Category Archives: social

Shoe size; Sex pills

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My day at work yesterday involved unloading a truck. I must say that this process has been made much, much easier on me since the change in distributors sometime in July. I used to have to pick every case off of a roller and set it on the floor to the side, now I just have to check in the perishables, which are carted in by the driver, and actually count the rest of the stock. I had never realized just how much work it was to pick up the several hundred cases (ranging in weight from 5-80 pounds) and set them to the side until the point where I didn’t have to do it. Damn that used to be a lot of work.

The unfortunate side-effect of the new system is that If I happen to miss damage to any of the persihable items while checking them in, we can not return them, and can not get a credit for breakage. What this means to me, personally, is that I have to pay a lot more attention to the boxes that the items are shipped in; If the sides of the box appear to be smashed a little bit, it could be that the product inside the box is completely destroyed. Still, having to do less lifting and more careful examinations is something that I welcome, having had problems with my back for the last ten or twelve years.

Unfortunately for you, the reader, I have no intentions of talking about my lack of lifting over the last couple of months. I have more sinister motives. It is all about the shoes.

In my last update, I mentioned that if my new shoes performed perfectly it would be akin to me getting a Pulitzer Prize for the writing that I put into this site. The thing is that the shoes did perform flawlessly, yet I have not heard any mention of my little bitch site being in contention for said Pulitzer. I suppose that I am a humbled man. I am a humbled man who no longer has sore feet every fucking day though, so that should count for something.

What I really want to know is how can a man reach the age of 30 without anyone ever saying anything about the poor fitting shoes? Sure there is not a lot of opportunity for that kind of thing when you buy your shoes at warehouse outlets and the such, but when the guys are fitting you for a Tuxedo they measure everything. Come to think of it, those rented tux shoes didn’t hurt either. Perhaps I should have asked the guy what shoe size I actually was. Bleh. Now I know the problem and I will be able to address it in the future.

One more thing that I must say about the whole ‘shoe size’ issue is that the reason that I used to buy the oversized (so it seems) shoes was that they were the only ones that didn’t horribly hurt my toes even in the showroom (that seems to be based on the shoe getting a fraction wider for every size; assuming that the foot is just a bit wider for every inch longer it gets). The side-effect of that was that they did not bend where my foot bent, which led to further discomfort, well pain usually. If you are a poor/cheap person like me, and you have a lot of foot pain, have someone actually measure your damn feet before your next shoe purchase. The difference is not like night and day, but more like sunshine as opposed to the endless void of the nether realms of a black hole.

I still wish that I could have found a brand that I knew a little bit better, perhaps the better fit of the shoes will keep my feet from busting the seams quite as quickly? I better go ahead and bookmark this page for the inevitable letdown in a month or two.

• In a bit of non-shoe news, for a change, here is a story that I really enjoyed:

Sex Enhancement Pills Fall Short?

I had long thought that no one believed the commercials for those damn ‘penis enlargement’ pills. Well it turns out that enough people did, and enough people are mad about it, that they are going to try to sue the makers of the pill ‘Enzyte’. You see, the thing is, I have to watch at least a dozen commercials for that pill every day. Not once, ever, in the commercials does it actually say that it will make the little willy bigger. It does say that it will give you a “big new spring of confidence”, it also says that it will give you “a little well-deserved respect around the neighborhood”, what it does not say is that it will make your penis bigger.

I think that they go to great lengths to try to make you think that they are saying that it will make your penis bigger, but they never say anything of the sort. Other commercials say that it will give you a “big, new swing of confidence” as well as a “happy woman back at the ‘club-house’.” None of that actually says, or implies, actual penis growth. Sure, some men would think that it implies they will get a larger penis if they take the pill, but aren’t there thousands of people who buy ‘penis pumps’ in the hopes of getting a bit of ‘natural male enhancement’?

The very last line of the article that I linked to at the start pretty much says it all, and it said:

“Enzyte is more successful subtracting from the male wallet than it is adding to the male organ,” Schardt said.

I may not be the biggest horse in the stalls, but I would rather eat my own shit than to pop sugar pills in the hopes that little willy would grow.

It is like my Mother always told me (and no that was not from her personal experience), “It is not the size of the wand, but the magic within.” Come to think of it., That might not have been my Mom, might have been my friend’s mom (the same non-sexual rule still applying), at any rate, someone said that to me enough times that I still remember it. Of course the small wand might make me remember this particular quote all the more.

Now that I have told everyone that has an internet connection that I have both huge feet and a small member, I think I am gonna call it a night.

Tune in to the next post to see how I can turn very innocuous ideas into horrible things that you would rather not read. I am ready.

New shoe discussion; Neighbor ships to Iraq

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This weekend left me without a lot of desire time to write anything. That is of course not true, but as the whole world now seems to just accept lies at face value I am gonna go with it. Today I will make up for the lack of any posting over the weekend by making sure to bore you to tears, and thus make you thankful that there was not any of this crap for the last couple of days. If all goes as planned anyway.

• Sunday was a day that I really dreaded. It was new shoe day. I dreaded it so much in fact that I have put off the occasion for the last two months, even though it was quite necessary. My old shoes have ripped to the point that it is possible to put my entire fist through the side of one of them where the leather meets the sole. In fact the only thing that kept my foot from slipping out through that enormous hole was the fact that it hadn’t quite made it all the way to the toe of the shoe, just damn close. Of course the rip was almost as bad two months ago, I just hate shoe shopping so much that I kept putting it off.

