I hope everyone had a delightful holiday season, with the exception of the residents of PA (pronounced “puh”) whom I’m sure suffered through their usual misery in that pathetic excuse for a hellhole that some, apparently without irony, call a state of this great union. PA is sometimes referred to as the Keystone State because spending any significant length of time within its borders is akin to having a Keystone shoved sideways up your nose.
My Lovely Wife™ and I took a wee road trip a couple weeks back to hit both the families for the holiday season. (Literally. We hit the crap out of them. Several bruised eyes, a few concussions, a split lip, and one sports hernia later, we returned victorious to Chicago to celebrate the birthday of the sweet, sweet baby Jesus. (For those of you who have not yet found Jesus, have you considered checking between the couch cushions? Seems like a lot of things end up there.))
My family lives in upstate New York, and LW’s folks hail from western Maryland. Both are delightful semi-rural areas that offer wonderful communities in which to raise families and generally live out fulfilling semi-rural lives. That is assuming, of course that you really like white people. Fields and fields full of white people. (If you prefer a little more diversity on the playground, you might consider the downstate and eastern portions of the states, respectively.) But all in all, not bad little places to visit.
However, what lies between? Hundreds of horrifying miles of unmitigated douchebaggery that goes by the name of PA.
One can tell all one needs to know about PA simply by [Read more →]
So it’s been a few days since I checked in here, but as you can see, I’ve been very busy. Very busy.
One tagline for Guitar Hero III urges one to “Unleash Your Inner Rock God”, but after a thorough and intensive search of my innards, I’m all but certain that no such deity resides in there. I have managed to unleash a rather uncomfortable twinge in my wrist, and for a while there I had unleashed a persistent numbness in my thumb. But that was before I determined that a feverish death grip does not make it any easier to hit the notes.
In fact, as far as I can tell, nothing makes it easier to hit the notes. No amount of practice has allowed me to proceed from the “medium”, or “almost-not-sucky” level. I am, at best, a mediocre demi-god, roughly equivalent to one of the blurry guys in a toga standing in the background behind Zeus on Mt. Olympus.
But I’m okay with that. I’m not giving up. Did Keanu Reeves learn how to play the guitar in just a few weeks? Did Russell Crowe? No, my friends. No they did not.
I don’t know about where you live, but here in the Heartland there are certain establishments which, should you call them and request it, will create one or more pizzas, usually to your exact specifications, and then ever so conveniently transport it to your house, generally via automobile, often for a nominal fee of your choosing. They “deliver” it, if you will.
One particular franchise, whose conceit is that their buildings have roofs which, in the popular tradition, apparently resemble those of “Huts”, has unleashed a brand new advertising campaign in which they unveil a new kind of pizza which has “double” of… something. Dough, or maybe ingredients, I guess. I don’t know… I wasn’t really able to remember what the exact variation on the product is because I was outrageously amused, probably unreasonably so, by their new slogan. Or perhaps amusedly outraged. It’s hard to say.
Should you not be familiar with this particular bit of genius, their slogan is…
“Double Means More”
I guess one might appreciate the simplistic obviousness or this. And/or the obvious simplicity.
Double means more. Well. No poop.
From what I’ve heard, rejected slogans include:
- This Pizza Includes Extra Stuff
- If You Add More Ingredients, It Will Be Bigger
- We Think Pizza Has Traditionally Been Too Healthy
- Hope You’ve Only Been Opening Your Mouth To Half Its Capacity, You Giant Cow, You
- Triple Means Really More, Not That It Applies To Your Order
- Your Driver Will Appreciate A Double Tip. That Means More. Seriously, Cough It Up
- Your Fat Children Expect Nothing Less on Friday Night
I don’t know much about relationships, but I do remember this one time…
Years ago, I was dating this girl, and we were known to have our ups and downs. And ups. And then some more downs. We were trudging through a down period one evening, when she looked at me and said, with a particular tone which I immediately recognized as meaning that the next few minutes would not be pleasant:
“What’s that?”
I had no idea what she was talking about (not an entirely uncommon occurence), and expressed as much to her in as sweet a voice as I could muster.
“That!” she said, and pointed at my shoulder.
I looked down at my shoulder and saw something peculiar.
The war rages on. I wish that I could tell you that we are finally winning the war against the invading feline horde. Sadly, this is not yet the case. They continue to run rampant across our lands, having their way with our people and destroying much of what we hold dear.
However, there is a ray of hope. As many of you know, the horde has unleashed a series of horrifying early morning attacks against our basecamp fortress. The dastardly cats’ psychological warfare against our soldiers when they were most vulnerable had been quite devastating, as they attacked the perimeter of one of our last bastions of security in the dark of the morn. But our generals assembled the finest military minds, and these heroes attacked the problem by asking a simple question: “What are our enemies most afraid of?”
