All I can see are pork swords
I’ve been laughing at this video all day.
The sound makes it watchable, but is completely not safe for work.
What had me in stitches was, “Who the fuck builds a castle like this with no floors?! And this invisible block technology, who the fuck came up with that? I gotta get some of that.”
The May Baltimore Blogger Happy Hour. You can see the original post here, but for the purpose of “great rehashment”:
When: Thursday, May 17th, 7:00 pm
Why: Why not? Plus,ISnay needs to get pissed.Where: Crease Restaraunt & Bar
523 York Road
Towson, Maryland
Questions? Shoot me Snay an e-mail at the address on the sidebar on his blog.
Time to move that self-servicing myspace post from the top of my blog. You can still be my myspace (Jesus now doesn’t THAT sound retarded) friend if you want, and join the growing legion of people that I don’t interact with on myspace.
1) I’m getting the boring thing out of the way first. My roof is done. I was off of work yesterday to make sure that I could keep and eye on the roofers, to make sure they didn’t steal the roof or the walls of my house or something. They didn’t! I was so excited. Then I was depressed for being excited that I wasn’t stolen from. I really hate contractors. However, it pleases me to say that I don’t hate Donald White roofing in Glen Burnie. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I love them, but I would absolutely recommend them if you need some roof work done. They finished the job in a day and a half, and the shingles they used and all their other costs (replacement wood, flashings, etc.) matched the other quotes I got. The difference is that Donald White roofing only charged me $1750. That’s cheaper than the next lowest estimate by $1750. 50% cheaper! That’s awesome! A roofer I would never use who suck suck suck are Trust Worthy Construction. They said my roof was crumbling. Donald White Roofing confirmed that the wood in my roof was fine. Donald White Roofing can be reached at 410 760 6821.
2) I was able to watch a lot of movies during my time off, the least of which include The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and Passenger 57. I’ll start with Passenger 57 because it’s much easier to explain why I wanted to see this movie. Ever since I was in the 6th grade and my friend John’s extremely permissive mother had taken him to see Passenger 57, I’ve always wanted to see Wesley Snipes deliver the line, “Always bet on black!” because it’s so hilariously over the top. I realize I could have probably seen it on the internets, but I wanted to see it in context. What a depressing movie. It wasn’t even funny-bad. It was obnoxious-bad. Somewhere along the line some studio jerkoff decided that the music should be done with lame 80’s electric guitar, porno bass, and irritating light jazz saxophone, so that when Snipes is beating a man to death with a putter (yes, seriously) the music sounds like you should be watching Kenny G getting buttfucked by the lead singer from Quiet Riot. It’s quite distracting.
Tokyo Drift, on the other hand, was awesomely bad. Before the opening sequence was over I had counted about 25 plot holes and was forced past reasonable levels of suspended disbelief about 37 times. That 25 year old is supposed to be playing someone who’s 17? And what the hell is the douchebag kid from Home Improvement doing there? Wasn’t he in high school on THAT SHOW like 10 years ago? One thing I was happy about though was that they seemed to have scaled back the amount of CG they had used in the first two movies. I feel like there was some actual skilled driving going on there, rather than what essentially amounts to cartoon cars doing impossible shit.
3) Since I was off yesterday to prevent the aforementioned roof stealing I also used the opportunity to take Wookie to the vet. She was due for some boosters and her ear has been bothering her. So I packed her into the car and headed out to the vet. She meowed up a freaking racket in the first 30 seconds that I thought she might prefer to be let out of the carrier. Big mistake. She meowed even louder and more frequently, to the point that she was panting. Like a toddler who screams himself out of breath and then tantrums himself into the Guinness Book of World Records for the world’s youngest victim of a an exploded heart, Wookie was in rare form. Yet, despite the howling she was pacing back and forth on the back seat to perch her front paws on the rear windows to look at the world outside, and when we got to the vet I went to put her back in the carrier and could feel her purring while she continued to howl.
The vet looked at her, gave her the boosters, cleaned out her ears and came back a few minutes later and issued his diagnosis. One hundred and twenty eight dollars and one pissed-off cat later I’ve got two prescriptions to treat Wookie’s seasonal allergies. Stupid goddamned cat is allergic to the SEASONS for chrissakes! I’m sure the next time we take her to the vet she’ll be morbidly obese and allergic to cats, and the only way to treat her will be to literally shred money and put it into her food.