It hasn’t always been like this, no, no, I actually used to enjoy shopping for shoes. Of course I used to enjoy shopping for shoes when I was following the trends that everyone does in their teens. Back then I would intentionally add unnecessary wear to shoes so that I could go and find the latest ‘in’ ones to replace them. That was when it was still on dad’s dime, so of course I never got the shoes that I really wanted, but I could usually get a cheap knock-off copy of the ones that I did desire. Strange that now that I am buying them myself, and can buy any damn pair I want, I so loathe the experience.

I only own one pair of shoes at any given time, well technically two, but one is a pair of dress shoes that might make it out of the box once a year at best. The other shoes are my everything shoes. Some people have a different pair for things like work, hiking, yardwork, digging ditches in horrible rainstorms, etc. I use the same pair for everything. Sometimes I will wear flip-flops when I am using the weedeater, which is a really stupid thing to do, but it does keep me from having to pick all the little bits of grass out of my shoelaces. I guess if I ever get careless and amputate a toe in the process I will look back at how foolish it was and laugh, or not, depending on what kind of medication I am on at the time.

So why do I hate shoe shopping so much? There is just no longer any selection. I know that you can walk into any random shoe store and see several hundred different shoes for sale, ranging from a couple dollars to a couple hundred dollars, but they never have anything even approaching what I want. So am I some uber-picky shoe snob? I don’t think so. All that I ever ask for is a pair of leather shoes that are black (at least mostly black) and hightops. That’s it, just black, leather hightops, wouldn’t seem that tough to find would they? I haven’t actually acquired a pair of the elusive things in at least four years.

My preferred brand of footwear is Nike, not that I have actually had a pair of them in a few years, since they just never seem to release anything that meets my meager criteria. I prefer Nike not for the fit (as they are always too tight and hurt my feet badly for the first week or two) nor for the name, but for their durability. The last pair of Nike’s that I had kept my feet covered for about a year and a half, I still actually have them and I do actually wear them sometimes when I know that I am going to get really dirty. For comparison, my last two shoe purchases have been something called “Tuff Grip” that I purchased at Wal-Mart, and which lasted about two months, and some “Tx Traction” shoes (a christmas gift from the wife that we never got around to picking up until late January or early February due to the aforementioned hatred of shoe shopping. And while I could have had any shoe in the store I took the 29 dollar traction ones since they were the only ones that came even close to what I wanted), which lasted about four months, though I put off buying new ones for a couple of months after that. As you can see the Nike’s just last longer.

My job actually dictates what kind of shoes I must wear. Not like a dress code, more like something that I have discovered over time. First off, I cut meat while I am at work, this tends to leave the shoes getting blood dripped on them. Try going out to dinner sometime wearing just jeans and a T-shirt along with a pair of blood-stained white sneakers, maybe people aren’t actually looking at the shoes at all, but it does make me feel pretty self-conscious. For that same reason I am not able to wear shoes that have any woven fabric in them, sometimes the blood will actually seep through woven fabrics also and that is quite gross. That is why they need to be both black and leather, and I mean leather not suede. While Blood and Suede might make for a good Ray Stevens song, it is pretty nasty on shoes. I can get away with faux leather, as long as the tongue of the shoe is also made of the same material, but it rarely is in those faux leather shoes. The reason for wanting the shoes to be hightops just comes with the amount of lifting/pushing/pulling that I do while working. I don’t really believe that having the extra lace or two around my ankles is going to save me if the four-hundred pound cart that I am pushing up the ramp comes back on me, but they do keep my shoes from slipping off during that scenario. The worst thing that could possibly happen when trying to control an out of control cart would be to lose traction when a shoe slips off, and low top shoes seem to slip off a lot more frequently than the hightops.

I haven’t been able to find a decent pair of hightops in the last six or so years, all the ones that they sell now seem to be white with many other colors on them. Did the NBA actually start to require players to wear white shoes or what? The only way I was able to get black hightops was with basketball shoes. Also, all of the shoes that even approach midtop height these days, at least the black ones, seem to have both leather and suede on them. So it seems that I am destined to never have a pair of shoes that I really feel comfortable wearing.

To anyone who is now thinking, ‘why not just black work boots?’, the reason is that while I do all of the lifting, pushing, meat-cutting, etc. I also stock the shelves. This means that there is a lot of squatting and kneeling as well. I tried those black work boots when I first noticed how difficult it was to find the shoes I wanted, and a lot of kneeling and squatting in those boots will leave you with horrible bruises on the front of your ankles. That is not even mentioning how horribly uncomfortable they were in the first place.

The particular shoe shopping experience, this time, resulted in a pair of New Balance lowtops. Out of the available selection of shoes that were both black and leather, there were either these or a pair of Reebok’s that felt like they were an inch higher in the toe than they were in the heel. I had at least heard of New Balance, so hopefully the shoes will last longer than it takes me to write this damn post.

Completely on a side note, I was gonna link to the pair of shoes that I bought, but the New Balance website should be a poster child for how not to do website naviagation. You have to be a couple of page-loads in before it gives you the search option, the search option does not actually seem to allow you to search for the actual model number (or whatever it is that they print on the tag in the shoe), and on top of all of that you can’t even browse all the shoes; You have to select a category to browse by. How in the random fluctuation of time and space’s name am I supposed to know if the shoes are walking, running, training, cross-training, basketball, tennis, extreme sports or other? If it said it was a “CT190”, for instance, I would assume that the “CT” stood for cross-training. Yet every shoe on the damn site starts with an ‘M’, that makes it impossible to tell even what category the shoe I bought would be in. Since I browsed through about fifty shoes from the site though, I would guess that they just slap any random number on any damn shoe, as they all look exactly the same.

