Tuesday, July 31, 2007

One of these things is not like the other.



Can you tell which one it is?

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The guy who rides my bus.

There's this guy with a really bad toupee who works downtown. He's about 60 years old, and has this horrible rug that he has cut himself with scissors, probably while it's still on his head. The back of it is all hacked and uneven. He has a slightly dank odor and is usually a little dirty, but he's not homeless. Well he might be homeless, but he usually has clean shoes and for some reason wears really tight hipster pants and shirts, so I think he's just a crazy dirty old man.
He always waves goodbye to this baby on the bus that I think might be retarded. The baby is with its mom, so it's not his baby or nothing. The other day he got on the bus and hadn't zipped up his really tight pants and it was a bad sight since he was freebagging. He also looks like Clutch Cargo.


This is Clutch Cargo.


This is what the guy on the bus looks like.

Note: This photo is actually a retouched version of the original Clutch Cargo photo. I utilized the com-puter program called Photoshop to digitally alter the appearance of hair onto the cartoon figure.

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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

LOLCATS!

You know I like to be on the cutting edge of the internet. If you remember, I'm the one who first told you how to find porn. Well now there's a new sensation that will be sweeping the virtual nation that I want you to get in on the ground floor.
It's something like a phenomenon called "LOLCATS"

These images usually of an interesting photo with a large caption characteristically formatted in a sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black. The image is, on occasion, digitally edited for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the subject of the photo, or as a description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax. The text parodies the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to internet slang. Frequently, lolcat captions take the form of snowclones in which nouns and verbs are replaced in a phrase.
Common themes include jokes of the form "I'm in your noun, verb-ing your related noun", or "I have a noun".

Here's a couple of my favorites:





Remind me next week to tell you about "All Your Base". I will also tell you who they belong to.

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Saturday, July 21, 2007

Logical Conclusion


Some video games had great soundtracks. Mostly the ones made by Konami. Some bands are "mathy" enough to play those soundtracks. Some people are good enough at those games that they can beat them in 20~30 minutes.

I give you "Contra Band".

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Friday, July 20, 2007

Rememberating


Homer Louis "Boots" Randolph III (June 3, 1927 – July 3, 2007)

Boots Randolph was my grandmother's favorite performer, along with some other lady with an old lady name like Margaret White. His passing a few weeks ago made me think fondly back on my grandmother. I remember setting up a new record player and tape deck for her back in the eighties. Then my dad and I taped all her old Boots vinyl so she could listen to it in the car. Now I will think of my grandmother any time I hear any of Boots' music. Fortunately, Boots recorded "Yackety Sax", a song I hear roughly once a week.


What totally obnoxious piece of music would you like to have people fondly remember you by once you're gone?

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OZ was lying, this is what prison is really like

Friday, July 13, 2007

Help Me Obi Wan, You're My Only Hope


Trivia: Alec Guiness thought Star Wars was dumb, so he forced Lucas to kill him in the first movie.

Okay, so back when I was a kid, my dad bought a bunch of star wars figures and left them in the box. This was purely speculative. This was before the movie was a hit, and people really started collecting
them. So they are the 12 back ones, he bought them just a few miles from the Kenner distributor. He says he was being smart, I think he probably was buying presents for us ahead of time and just forgot
about them in the attic.

So he finds them later, pretty much mid 90s and gives them to me. I put them in another box, add some figures i have, like a wolverine in box, secret wars spiderman, that sort of crap, and then do nothing. Maybe the story needs a bit here where I detail the box, like it is an acid free preservation box for archival purposes. But that would be lying. It was a white cardboard box, the kind doughnuts come in, with a flip top and those tabs to keep it sort of closed. The only thing special about it was that I wrote “STAR WARS FIGS” on it. In three distinct rows. I should have written FIGURES, to differentiate them from Mediterranean dried fruit but it messed with the spacing.

I don't sell them when the re-release happens, or the shitquel movies. I give them back to him and move out here. He finds them again when they start ebaying all sorts of their stuff.