I’ve only been awake and this week has already started off shittily. (Shitty? Shitly? How the fuck do you adverb “shit”? Further, can you verb “adverb”?) The roofers are at my house already. I wasn’t expecting the roof to go on for weeks, but I got a call yesterday that they were ready to go today. So now I have to leave work early and dump my work on my coworkers so I can make sure that the contractors don’t steal anything or use my gutters to answer nature’s call.
“But you get to leave early, that’s something, right?” Not really. It means that eventually I have to pay my coworkers back, and the payback is always worse than what I leave for them. It’s how we “encourage” people not to take unscheduled time off. We won’t bitch you out if you want to frolic on a warm and sunny weekday, but you can bet your ass that we’ll be saving up our most tedious and mind-numbing work for you when you get back. I think it’s why our office works so well together.
As an order of internet business, I have recently been inundated with myspace friend requests (that would be two requests) so I’m putting this up for one time only. I’d be happy to be your friend. I’ll friend just about anybody. I draw the line at the pornspam friend requests though, so if you’re pornspam, I won’t friend you. I mean, unless you’re really freaky pornspam, then I’ll friend you, but not too freaky. Just-right freaky is okay. Anyway, here’s my profile. I never look at it, modify it, or even want anything to do with it.
http://www.myspace.com/anonymouscoworker
Most people think myspace is the armpit of the internet. Not me. I think myspace is the asshole of the armpit of the dark, sweaty underside of the scrotum of the internet.
I’ve been trying for weeks to make a subtle reference to the GoBots in one of my posts, but the opportunity just hasn’t presented itself. So in lieu of any actual content, here are some links to a bunch of GoBots crap, and a quick anecdote.
GoBots on Wikipedia
GoBots on IMDB
GoBots on ebay
GoBots on Amazon
GoBots intro on YouTube
GoBots in France
In the first grade I was a huge GoBots fan. I watched the show religiously, had the toys, and knew all the character’s names. I even had a GoBots lunchbox. It was red, and I had two tiny smiley-face stickers on the front in the “O” of “Go” and “Bots”. In fact, it was this very lunchbox.
In the first grade I went to Catholic School (by the way, if you want to ensure you have an atheist child, send them to Catholic school), and there was a little cubby hole cut out of the wall next to the radiator, and that little shelf was where we kept all the lunch boxes. When lunch time would roll around the kids would all make a mad dash to the cubby and grab their lunch box before heading back to their desk. So one day I plop down at my desk with my GoBots lunch box and open it up to the cornucopia of delight contained within. I surveyed the bounty: sandwich, snack, drink, dessert. What more could a little kid want?
I always ate my sandwich first. I don’t know why, but that’s what I did. I took a bite out of the sandwich and gagged. It tasted horrible! It was like somebody had made lunch meat out of old cat food and feet and then stuffed it into my sandwich. Just as I was looking for the teacher to let her know that something was wrong with my sandwich, I saw her looking for me. She was standing next to my friend Steve, and he was holding a familiar-looking red lunch box. I walked over with the lunch box that I thought was mine and said there was something wrong with my sandwich. Steve was complaining that the lunch box he was holding wasn’t his because his lunch box didn’t have stickers on it. Our teacher, Mrs. Decker, quickly realized what was going on and got the right lunch boxes into the right hands, and everything looked like all would be right with the world.
I quickly had my 6 year old dreams crushed.
Mrs. Decker insisted that Steve get something from my lunch box because I had taken a bite out of his sandwich. “But it was an accident!” I pleaded. Mrs. Decker was having nothing of it. “Go ahead Steven, pick anything,” she said, pointing into my now open lunch box. My gut was in knots. I felt like I was being choked by the tiny maroon clip-on tie they forced us to wear. I could feel the cold metal of the clip pressing against my throat.
I managed to stammer, “I didn’t even like his sandwich!”
“Hush! Steven, go ahead and pick something.”
When he reached for the peppermint patty I almost threw up. I could barely hold back the tears. I managed to make it to my desk before I actually started crying outright. It wasn’t fair! I had only taken one bite of his sandwich, and it wasn’t even good! For that he got to take my whole peppermint patty?! The classmates around me tried to point out the relative benefits of my peanut-butter and jelly or my Cheetos, but it was no good. I was inconsolable.
The details escape me after that, but I believe I was sent to the nurse to calm down a bit. I think I may have fallen asleep. I remember my mother telling me later, after having spoken to Steve’s mom, that Steve’s sandwich was braunschweiger; that pasty mash of rotten-tasting meat that my father like to eat on toast. I had my peppermint patty forcibly taken from me for eating braunschweiger. What kind of fucked-up world was I growing up in?