Well, at least I got some new shoes.

• In other news, the war in Iraq just got a whole hell of a lot closer to home. Right next door, in fact. It seems that my neighbor, who is at least six-and-a-half feet tall, has just re-signed into military service. He was still on Active Duty when the Desert Storm conflict was going on but never got shipped over. He has decided to go ahead and serve his country in the current war to (I suppose) fulfill some sort of patriotic duty. I really believe that that is an admirable thing to do, at least in most cases. I am certainly not going to fault any person that wants to defend our country (regardless of how wrong I think the conflict may be), I don’t have the courage or fortitude to do it, any man who does is either a better man than I, or possibly a bit insane, or both.

I certainly wish him the best of luck in his new endeavor, I believe he ships to a special training course in October and will be in Iraq by late December or early January. I guess he is only doing two years this time, and there will only be one year on the front line, while the six weeks of training and the reaminder of the two years will be stateside. Best of luck to you.

It is impossible for me to understand his logic in signing back up. When he was serving in the military back in the desert storm days, he was likely single and ready to give his all to defend his country. I am sure that he has the same mindset now, but a decade has passed. He is in his thirties, married, has two beautiful children, and has decided to ship off again to fight the baddies in the middle east. Again, I must admire his…well whatever it is that made him make the decision, but what happens if he doesn’t make it home? He will leave behind a widow and a couple of children that will likely spend the rest of their lives wondering why he decided to fight this fight. There is a very famous line from a movie (which I think was ‘Johnny got his gun’) where a child asks his father “Dad, when it comes my time, will you want me to go?” The response from the father being, “For democracy, any man would give his only begotten son.”

What happens when you are a father? You leave two generations to mourn if you don’t manage to make it back. I do admire the courage that it takes to go into a war, especially when you don’t really have to.

Here’s to hoping the neigbor makes it back in one piece. Best of luck to you.

IHOP; PC issues; Assault rifles

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Diving right back in where I left off yesterday, let me just say that I really, really, really hate Microsoft.

There was recently an enormous update released for windows XP, I just tried to find it through their website and I honestly don’t know which one it was. I have the new computer set to automatically search for and install windows security patches, perhaps it was one of those. Anyway, I can no longer open .shtml files with internet explorer. Or, more accurately, I can no longer open them on my local machine with internet explorer, while I can still open the same file from a website with it. The reason that this irritates me is twofold. The first reason is that I liked to check my linkage before I uploaded a recently written page, the second is that it had always worked before the most recent security update. I just hate it when you fix one thing and break something else in the process.

I have tried all that I can think of to try to circumvent the problem, no go. I simply have to use the MSN service for the purposes of testing my coding now. It is not really that much of a hassle, yet somehow I find that it really pisses me off. At least that was how I was feeling when I started to type this late last night, through some experimentation I was able to make Internet Explorer open the files, though it will first open it as a text file, then if I refresh it a couple of times it will show the actual html page. Is that really supposed to happen? Am I just an idiot? If you know how to fix this, send the answer here.

• Monday night the wife and I went to check out my Brother-in-law’s new apartment. I will say this, it is a very clean little place…Emphasis should be placed on that word little. Of course he is only twenty, and I can remember some of the dives that I lived in at that age so I guess he is doing better than I did at that stage. Living on your own for the first time is a very liberating thing, so much so that I believe we all go into the process with some of those ‘rose colored glasses’ on. Not to mention that the whole place is now yours, while living at home you just got the one room. I am pretty proud of him for actually getting his own place so quickly after getting a decent job, I only hope that he is constantly looking to improve those accomodations, while still staying within his means, of course. I remember the little apartment that I moved into shortly after I turned 21, no one ever wanted to visit me there, it was just too small to comfortably fit more than a couple of people, but it is those little places that start us all on the journey into eventual home ownership.

• We were going to have dinner, and lacking any solid ideas of what anyone wanted we ended up at IHOP. I was initially thinking about trying out their chili cheeseburger, but since the wife was having a breakfast for dinner, and since I really do enjoy the staples of breakfast food (even though I never eat breakfast) I figured I would go with an omelette instead. The particular omelette that I ordered was called a “Tex-Mex”, and, strangely, is not shown on the menu at the website.

I chose that particular omelette since it had both chili and cheese, the two major driving factors in my initial chili cheeseburger selection. Here is the thing, it just didn’t seem to reach my plate quite the way it was described in the menu. The menu said it was “a fluffy 3 egg omelette with a zesty blend of chili, cheese and jalapenos.” That was more or less true; it did have all of those ingredients. Yet, in the preparation it seemed to lose some of the description. There was not really a ‘blend’ of anything. There were a total of (I would guess) roughly six large, sliced jalapenos in the omelette, as well as a little bit of cheese. On top there was a scoop of chili. It was actually pretty tasty, but I was assuming that the ingredients would all be placed together and put inside the omelette, isn’t that what an omelette is? Also, had there been some chili inside the omelette there would have been less room for the jalapenos.

