Oh, the Things I Hear II

It’s time to quit smoking. Not due to any health concerns, fear of public criticism, or anything else, but because of the idiots that I’m confined with in close quarters… on the smoking porch (at work). Er, yes, that last sentence contained a bit of irony. Anyways.

As mentioned in an earlier entry, I’m not a big fan of strangers accosting me, and starting inane conversations about this and that. But even worse than being accosted is listening to people airing their dirty laundry in public. (Oh, you think my blog is dirty laundry? Heh. What have I told you about my friends and enemies? Nothing really. Move right along.)

So, last week, some of the Usual Suspects were smoking on the porch. One of them was an attractive, older lady who’s generally there by herself. But on this day, she was on the smoking porch with an unattractive, mouthy, younger chick. And the topic of the day was “childbirth”; yes, how pleasant. Or…

Unattractive wench: Yeah, so this pregnancy is really fucking kicking my ass.

(Editor’s note: Yes, smoking and having a baby. You read that correctly.)

Older lady: Yeah, it can really suck.
Unattractive wench: You’re telling me. My first two were fine, but this one is really kicking my ass. It’s literally driving me to drink.

(Editor’s note #2: Yes, she did in fact say that she was drinking and smoking while preggers.)

Older lady: It can be that way.
Unattractive wench: I mean, he’s so active, that sometimes even when I’m taking a dump — he’s kicking me.
Older lady: Yeah, that’s like my second one; he was a real fucking asshole, that one.
Unattractive wench: Uh huh.
Older lady: And after that, I decided not to have any more! That was unbearable, and I wouldn’t let my husband near my vagina for months!
Unattractive wench: I hear that!

I’m not kidding. I had to walk away from those chicks, as they kept going and going. I can only imagine that the conversation transitioned into more important subjects like bossing their husbands around, boating in the nude, or who watches the kids while the parents attend swing clubs.

Oh, what a day!

Ever have one of those days where you hear one of your co-workers remark: “I can’t wait ’til my Barry Manilow tickets arrive!”, and you wait for a punch-line but never hear one? Yeah, I’m having one of those days.

On political correctness

I’ve been thinking about political correctness lately. In light of the recent “pledge of allegiance is unconstitutional (as stands)” thing, I’ve been led to ponder what political correctness really is. I mean, we’ve heard all about “PC”-ness, and how “everybody” has made a serious effort not to piss anybody off, in order to uphold the principles of “PC”. But is that really true? Serious. I mean are these goals of “PC” really true? No, in my opinion.

You’d think so, if you listened to a newspaper columnist, or one of those know-it-alls on CNN or Fox News, but when you really look at it, “PC” is really “PinC” after all! (And yes, pee’ing in the sea is probably politically incorrect, too, unless you’ve called the act of pissing off the deck of the Calypso a contribution to the natural balance of the sea, which is acceptable.)

For all of the things that it purports to be, “PC” is actually bigotry in disguise. Don’t like Catholics? Write an article that’s slanted towards Pentecostals without mentioning Catholics at all. Don’t like religion? Impose your atheist beliefs on everyone and everything that you disagree with (in the name of your “rights”). Don’t like minorities? “Fine, we’ll call them ‘fucking African Americans’ instead of something worse!”

See what I mean? “PC” is just a phrase, a conversation piece. “PC” is like buying a day-old loaf of bread from your grocery store. Sure, it’s packaged in a new wrapper, but it’s the same shit as yesterday. Much hasn’t changed, and probably never will. So, why re-package something if somebody would’ve bought it anyways?

Blogstar

So, I received an interesting piece of email a few days ago:

From: <someperson@i-have-never-seen-you-before.com>
Subject: Your not famUs.
yru so arogent?  do U think ur famUs? by puttin stuff on the net?
[ ... 100 more lines of the same deleted ... ]

What a shocker! * gasp * After viewing every, single, last entry in my blog, this person decided that they didn’t like me, and sent me a nasty-o-gram. Oh, and what worse? They decided to grace my INBOX with some kind of ScriptKiddieSpeak that’s inviting a migraine as we speak.

So, for what it’s worth, I write these blog entries © For Entertainment Purposes Only. If they really bother you, well, that’s not my problem. I don’t write them for notoriety or to entertain you with stories about thong underwear, or why flame broiling beats frying nearly 2 to 1. If you don’t find them entertaining or agreeable, don’t read them. Go hack somebody’s Linux server, or irritate people on EFNet, or whatever else you would’ve done had you not spent 3 hours of your time reading my blog.

If my response bothers you, I wholly apologize. Here, I’ll rewrite it, and run it through “insane-political-correctness.css” (and if necessary, you can sing it to yourself with the music from “Stan” by Eminem):

“Dear Sir or Madam:

I wholeheartedly apologize for having offended you in any way. It’s not the goal of Noopy.ORG to bother anyone. Although we do realize that people have different tastes, and ways of looking at things, we believe that our viewpoint is correct in any case. Your criticism is welcomed, although subsequent complaints will be directed to /dev/null.

Have a super day, unless you disagree, in which case, have a Constitutionally-protected day, even if your Constitutional protections are subject to whim, caprice, and misinterpretation.

The Management.
“

Et tu, neighbor?

I’d planned to get up early this past Saturday. With my house on the market, and an insane number of things to do, I knew that if I didn’t head off the hectic stuff, I’d be running around at the last minute.

