem?" And there was. As soon as I asked to see one of the refurbs, the Game Stopper started stopping me. The display case was unlocked, but he wouldn't take it out. He immediately told me that I should get a new or used one ("But none of our stores in the state have any used ones"). There was only a $20 difference between a new one and a refurb (their website has them for $30 less with a free game). Another employee immediately joined in, "They don't really fix them, they can overheat, blah blah blah." They said everything but "We're not selling you a refurb," although that's what they meant.
      Why were they refusing to sell me it? Got me. It wouldn't seem to be worth the extra $20 they'd make, especially as they ended up not selling me anything. Obviously, they're under orders not to...Is Gates that angry at mod chips?
      My excuse at Best Buy for returning the X-Box was that I "Had some unexpected expenses." Which was kind of true. My APEX DVD player is acting up. To get it to play, I have to open it up, insert a disc, then wiggle the drive around until it starts playing. Yes, I have a DVD player that makes me jiggle the handle like a balky toilet.
      I'm unsure how much of a loss it will be when it dies. My NetFlix account is "On Hold." I tried to give Long-Time Driveller Lilly Von Latest-Pseudonym a gift certificate to NetFlix, because she didn't have a credit card and couldn't try the free trial. It wasn't untl after they took my money and she tried to redeem it that we found out that she needed a crredit card for that, too. It makes sense, in retrospect. How else could they guarantee that she'd send the DVDs back? But it was also a scam: When the gift trial ended, she had to cancel it or they'd start charging her for membership. And while "needs a credit card" was probably buried somewhere in the fine print, they didn't tell me right up front about it.
      ...And we're back from vomiting. Fourth time in a week. Good ol' Syndrome.
      I got an email from Customer Service congratulating me on my purchase of the GC, so I emailed them back, asking them to cancel it. It bounced back; only they could write me from that address. Was there a contact email or number on their page? Nooo. So that left me with one option--dispute it on my credit card.
      That wasn't too much of a problem, although they charged me a service fee for it. If I paid my full balance, I couldn't dispute the charge; when I didn't pay the balance, they charged me. That was fixed by a phone call. But NetFlix has my account on suspension, despite the fact that they're not OUT ANYTHING by not getting paid for a GC that would never be used. They'll be out a customer if they don't fix this before the next time they try to charge me for another month. And Kevin's already recommended GreenCine. Same price as NetFlix, but supposedly leaning more to the esoteric side of cinema. Not that they have Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! either. I named my daughter for that film; how come no one wants to rent it to me? Like Game Stop, why doesn't anyone want my money?

7/26

      Back to posting links I stole from more productive pages.

      Comics based on spam titles.

      Humphrey Bogart as Frodo. Funny, but a long download with about 2 minutes of "Rock climbing, Joel. Rock climbing."

7/27

      Via Big Picnic, my fave mean quote out of the current political season:
      "Hey, here's [Clinton's media guy] James Carville on Ralph Nader...'I wouldn't urinate down his throat if his heart was on fire.'"
      Ouch!

      Even when I was a kid, and assumed that the 60s were what my future would be--high-paying and possibly Union job, a wife, a house with a white picket fence, and ever-increasing freedom, equality and prosperity (why, YES, we had a DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT, that's where these assumptions came from)--I never expected to have kids. That was really weird for anyone to think back then.
      Once I hit my teen years, I knew I never wanted kids, and was seriously doubting any need for marriage or even a girlfriend. It took a long time to fight off the expectations of society, but I decided that Solitude was what I really wanted. I fell off the wagon a few times, sure. But I've really never wanted constant companionship, not at any point in my life. Finally, my parents told me that I had to reproduce. To continue the Family Name! Yes, I was the last of my kind, an endangered species. The last English-speaking person in the entire world with the bizarre surname Young. I said that getting married simply to continue a name was the stupidest reason ever to have a child. The next time the argument came up, I pointed out that any of my three sisters could hyphenate their names to carry on the tradition. That ended that. And with me, ends one of the millions of family lines named Young.
      The last Pimbury in the world. Maybe one of my sisters should have married him.

7/28

      I bought IAMS last month before I ran out. Can't have hungry kitties! It took a week for the old bag to run out, and by then, IAMS was on sale. Well, it's not like I wouldn't buy it soon enough anyway, so I got another. DANG! It's the same flavor as the one I bought last week, and the Kids love variety! Oh, well. They'll eat it anyway.
      Today the bag went empty, dropping a last few dribbles of kibble into the bowl. Kill Kill circled the bowl as I grabbed the new bag. She became very excited, purring and rubbing her face on the IAMS bag as I refilled the bowl. Then she sniffed the food. And began whining and pacing around. But a new bag always has a DIFFERENT flavor! she meowed.
      They always know more than you think they do. And, yes, tomorrow I'll buy a different flavor.

      Creme Filled Red Velvet Bingles: The latest in the Onion's recurring AV feature on taste-testing dollar store snacks. Better them than me.

      Better them than me again: Japanese language cops decide that it's okay to use obsolete kanjii for kids' names. Judge for yourself what you'd name your children. Hmm...what's so wrong with naming your daughter "Vagina" anyway?

      "That's not a small moon--It's a space station! No--Wait--It's a small moon." Sure looks like the Death Star, though.