I have no problems with the peppers. When the wife or mother-in-law make salsa they will intentionally try to find the hottest types of chilis that they can to try to make me cower. The best they can ever get out of me is a bit of a runny nose while eating it, but still wanting more all the same. That is regarding fresh peppers though. The jalapenos from the IHOP were pretty clearly canned, and in vinegar no less. If there is one thing that I really can’t stand it is the taste of vinegar. I can eat jalapenos all day long, but when they throw in a single ‘pickled pepper’ I have to have some other flavor to take away the nasty vinegar taste, which I had some pancakes for at the IHOP so that was fortunate.

I have seen those little diagrams showing the human tongue, the type that show that certain parts of the tongue can taste sweet, while others taste sour. I think the whole tongue can taste hot (like pepper hot, not temperature), but the part of the tongue that tastes sour seems to rule over every other part of the tongue. Don’t think that is true? Try eating a raw jalapeno, remember the heat, then try eating a pickled jalapeno. I don’t like the sour taste, while I really do enjoy really hot peppers. When you pickle a pepper you are just destroying a perfectly good, very toasty little pepper. That is no way for a pepper to end! The goal of the pepper is to make you breathe fire now, and really regret it tomorrow. Pickled peppers don’t do either of those things. Though there may be times that they do make you regret not just ordering the damn chili cheeseburger.

• Yesterday’s post actually resulted in an email. What is unusual about this (beyond the fact that that meant that someone actually read it) was that this email was asking for my opinion on the expiration of the ban on ‘assault weapons’ (which I could not find a really good news story on, but I am crutched by a dial-up connection and impatience, so knock yourself out).

First of all, the email came from someone that I do not know and who had never emailed me before. I sent that person a pretty lengthy email explaining my exact position on the subject. It is certainly a struggling little site that will send longer emails to readers than the posts that are put up in the first place, and that is me. While I am not going to quote any of either his email to me, or mine to him, I do want to touch on this subject for but a single reason. I am both for and against it.

In my senior year of high school this issue started to hit the news. Whether or not the weapons that they were calling ‘assault weapons’ were actually assault weapons, whether they should be banned, all of that sort of garbage. While in Government class the assignment came that we would break into pairs to debate the issue (one person debates for, one against, in each pair. We were given one day to prepare our arguments). There were an odd number of students in my class, but they were so evenly split on the issue that I volunteered to debate for the issue (which was my first choice) then to debate against the issue with the odd man out. The debates would be decided by a vote from the rest of the class, supposedly based solely on how convincing the arguments had been.

I was not exactly the most popular kid in high school, lots of the people in this particular class especially, didn’t like me a whole lot, but I was pretty confident that I could debate it both ways. This was in Oregon, after all, every living being (at least the male ones) in the state of Oregon really think that they should be able to have whatever guns they want for whatever reason they want them. In fact every single argument against the banning of the assault weapons was the winning one, with the exception of my opponent when I had to argue it the other way.

Having to argue for the banning of the weapons was a real stretch for me. I still believe in the U.S. Constitution enough that I know that it is our right to ‘bear arms’. I focused on the negative usages of the firearms in question to get my victory in the debate. It was not a fiery speech about the evils of guns that I used to win, it was cold, hard facts. I brought in copies of newspaper stories from the last month about gang shootings in L.A., and noted the weapon choice in each. While many of the killings were just with normal handguns, the majority of the killings of children and others that were not involved in a gang at all, were done with ‘assault weapons’. They can fire fast, but they aren’t really that accurate. Show them a few photos of dead children, who are dead because of ‘assault weapons’, and it is a pretty easy group to sway.

That all being said, I still think that it is your right to have the weapon if you want to have it. It is not like the guy who is going to spray bullets through the local day-care actually bought the gun at a store, he stole it or got it from a friend who had already used it in a murder. There are only so many of these ‘assault weapons’ that are not accounted for (at least the ones sold in the U.S.). I tried to sell a little rifle, which was mine, to a local gun store and they actually had to run the serial number on it before they would take it. These ‘assault weapons’ are easy to buy in any country other than the U.S., if we try to fool ourselves into thinking that not selling them in the U.S. is going to make safer then we are delusional.

Much like the current leadership of the Country.

PC issues; Guns; Home depot

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Well I have had a couple of busy days, thus leading to the lack of anything new posted here. On the up side I did do some things that simply require bitching about, so here we go.

First a website issue. Had I known how much work was actually going to be involved in tryin to maintain this little site, I would never have started it in the first place. I suppose that it isn’t really true that it is a lot of work, more so that I make it into a lot of work. The odds that anyone reading this right now will want to read it again so badly, sometime in the future, that they will actually go back into the archives looking for it are pretty small. I am pretty sure that I am the only one who ever goes through my archives, and that is for one of two reasons, either I am looking for a link from where I bitched about something previously or I am reading the post to put a brief description on the archives main page. Unfortunately, as I found out on Saturday night and again on Sunday I am so damn far behind on the archive main page that I had to go through over three months of posts by clicking the ‘next update’ button until I found the page that I was looking for. That sucked!

That being said, I was thinking that I would take the time to go ahead and throw brief descriptions of them onto the page right then, unfortunately I encountered a problem. Out of the sixty or so pages that I had to click through to find the one I was looking for, twelve of them didn’t display right. Not a problem with the coding or anything, just that a portion of the page wasn’t there. I always check the index file when I upload it to make sure that it works correctly, it never occurred to me that uploading it to the archive page would be any different. Yet somehow it is.