Recently I’ve been going through my CD books on the way to and from work and listening to CDs that I usually pass over. This means that I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff that I sometimes haven’t heard in years. You have to be in a special kind of mood to pick electronic/ambient/spoken word prog rock albums with an overarching theme of a romantic relationship between cosmonauts, and I haven’t been in that kind of mood in about 7 years. But I’m listening to it now, and I’m still not in that mood. At least after this I can get rid of the album and feel absolutely no remorse about doing so because I’ll have given it a second chance.
Yesterday I was listening to a Calypso CD that was equally as old and that also hadn’t played in 7 years, so I popped it in. The weather was warm, the music was good, and generally, all was right with the world. As the CD moved from track to track I heard different performers and bands playing in front of audiences that were vibrantly interacting with the music. On almost every track you can hear the din of the crowd beneath the music and in between notes; all their laughter and chatter underscoring the fact that this music was being recorded by the people of Trinidad, for the people of Trinidad. The music was upbeat and funky, so I was grooving along with them.
As I was bouncing through Arbutus on my way to the store to pickup some dinner, I heard this song (thanks to Undercover Black Man for hosting it) and nearly drove off an overpass and into the highway traffic below in a comically manic attempt to reduce the volume. As a word of warning, you might want to listen to that song quietly lest you suffer the same embarrassment that I did.
For those of you who don’t know, the part of Arbutus that I was driving through is primarily populated by African-American working-class families, and I was driving through with the calypso music pumping and the track had just changed to the one above. Clearly it wasn’t my intention to insult anyone, or cause anyone any distress, but a situation where I’d been a guy just happily listening to music devolved into a situation where I was who was painfully aware of his skin color.
The worst part is what has happened in my brain. My first instinct was to think, “Yes, but you listen to hip-hop all the time, and this can’t be any worse than that, can it?” And I don’t think it is. Even though I eschew people like 50 Cent and Lil’ John and Chingy for people like Mos Def and Talib Kweli and The Roots, I can’t say that the latter groups are any less guilty of using language that people would consider offensive, and it would make me feel weird if I felt compelled to turn their music down. I guess it’s the Al Jolson/mammy-esque quality of the song that, in my opinion, gives it the potential to offend.
The other problem is that I find it to be an extremely catchy tune. I couldn’t get it out of my head yesterday, and after relating this story to my brother while I was helping him install molding, he couldn’t stop whistling the tune, even though I’d only sung a few lines to him. This morning it’s still bouncing around in there and I’m worried that during a moment while I’m concentrating on work and not really paying attention I’m going to belt out, “How nigga! Sweet nigga! How nigga!” and not have enough time to explain that it’s a song I heard before I’m beaten to death.
I’ve always been drawn to music, and as I’ve mentioned before, my tastes are kind of eclectic. I love white-people music, but I also love hip-hop, and reggae, and blues, and jazz, and Motown. All I want to do is be able to listen to the music I like without accidentally offending someone else. I know my white guilt is probably just in overdrive right now, and I’m not going to start an argument about who can and who cannot say the word “nigga”, but I felt like writing would help me think some of this through.
My boss just popped her head into my office and said:
“I just wanted to let you know that I’ve got your boys covered this summer. I’ll be all over them.”
This is weird for any number of reasons, the least of which being that she’s pregnant.
Five minutes later she popped back in to apologize for sexually harassing me and explained that she meant two of my customers that I had referred to her because they needed help from someone higher up than me. She wasn’t referring to my balls.
This morning I enjoyed the rare treat of getting ready for work with my wife. She’s usually out the door before I’m even up, so it’s nice to have someone to talk to. We usually just talk about how we slept, or crazy dreams we might have had, or what we need to do that evening upon returning from work. Captivating stuff, I know. I’ve been shopping around rights to a reality show about our lives. It’ll be like a combination of Big Brother and 24. So it’ll be like, “The following events take place between 6 and 7pm” and it’ll show us plopped in front of the couch watching The Simpsons and eating dinner. We might even talk during the commercials. I expect to make my first billion in advertising in about a week or so. At that point this blog will pretty much become daily pictures of my junk.
Anyway, this morning I asked Mrs. ACW how many days were left in the school year. (She’s a teacher, you remember, I’m sure.) She told me that she had 32 or 33 weekdays left with the kids, and if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s teachers knowing how many school days they have left, usually starting around March. And they’re deadly accurate too. Those teachers are so ready to get out of there that something has been hardwired into their brains in order for them to count backward towards spending the next 6 months they have off for the summer drinking themselves into oblivion. They particularly anticipate the first full 72 hour period they can spend completely inebriated since the Christmas break, and you can almost set your watch on them sharing a few cases of congratulatory Zimas in the parking lot on the last day of school.