I don’t know about where you live, but here in Illinois, women apparently require certain… sanitary products on a semi-regular basis. The television ads for these products have often featured women walking on the beach, or riding horses, or wearing white pants.
But now there is a commercial for what is, I believe, colloquially referred to as a “maxi pad”, in which an animated pad floats gently down from the sky and snugly adheres itself to… a mechanical bull.
When you stop to think about this, it is even weirder than it sounds.
The rodeo-training apparatus, really best known for throwing drunken Texans to many a sawdust-and-vomit-strewn roadhouse floor, begins to do as mechanical bulls are wont. That is, it gyrates back and forth and spins in circles, with the pad experiencing nary a ripple in it’s comfortably woven surface.
I cannot help but wonder what percentage of women move their pelvises in this manner whilst menstruating. Cowgirls, I could see. But regular, non-cow girls? Perhaps this was covered in the girls version of the health class film.
But what really makes this particular commercial stand out is that, for a brief moment, we actually get a vagina eye’s view of the action. Yes, we actually get a point-of-view shot from atop the mechanical bull. A point-of-view shot, as you may know, is when the camera (and yes, even in animation, there is the concept of a virtual camera moving through the virtual space) acts as the stand in for a pair of eyes. Usually, it’s the eyes of a human being, but often it’s the eyes of a monster crawling through the shrubbery about to pounce on unsuspecting campers. In this particular case, though, we must assume that it’s the vagina.
I never really thought about vaginas as having eyes before.
Is it just me, or is that hairy, cartoonish ancient guy in the Beowulf trailer who yells “I AM BEOWULF!” an awful lot like the hairy, cartoonish ancient guy in that other movie who yells “THIS IS SPARTA!”?
I don’t know about where you live, but here in Chicago the battle for our home entertainment dollar is raging. The biggest combatants are some satellite TV company and some digital cable company. Comcast, the cable company, has a latest round of commercials in which some supposedly enlightened dope who has signed away control of half their life by subscribing to Comcast television, telephone, and internet service, attempts to explain to some poor schmuck who has not thus far succumbed.
One in particular, it seems to me, might be sending the wrong message. Two ordinary Joes, who may or may not actually be called Joe, are washing windows on a skyscraper hundreds of feet off the ground. One guy, seemingly out of nowhere turns and says, (I’m paraphrasing here) “I just got new high-speed internet from Comcast.”
And the other guy says, “What’s that like?”
And here is where it gets a little weird. The first guy, the guy whom I believe we’re supposed to respect in some way because he… you know… can get online now, is apparently rather mentally unstable. As he shall soon prove, he was probably not the best spokesperson for a major media company. Yet, he is also apparently in charge of the lever that makes the window washing rig go up and down. So, in order to demonstrate what it’s like to have Comcast internet access, he sends the scaffolding plummeting to the sidewalk below at rather improbable speeds.
The other Joe, as I’m sure you or I would also do, begins to scream at the top of his lungs, certain that his psychopathic co-worker is attempting to kill him. His life flashes before his eyes, probably. I wouldn’t be surprised if he soiled himself at least a little bit.
At the last possible moment, crazy Joe slams on the brakes, or whatever the equivalent of brakes would be in the window-washing world, and they are prevented from becoming a sloppy tangle of blood, bone, and metal in the street.
“Like that,” he says.
So.
Comcast internet service is terrifying, causes you to piss yourself, and there’s an excellent chance it will kill you.
Oh, by the way, I just wanted to mention that I am not, in fact, Italian. I can understand why someone who didn’t know me might get that impression from that lovely picture up there on the homepage. That photo, and all the various photos you might see on this site were taken by myself and/or The Lovely WifeTM… some of them on our recent trip to Italy.
But I, personally, am not Italian.
This is not to say that I don’t like Italians, or Italy, or things from Italy, or things that remind me of Italy. There are a number of Italian things that I do like. In fact, I will tell you seven of them right now.
Actually, why don’t we do this $25,000 Pyramid style? (That’s the early 80’s daytime version, not to be confused with the earlier $10,000 Pyramid or the later $100,000 Pyramid. Also, let me stress that while you do this, you should be picturing Dick Clark in your mind. NOT John Davidson. I repeat: NOT John Davidson.)
(Picturing Nipsey Russell is okay. I mean, of course, that’s always okay.)
1. Uh… this is… uh… a beverage made from grapes.
2. Okay, this is a famous statue… um…. “Blank” and Goliath.
3. Okay, this is a type of meat you get at the deli… uh… not ham but….?
4. Okay… um… this is a city with a lot of canals.
5. Okay… um… this is a… um… PASS!
6. This is a type of food that you get delivered…
7. Okay… this is kind of sports car…
5. Okay, this is a….