I am relatively sure that this is happening because of the cheap ftp program that I am using. It always tells me that the upload was successful, but unless I actually refresh the web directory and compare the size of the file to my local directory I can no longer assume that it went through. Not that it would take a tremendous amount of time to do that, more that it is just a really annoying problem, more annoying since I went through every file on my computer to compare the file size with the version in the web directory. It took about two hours to get that all straightened out, so I will try to be a bit more careful in the future.

As a sort of proof of the lack of desire to read the archives, I never once got an email from anyone telling me that there was a problem. If anyone had actually looked at the pages they would have known that there was a problem. The pages didn’t look like I just didn’t have a lot to say, they were cut off in mid sentence, even mid-word on a couple of them. Two of the pages had absolutely nothing but the sidebar and date. Trust me, if I am gonna waste the time to write out the date at the top of the page there is going to be at least something written on the page. Whether it is worth reading is questionable, but there will always be something there.

• On Sunday morning I was going to borrow a truck from George so that I could go get a new washing machine at Home Depot. I don’t suppose that it was a coincidence that he knew I would be at his house at nine in the morning, and he had a semi-automatic Colt handgun disassembled on his table at the time. Mind you this is one of the four or so times that I have ever been to his house, and one of the other times was also to borrow his truck, so I wanted to be friendly and chat with him a bit.

The fact that he had a handgun stripped on his kitchen table, as well as a recent copy of ‘Guns and Ammo’ there also probably dictated our conversation just a bit. I used to be really into handguns, my father always owned at least a half a dozen of them, as well as fifteen or twenty rifles, and growing up around them I guess you really just get accustomed to them, then eventually you start to like them, desire them even. As the conversation about ammunition, old Colt revolvers and the such carried on, I mentioned that the revolver on the front of the ‘Guns and Ammo’ magazine was one that I would really like to try out. The firearm in question is shown below (stock photo, I was not able to find the actual magazine cover).

Imagine my surprise when George went into his bedroom and came back with that very weapon (of course I should note that it was an older copy of ‘Guns and Ammo’ so I did know it was coming). The picture does very little justice to the actual size of that revolver. The barrel is 10 1/2″, the thing is 18″ overall and weighs five pounds when it is not loaded. Simply put, it is fucking huge.

He checked to make sure that it wasn’t loaded, then handed it to me. I proceeded to also check to make sure that it wasn’t loaded, which, thankfully, didn’t seem to offend him, of course if everyone were to take those kinds of precautions there would be far fewer accidental shootings. It was simply amazing how comfortable the thing is in your hand, not despite its size but in general. It didn’t feel like a five pound, foot and a half mammoth, it felt like a very well balanced revolver. Were it not for just how far the tip of the barrel was from my hand I could have mistaken it for a .38. Knowing, through experience with my father’s gun-collecting friends, that some people would get really pissed off if you pull the trigger of an empty firearm, I asked him if he would mind if a gave it a squeeze or two, which was fine.

I am not kidding even slightly when I say that I have had capguns that took more force to shoot than this huge revolver. I was gripping it with my right hand, while the barrel rested in my left (pointing up and to the left so that I could watch the trigger, hammer and cylinder), when I started to squeeze. The trigger was so fluid that I found myself thinking they must have rigged up a few pulleys inside the thing to make it move that easily. I tried it again just to make sure that I was not just thinking it was less difficult than I had expected it to be, and again it struck with just very light pressure. George then instructed me to pull the hammer back and try the trigger that way. With the hammer back it took less pressure pull the trigger than it takes to click the button on your mouse. Even if you are not a big fan of firearms, this one should make you at least pause long enough to think that American craftsmanship is not dead. That was simply the most beautifully built handgun I have ever handled.

George did offer to take me out and have a couple of shots with it, which I would have loved to have done, but I had already been there almost an hour and the washing machine has been out almost a month. I told him that I would take a raincheck on his offer though. I really do want to see what it feels like to fire a handgun of that size. Well, enough deadly weapon porn for today.

The trip to Home Depot was pretty uneventful. Of course his truck bounced a lot more than the little cars that I am used to driving/riding in so that took a little getting used to. One thing that I did find really strange was that the truck has no stereo. It doesn’t have just a shitty AM/FM radio, it doesn’t have a cassete player, it doesn’t have a cd player, it doesn’t have hole in the dash where the stereo used to be but got stolen, it just has nothing at all. The spot where the thing would have been in the dash was just a solid piece of plastic. The truck has simply never had a radio or stero in it at all (more on that later). Now, first off, I didn’t know that you could even buy a car that doesn’t have at the very least a cheap AM/FM radio, but he found one. Which leads to three important questions: 1) Why did the truck have a radio antenna if it never had a radio in it? 2) Why did it have speaker grilles in the door panels and on the dashboard? 3) Were there actually stock speakers behind those grilles?

I got to the Home Depot and took the internet printout of the machine that I wanted directly to the appliance section. I thought that they would try to sell me up to some other machine, but I guess the guy was just happy to get his commission without having to work for it. Ten minutes or so later I was back on the road with the new washing machine in the bed of the truck. Unfortunately I had completely forgotten to take along anything even resembling a rope. That meant that I had to drive at 50-55 the whole way back, as any speed beyond that started to tilt the box over and made me slam the brakes. Sure it was just a 279 dollar purchase but there is no way in hell I am going to break a brand new appliance to get home a couple of minutes sooner, if only the rest of the people on the road had felt the same way. At any rate, the washing machine was home and I wanted to get the truck back to George as quickly as possible (since he begged me not to put any gas into it, having something to do with a weird superstition about gas mileage and a particular pump at a particular gas station).