I encouraged Mrs. ACW to keep up the tradition of blasting Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” while burning rubber in the parking lot of the school on the last day. However, I discouraged her from driving to all of children’s houses and doing donuts on the lawn while screaming out the window, “I’m a private citizen now, bitches! You little hellions can’t do shit about this!” and gesturing at the children and the quickly deteriorating lawn with her middle fingers before throwing a bag of flaming feces onto their roof and pausing momentarily to, ahem, mark her territory on their mailbox before rocketing into the summer sunset.
I’m pretty sure the cops said they wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior 4 years in a row.
So after the lawnmower incident from yesterday, the neighbor’s wife calls about the roof situation. (Here’s the story in the quickest way I can spill it: her nephew is a roofer and had a guy swing by her place to make sure everything was okay. The guy says it could stand some new shingles. The neighbor calls us and tries to get us to go along with this new roof thing. We relent because we share a roof. She calls another company for an estimate. I call five, but can only get info from two.) Apparently she’s eager to get some new shingles on our common roof, so she keeps being passive aggressive and asking if Mrs. ACW and I have talked about the roof yet. After a consultation from Fick Bros., an 8:30am Saturday visit (the neighbor picked the time and date. Bitch.) from Trust Worthy* Construction, and a psuedo-estimate from the Home Depot, we were ready to go with her guy. If he does a good job, I’ll let you know who he is. If he does a terrible job, I’ll also let you know who he is. (Home Depot apparently doesn’t work on common roofs because of liability reasons. The Home Depot guy was nice enough, however, to spell out what he would have done had he taken the job and given us an estimate for his work. He was only $1500 more than the guy we’re going with, and he would have provided the exact same type of serve as they contract states for the guy we’re going with, so right now I think we’ve got a pretty good deal.)
Fuck. What a boring post.
The reason I laugh at Trust Worthy Construction is threefold. First, they clearly can’t spell worth a damn. Trustworthy is one word. One. Idiots. Second, they gave us the highest quote. Even Fick Bros. who agreed to do a ballpark quote over the phone if I gave them measurements, and then explained that they were going to give me the most expensive estimate since they haven’t seen the place, came in $2000 cheaper than the guy from Trust Worthy* who actually walked up on our roof and claimed the boards underneath were rotting away. My neighbor, being a dimbulb, helped confirm this fallacy by saying she hadn’t been in her attic in years. Me? I was in the attic for three days two weeks ago laying down plywood to create an unfinished floor up there. The roof boards are fine. Better than fine, even. They’re surprisingly strong after 22 years of being up there. Could they stand to be replaced? Possibly, but they are under no circumstances crumbling. So they’re either liars, or they’re idiots, or possibly even lying idiots. I do not want these people working on my house.
The third reason I laugh at Trust Worthy Construction is because of their evangelism. On all their trucks they have Jesus fish and crosses, and their business card has the standard Jeezy Creezy Lord and Savior Drink at the Wang of God Poof Now You’re Saved claptrap that I’m sure we’re all familiar with. Got problems in your life? It’s because you haven’t been saved! Been saved and still have problems? You just need to be saved again? Problems still? How about another saving?! If these people who constantly rely on all this saving nonsense were to instead take a look at their lives, make some modifications, and then change their behaviors they wouldn’t need to be constantly clutching at their god’s skirt. I mean honestly, they’re treating themselves like an old Nintendo game. Anytime anything gets fouled up this magical superstition cranks into high gear and we’re suddenly blowing into the cartridge from right to left before carefully sliding the game back in to the Nintendo as opposed to thinking, “Gee, I keep spilling milkshakes on my Nintendo. Maybe I should clean the Nintendo out, and be more careful about my milkshakes in the future. They do, after all, bring all the young men to the front garden outside my domicile.”
Terrible analogies aside, one of the reasons that religions irritate me is this reliance on a higher power. I know how to behave, and when I make a decision I want to know it’s because of what I did, not because someone else let it happen for me. I don’t need a god, or anyone else for that matter, to tell me what is right and what is wrong. If you want to use a god, that’s fine, but don’t suggest that those of us who don’t use a god are somehow morally bankrupt.
So there you go. From roofing to Jesus in 5 paragraphs.
*Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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