      "In the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen roughly once a month." I've been explaining "The Law of Large Numbers" to unskeptical people for years. Let Scientific American do it for me for once.

      Oops, I forgot: At Shaolin Soccer, they ran the trailer for the original, restored Godzilla. A patron flipped through the theater schedule and exclaimed, "There's no Raymond Burr?! They took him out? How did they DO that?! It must've been digitally!"
      RAYMOND BURR, entirely different shot, room, film stock: "YES, I see!"
      So...It's this weekend. Should I go see Gojira? Ebert's unclear, while the local reviewer says Yes (no link yet). All I remember is, digitally de-Burred or not, that...was...the...slowest...Godzilla...ever...And yes, I've seen Godzilla 1985. Would you pay $7 to see it in a theater?
      "Famous Steve Martin--What would YOU do?"
      BURR: "YES, I see!"

      It's a dark and nightly spork when the Annual Bulwer-Lytton Awards are pretty lame. Meaning that they're not. Except the ones that I mean are. Which would be those other ones.

7/29

      I've mentioned before how customers, when told that their total is a four-digit number beginning with "19" (ie, $19.17), will make the "original" and "hilarious" "joke," "THAT WAS A GOOD YEAR! HAW HAW!" Today I told a guy that his total was $18.76, and his eyes glazed over for a minute. Then a revelation hit: "Wait, 1876, that was a famous date in history! It was...It was when Columbus discovered America!" Yes. And when he met the Indians, they killed him at Little Big Horn.
      His next guess was that Columbus discovered America in 1526, but I sing-songed "In 1492, Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue!" He then said that 1876 "was the Bicentennial." Yes, the 200th anniversary of 100 years before the Declaration of Independence. He was self-effacing enough to admit, "I guess I'd better not go on Jeopardy."
      In another bit of SHAWTery, I had to explain to a customer why Michael Jackson is called "Jacko." "Because his name is Jackson." (Blank Loook) "You know--Jacko? Jackson??" I suppose that this is expected of readers of the New York Post. The 2 headlines today, the 2 biggest stories in the entire world at the moment: Jacko does Something; Britney is Fat. No, seriously, those were the only headlines. No wonder the readers need to have how "Jacko" might be derived from "Jackson" explained to them. I'm surprised that I didn't need to explain that he would understand the stories better if he read them, not ate them. That's not what they mean by "news digest."

      Do we have another thief at work? Bob, the manager, seems to think so. On Monday, the register was short $35, and yesterday, $50. He immediately blamed Craig, the newest full timer, as he was the only person who worked both Monday and Wednesday! Except for Bob. We've learned that whoever Bob blames for anything, it's never Bob.
      Of course, why would you expect Bob to make a mistake? Just because he starts chugging Heinekens and popping Valium at 8AM doesn't mean that it might affect his judgement! Sure, he has a few beers at work. Never less than 8, and his repeated personal best is 12 (with anywhere from 2 to SIX taken for the ride home). He thought that the Tuesday deposit was short $20, until he realized that he'd dropped a Jackson (Andrew, not Jacko) on the floor.
      Today Gina was talking to an old customer she hadn't seen in a while. "How's Bob?" he asked about the drunken crazy man who starts screaming over the slightest anything that goes remotely not the way he wants. "He's still Bob!" she said. "So," he asked, "does he still go to the methadone clinic?"
      She stammered for a second, then said "Yeah, he does" and not "FINALLY! INDEPENDENT VERIFICATION!" Months ago, an employee said she'd spotted him there. But this was a true sighting; the guy really is on methadone. He was a crackhead who passed out with a cigarette in his hand, and tragically didn't wake up until he was on fire. He has horrible burn scars all over his face and upper body (He's mostly cleaned up his act since; he buys wine coolers, although, unbelievably, he still buys cigarettes). Then she remembered that we have a regular customer who works at a meth clinic.
      She asked general questions about the type of person who goes there. Such as, "How long are people on methadone?" We've been wondering whether Bob was shooting up heroin in the bathroom a year ago. "You can start on methadone at 17, and be on it the rest of your life." What happens if you miss a dose? "You get angry, mean, agitated, depressed." Well, that described Bob both of the days that there was missing money, especially Monday. When Bob went to the doctor for some blood work. Did he skip his meth dose so that it didn't show up in his blood work? A running joke in the store is how Bob acts like he thinks that we don't know how many beers a day he downs; why wouldn't he want to continue the charade with his doctor? "You'll also do things to replace the high, like get drunk." Monday was one of those 12-beer days for him.
      Maybe Craig stole that $85 to buy himself a mansion made of refrigerator boxes. Maybe somebody else's brain is busy playing bumper pool with its skull.
      Throw in an evil twin, and I'll really work in a soap opera. "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!"

      Funny: Kerry's speech...as edited...by Fox..."News"...

7/31

      Every time someone's asked in the last few years, "Do you think Bush will win the election?" I've answered "No. But he didn't win the last one, either."
      Good tidings for the unelected and unpopular resident of the White House:

It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.

When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.

This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif...

      Tod Holton gets some residual hittage, this time from DemocraticUnderground. Well, fellow siblings in the struggle...Come on in! Sorry about all the beer cans that MeFi left around.
      I like Commenter #4. Not because of the comments, or even her/his apparent Canadianness, but because of the icon.