I threw a five dollar bill under the seat of the truck before I left my house. I knew that if I offered to pay for his gas that he would refuse to accept the money, which was true. That way he will just find the five in his truck sometime later and there will be good karma for him for not letting me pay as well as good karma for me for paying him anyway. The devious things that you have to do to be a good person these days…

I did ask him about the stereo when I returned the truck. He pointed out (which I had noted) that the only two option that he had on the truck were the air conditioning (which is simply mandatory in Arizona), and the automatic transmission (which is mandatory for someone with such horrible diabetes that they can hardly walk). He said that the rest of the options all came in packages like radio, rear-window defroster and glove box light. He didn’t want any of the other shit, and, being an audiophile he didn’t want the factory stereo anyway. Something to do with how much power can travel through your average speaker wires, subpar sound from the speakers that are not able to hit the high and low frequencies, inferior sound from the stereo not being powerful enough to handle the speakers (which I always thought was the other way around, but listen to the system in his house and you will understand). I simply gave up on the stereo thing about four seconds after I asked the question, yet the explanation was easily a half an hour long.

There are a couple of other things that I really want to get into, but I am getting really tired of typing. This post is easily in the top five, as far as length, that I have ever written. With a bit of luck I will be able to go into other issues tomorrow.

Time will tell.

9/11 anniversary; Disturbing email

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Well it is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, so I figure I might as well make a post. The first thing that I would like to say is that I do truly feel for people who lost loved ones on that day. I know what it is like to experience the death of a close member of the family long before his/her time (which was my father, who died at only 38, and on Christmas Eve no less). The fact that so many thousands of people had that happen to them, all on the same day, and all at the hands of terrorists who just wanted a good ‘death count’ probably makes it worse. Especially since no one saw it coming.

When my Father died, as callous as it sounds, a lot of the family had been seeing it in the near future for a long time. He was not taking care of himself, not following his scedule for the insulin shots that he had to take for diabetes, in the midst of a court case that might land him in jail for a bit, not to mention having just gone through a nasty break-up with his girlfriend. Yeah, I guess it didn’t really surprise anyone when he died, even though he did die quite young. The thing is that I was still grief-stricken for a very long time, even though I knew it was going to happen, and knew that the choices he was making were only making it more likely.

The Families of the people who died in the 9/11 attacks didn’t have anything like that. There were husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, that simply went into work one day and never came home. People who were likely in good health, people who were going to do their job to support their families. Then a bunch of malicious people with razor-blades took the lives of thousands of them, and with that, took part of the life from everyone related to any of the victims. It was such a horrible, sickening thing for any being to do, that I can not believe that the attackers truly thought that what they were doing was in the name of any so-called God. Can I possibly be so naive?

Let me posit this: Most all current religions believe in a single God, sure there are other religions that still belieive in multiple gods, but for the purposes of this discussion I will say that it mostly focuses on one per religion. So, what if you get it wrong? Say you worship the father of Jesus, but it turns out that Allah is the real god, boy howdie, you would certainly be fucked then. Of course if you don’t believe in any god it is easy to make the call on your death bed, that is what I am banking on. I may make a quick 180 from my current postition when it does appear that I am dying, yet, I am not willing to kill myself in an attack on the world in general.

• It is not my goal to try to cheapen the anniversary of the death of thousands with a few words, nor is it my goal to try to do it with absolute silence. The thing is, the important thing is that people do move on. The families of those who did die in the attack on 9/11 are, likely, just starting to realize that they have to live without them. No amount of mourning will ever bring them back. People died, it was a tragedy for thousands of families, those lives are gone and will never come back. Just as the people who are coming to terms with their loss are starting to forget the pain and anguish, Bush decides to have a moment of silence for them… Way to bring up a really bad experience and make people cry…Now why don’t you call the parents of all the 1000+ soldiers that have died in Iraq, get them to go to a single location and have a moment of silence for them?

Do not scroll down

I don’t know if you are like me, but I skim my emails and open the ones that have only a single name (when it is the name of someone I knew ‘back in the day’). When I opened a particular email, which said it was sent by ‘Steve’, I thought that it could have been any of a dozen people that I knew, some of whom I would really like to get in touch with again. It turned out that the email was not from the ‘Steve’ that I knew in high school, nor anyone named steve that I have met after high school. Which sucks.

What followed was the most disturbing picture that I have ever seen.

The only way that I can justify this to myself is to say that ‘grandma found the machine that ices the donuts’. Any other explanation is simply unacceptable. I don’t really want to know why or how that photo was taken, what I want is to have it erased from my memory for all time. That is something that will sicken me every time I see it.

Unfortunately, the photo in question came with a little message that said, “want to see more photos like this, click here.”

I think I may quit looking at emails that have a friends name as the sender. That image is simply Burned into my mind.

The image of Granny finding the machine that puts the icing on donuts, that is.


Bush, Kerry, and Bishops

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I really thought that I hated Dubya just based on his policies. I really thought that his policies were just following the norm of the extremely kooky religious right, then I took This Test, which is a test for Catholics to see who they should vote for, in theory.