I’m not a happy morning person. Specifically, I’m not a happy morning person on the weekends. More specifically, I’m not a happy morning person on the weekends when something in my dead-to-the-world-then-somewhat-awake pattern gets altered. I woke up early Saturday morning, not because of my alarm clock, but because of the sound of running water.

At first, I panicked. It had rained all day and night on the previous day, so I jumped out of bed and started looking around the upstairs of my house (for leaks in the roof). No leaks. And then I checked both bathrooms for leaky faucets/toilets or faucets that might be running. No leaks and nothing running.

Fuck.

So, I decided to take the dog out (before he had an accident), and that I’d examine the basement afterwards. I fed the dog his breakfast, and opened the door to take him outside.

“HOLY FUCK!”, I recoiled. My neighbor’s (yeah, the one who’s got the dog that I hate) swimming pool was spraying a geyser of water everywhere! It was shooting about 30 feet into the air, and the streams spread into quadrants that splashed back down into the pool. There’s our running water, ladies and germs!

While waiting for the dog to finish his business, I contemplated the nature of the geyser. First, I considered: “Would it stop? If so, when?” Second, I pondered: “If a tourbus of Japanese tourists just happened to break down on my street, would the geyser be worth photographing and writing home about?” “Oh, the super-happy-fun-American neighbor!” *click click* *flash flash* I could hear them saying it now! Third, I mused: “if the Brady Bunch took a vacation to my town, would my neighbor lock them in his backyard with the dog if they strayed into his domain? And if that happened, whose belt would rescue the Fab 9?” Finally, I schemed: “If I showed up nextdoor in body armor and a thong, would my neighbor accept to follow through with a Ceaser’s Palace theme?”

And if I punched him in the face, would he have the “Eye of the Geyser”?

Go … Pyle?

I think that it would be interesting to work for Hasbro. It’s not such much the toys they make, but the toys that they conjur, likely in some meeting of marketeers where everyone is smoking crack.

Don’t know what I mean?

Remember G.I. Joe, you know, the 3.25″ ‘action’ figures? Well, Hasbro made those. Remember the “limited edition” G.I. Joe action figures? Yeah, Hasbro made those, too. But it’s not the fact that Hasbro made them, in as much as it was the people who the action figures represented: Sargeant Slaughter and William “the Fridge” Perry. Yes, there was a “Fridge” G.I. Joe action figure. And yes, they shipped it in a gigantic box.

Now, Hasbro has decided to ship an “Ernie Pyle” special-edition G.I. Joe action figure. If you’ve never heard of Ernie Pyle, he was a WW II (news) correspondent whose work (in the heat of battle) gained him a lot of notoriety. He was practically in the war without actually firing a weapon. Following suit, Hasbro ships the Ernie Pyle action figure with: a trench-digging shovel, a lantern, a typewriter and a newspaper.

But don’t think for a second that Ernie Pyle is a pussy just because he doesn’t have a gun. Next time you’re in a battle with Cobra or the Third Reich, feel free to throw Ernie’s typewriter their way. Or maybe, capture Cobra’s dog and have Ernie thwap its nose with his newspaper.

Only in America, Part I

Strange things happen all-too-frequently in America. It’s not so much that these things are inexplicable, in as much that these happenings are evidence of the pure excesses of living in a country that happens to be a super-power (or should I say, a “stupor power”?). Why have I linked this happenstance with being a super-power?

Well, read the link below. It describes how actress Winona Ryder, who’s on “trial” for shoplifting from a store in Beverly Hills, is unable to attend the first day of the trial since she’s mugged by reporters, and is trampled, such that she breaks a bone in her arm. Further, the article quotes onlookers and others as commending her as a “trouper” since Ryder had tried to insist that she stand trial — anyways — even with the broken bone in her arm. Trouper, eh? I can only imagine what would happen if some indigent was on trial for some kind of theft. They’d be lucky to be offered a piece of Scotch Tape to hold their severed arm in place.

[Dream sequence: I can't help but think what will happen if Ryder is found guilty. Will L.A. riot again, this time over rich people being oppressed by clerks in retail stores?]

Now, I’m not really all that interested in Hollywood folk. There’s really nothing about them that makes me want to know all that much about them. But the story about Miss Ryder conjures images of (Russell Crowe’s) “Gladiator” to me. And it makes me wonder if such things happen in a place like Kabul, a place that clearly seems to suck. When you don’t have a pot (or cave) to piss in, who gives a flying crap if some Hollywood starlet took something from a store?

So, what’s with my “Gladiator” reference? It seems like we’re sometimes a modern-day Roman Empire. Sure, we haven’t tried to gain power through land ownership and all of the other exploits of the True Roman Empire, but there’s a certain hint of problems lurking under the surface when everybody shows up to a petty-crime trial of a Hollywood starlet (and injures her, no less), yet most Americans seem to think that when you say that you’re from India, they locate Indiana on the map and ask you what you think of Bobby Knight.

Oh, the things I hear!

I was visiting cms again today. A piece of classic dialog:

cms (noting that the batteries in his Sony Commander remote were near-impossible to remove, and cursing the thing): Oh, come on, you fucking cock biter!
E (cms’s fiancee, from the other room): I’m over here.

HA.