He decides to do them one at a time, instead of in a lot, or putting separate items all at once. But he tells people that he has about 10 of these things. He puts on a c3po and gets 300 bucks. He gets like
250 for death star guy in bowling ball hat. I tell him that the han solo is worth a lot because it's small headed. Or big headed.
Whatever. I just remember it’s better because it’s the one that looks more like Harrison Ford than Greg Neibur.

Then he gets this email through ebay from a guy saying, "before you put any more items up, you should email me, this is important and
serious
"
My parents email him back and he asks if they have an Obi Wan, and what does it look like. He then tells them this story about the Extending Lightsaber*1. And asks if they can see if it exists on this figure. They say it does look different, and then email him tons of pictures of the box and the saber, and all sorts of crap. He says he's a buyer for some other guy and is willing to make them a deal.

My parents email some other guy in canada who bought the 3cpo and was nice to them about how to label the quality of the figs, and he tells them that the Obi Wan with extending lightsaber is the holy grail
amongst fatbeards who live in their mother's basement. So it is real, and good luck to them.

They end up getting a cashier's check dated for the future, and then they send out this Obi Wan with huge insurance on the USPS.
Then they tell me about it. I guess they've been scammed, but whatever, it's just a toy. The package arrives safely, the guy asks for a slight refund due to damage on the back of the card, and the check goes through in a shocking development.
They send me my portion in the mail, and I earmark it for bathroom renovations.
It ends up paying for mostly nothing as I live an extravagant lifestyle beyond my means. I believe the money eventually goes into my Burrito Fund.

*1 As a three year old I alternated between thinking this was called a LIGHTSAVER or a LIFESAVER.
What the hell word is a saber to a kid?

dear irs this story is fiction do not audit my taxes

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Monday, July 09, 2007

Whirlwind

Just settling back down from my two weeks of travel.
Set off for Portland on June 21st. Flights were good...had some older people next to me that slept and/or were good conversation. Also got some short story reading dun and got some of my first chapter of my dissertation knocked out. Portland was fun...hanging out and all. Flew back home on the redeye the night of the 25th.
First leg was good and calm...then I had to switch planes in the Vegas and was trapped in the window seatby two freakin knuckleheads. KH 1 was a shaved head, goateed, barb wire tatooed, cowboy boot wearin dick who insisted on constantly jockeying for position on the shared armrest. KH 2 was his short, skinny, greasy spiked haired, crazy design shirt wearin yesman. Their gratuitously loud conversation consisted of calling the flight attendant "bitch" multiple times because she would not let yesman go to the lavatory as the plane taxied for takeoff and also for having garbage in the seat pocket ahead of them. Further complaints consisted of smoking regulations being linked to "Americans" being afraid to stand up and take back their country and not getting meals on flights anymore because of 9/11. At least they fell asleep fairly quick.
Arrived in Columbus, OH at 6am. Drove directly to Dayton, OH to pick up my mother-in-law and a rental van. Drove to Cincinnati, OH to pick up my wife and two kids and was on the road by 1pm for our family odessey to Florgia.
First stop was Statesboro, GA to visit Georgia Southern Univeristy in order to prepare for my new faculty position. We are moving in a couple weeks and need to look for houses and complete other preliminary acitvities to pave the way for the move. No houses to look at so we needed to stop by through on the way home. We did find a rental on the way back in one of the neighborhood farthest from campus...between 3 and 4 miles away. The highway bypass for the town is about 2-3 miles from the center...pretty small.
Our final vacation destination was Cape Coral, FL where a friend let us borrow a family home for free. Nice, but the MIL started to wear thin. Drove back home...stayed in Statesboro again to find a home, and finally got back home to Cincy at 3am Friday the 6th. Overall, the kids were pretty good in the vanride.
Besides having to move to Statesboro by August 1st, which means packing our worldly possessions, find Kim a job, and sell our house, I decided to attend my 15 year class reunion this coming weekend. I already compiled Kyle's and Bryan's official bios. Gay Baliwood stuntman lovers now living on a sailboat in the Meditteranean. Sorry guys, the truth is not spicey enough to flow from my lips.
So the question of the event...should I roll to the reunion in my new tuxedo and a limo?