Wow! All this time I was thinking that Dubya was working on a religious/political agenda, but it turns out that your average Christian doesn’t like him any more than I do. These are, of course, my stats from that little test, and I answered them honestly and this is what I got. If you actually take the test yourself, the questions are a bit weird and some of them are baited, but you will get the idea.

I did not try to answer them in a pro-conservative or pro-liberal way, I just answered the questions truthfully. I think that I scored well with the ‘Bishops’ since I really don’t care for the death penalty, yet, I scored badly with them since I don’t really care for abortion, BUT, it is your body and the decision should be yours and yours alone.

Towards the end of their little survey, they have something about ‘global solidarity’. I am pretty sure that this is where the ‘Dubya Lovers’ are going to get screwed. The thing that no one ever talks about is the fact that the U.S.A. and Russia still both have weapons of mass destruction…Weapons that could wipe all life off of the planet in just one hit, that is if the other guy fired his off…

While the ‘peace talks’, and all of that kind of rhetoric, look great on T.V., it does not change the fact that the U.S.A. and Russia still have the power to wipe any trace of human existance off of the face of the earth. If the U.S.A., or Russia, decide that they are tired of dealing with say South Korea, for instance. The missle would fly and South Korea would be the biggest parking lot in the Asian community.

I certainly don’t want to sound preachy, nor do I want to excuse the actions of the current administration. The simple fact is that the U.S.A. has more ‘Weapons of mass destruction’ than any other nation on earth. If NATO were to take a step back and look at the big picture, NATO would realize that the U.S.A. is trying to ‘bully’ other countries into doing what we want. The fact that the current administration will not report to NATO, or conform to standards set by the Geneva Convention, tells me that it is going to get a lot worse before it even hopes to get better.

It is pretty clear that the current administration does not think about the future (like twenty years in the future), It would be pretty nice if they were to think it through at least until next Thursday.

Dubya is leading us down a road to where we are going to be hated by every country on earth. Kerry might never be able to dig us out of it, but he is certainly not going to grab a shovel and dig us deeper.

No Politics, damn it! Someone tell the RNC that I don’t care for politics, especially manipulative politics. I would rather lick my own ass than talk about this, but this is all that is in the news.

PC problems at work; Atkins diet

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Well first off, just in case anyone out there is interested. The problems with the PC communicating with the cash registers at work has been resolved. As I suspected the faulty part was actually the communications board within the Master register, well, one of the communications ports on the pc is also a bit buggy, but I have known that for years and know how to get around the problem.

The unfortunate part of this situation is that the repair guy from NCR was down here for unrelated problems. The scanner on one of the machines would not send information to the register. We had the same problem a couple of weeks prior(while the bosses were away) and I remedied the situation by removing the scanner from the system (just the little part with the laser, not the whole scanning system) and swapping it with the other register. When they both worked, I just swapped them back. When the problem happened again, the boss just called NCR to have them try to find a more permanent solution. After a couple of visits to the store, the guy ended up doing exactly what I did. Swapped the scanner units and then both of the machines were working again, here I must say that “I could have done that”.

The NCR guy then swapped out the communications port on the Master Register, which took some convincig to get him to do, and waited while I tested it out. Everything worked perfectly. NCR man made a beeline for the door. Within fifteen minutes of him leaving the scanner that he had fixed quit working entirely, no beep, no whirring mirrors, nothing. We tried unplugging it for a bit then trying it again and were met with a long speech by the scale which involved phrases like, “Stop. Check. Cannot stand mechanical vibration. Stop. Check. Code 6. Change Scale Board. Stop. Check. Change Low Cell. Stop. Check. Code 4. Recalibrate System. Stop. Check. …” The list went on for about a minute or so and I can’t remember the rest of it, but come on, that certainly wasn’t functioning correctly.

There was someone out there again today fucking with the scanner problem. I sure hope it is actually fixed, as this is getting progressively more boring to recount and likely not going to get me onto the best-seller lists for fascinating non-fiction.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was going to ask the technician why it is that any power surge can completely disable the newer registers while the thirty year old ones can live through it and still function perfectly (the old registers are always kept powered on, which I find a bit humorous, since whoever sold the old registers to them told them that it is better to have them powered constantly, even when not in use. I have repeatedly tried to get them to leave their pc turned on all the time but they never will. I don’t honestly know if it is better for the PC to be left on all the time, but that is the way I have always done it and I don’t have Nearly as many problems with my machine as they do), I got the opportunity to posit that question yesterday. I don’t recall his precise quote so I will paraphrase, Well, the newer microprocessors are far more power-sensitive. That’s how they’ve made them so much smaller, they are using less metal to make connections and sometimes they can’t take the power of an electrical spike (he said spike, not me, I usually say surge, so spike is probably the correct term). Now to skip a bunch of the tech-babble, it came right down to him saying, “Well those old registers probably weigh forty or fifty pounds, these ones only weigh fifteen.”

Great. So by making everything smaller and lighter we are making it also less and less reliable. No wonder you can buy a digital camera for sixty bucks nowadays, they know you are gonna buy another one in a few months…

• Now for the Headline of the century!

Atkins Diet Weight Loss Doesn’t Last – Study

Dear Random Fluctuations of Time and Space, stop the world from spinning. I, for one, did a triple-take at this news. I mean limiting your body to taking in nothing but fat doesn’t lead to actual long-term weight loss? Next these ‘science geeks’ are probably going to try to tell us that the earth isn’t flat, or even the center of the universe…Such Rubbish…

I am sure that any human of sound mind (and therein lies the key) understands that eating only one type of the basic food groups is not a healthy, long-term solution for weight loss. My wife (who knows a few people on this said ‘diet’) and I have talked about this a few times. Our basic take on it is that no one is going to lose much weight, but a couple of pounds seems pretty good at the start. The couple of pounds at the start are just wringing some of the water out of you, if you stick to the diet for a couple of months, even a year, the health risks are going to far outweigh (pun definitely intended) the loss of body fat. The majority of the people who are getting into this, it is not a diet, it is a ‘low carb lifestyle’, are at the point where the metabolism starts to slow down in the late twenties/early thirties. Sure, it is possible that this low-carb diet could work for some of the people, it is not going to work for the majority of the people that try it though.

My theory, one which my wife shares, is that in about twenty or twenty-five years the people who are currently on the ‘Atkins diet’ are going to have their hearts start to explode like popcorn. While it is possible to lower your carb intake and lose weight (which I know after having gone from 205 lbs. to 165 lbs. in just a few months after switching my 12-pack a day habit from Coke to Diet Coke), it is certainly not a reasonable assumption that you will stay at the lower weight if you take in nothing but fat calories.

Hell, I am creeping ever closer to the weight that I was before the soda change a decade ago. I suppose I should start eating nothing but beef and cheese, yet, I think I am going to have enough problems in the future since I smoke, drink, and come from a family that is almost all diabetic.

I suppose that a really bad analogy could be, If you didn’t brush your teeth for the first thirty years of your life, then someone offered to sell you a tube of something that would make them look like they did when you were fifteen or so, and you bought it, expecting results. Your teeth are still going to be nasty and rotten. No ‘snake oil salesman’ can turn back the hands of time. Taking care of your body yesterday is the only way to make sure that you are how you want to be tomorrow. If you notice you have put on five pounds, limit portions on food, excercise more and marvel at the results.

The point where you know your heart is going to explode in your early fifties is when you ask for a cheeseburger without the bun.

Audio equipment; Phimosis

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Well as my legion of fan (no those weren’t supposed to be plural) might have noticed, I did take a couple of days off from typing this page up. No reason why really. I didn’t feel like typing, no one ever reads it anyway, kind of like farting in the wind… there is just no payoff. Though I have no plans to close down the site, as It is very theraputic for me to write something down that is annoying me, I don’t think I am likely to try to keep making a new post every day. I am not going to set to stone a schedule whereby I will make new posts, as that loses the point of bitching about stuff that is irritating me, what I will do is say that I am likely only going to have, at most, five posts a week. The days that they might occur are going to be a surprise even to me, so I guess it will actually be 100% true that I am typing this for my own benefit from this point forward.

• Something that I want to mention today, as it may be too late tomorrow, is a brief conversation that I had with a regular customer where I work.

The man’s name is George, I consider him a friend even though I do not know him all that well. We have been talking, at length, about all sorts of weird shit ever since I started working at the store. He is quite a friendly, helpful man, but he has a lot of medical problems. I have visited his home several times, even knocked back a cocktail or two while there, and I suppose that, by definition, that would make us friends, though had that never have happened I would still think of him as a friend.

George loaned me his little truck (chevy s10? maybe) a few times to do errands that needed doing. Much like with the local “cat lady”, his only reward was for me to sit with him in his home and talk. Mind you, he is a bit of an Audiophile, and that took a bit away from my apprehensions about visiting his home. The guy has every album you could ever think of on vinyl, 8-track, cassette and CD. There is no place in his house that you can stand without hearing the song that is playing coming from multiple speakers, and sounding totally awesome. That being said, his audio system cost probably in excess of $20,000 U.S. dollars. That system is also installed in a house that likely cost him a lot less than that when he bought it twenty-five years ago. I don’t know why audio is his passion, but it is.

I really started trying to fuck with him with the stuff that I brought over (cd’s I mean). As far as the retail cd’s go, he could tell me every time that they were a retail cd, while he could tell me every time that one was an mp3. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. Just for fun, I brought over an old garage recording that I had made back when I was in a band. He instantly knew that it was not only a “garage effort”, but a very poor one at that. Being pissed off at that point, I ripped “Metallica’s” song “one” to mp3 to see if he could hear the difference between the two. What really shocked me was that, on his system, I could tell the difference between the two. I think that the studio recordings have a lot more sound on them than you can hear on your average, cheap-ass media player. If nothing else, George proved that point to me.

This guy, George, has had a lot of shit happen to him over his life. Possibly the worst thing (at least in my mind) was the Phimosis.

The thing about “phimosis” is that if you are circumcised you never have to fear it. If, however, you are not circumcised, it will be a constant threat to the penis. George had the phimosis problem as a child, but it was never discovered. By the time he was in his late 30’s/early 40’s, he had to have his penis amputated as it was so covered in virus that it could not be saved. I suppose I should note that phimosis, in and of itself, is not life-threatening. When, however, it is let to stay on a body for thirty years, infections can occur. The phimosis kept him from being able to clear up some, I can’t remember the story all that clearly, but it was genital warts, I think. Without the ability for the glans of the penis to be free of disease, the infection spread into his testicles. He had, at that point, two options; 1) Die. 2) Amputate your penis and testicles.

But wait, it gets worse. The guy then had a couple of strokes, which have left his back and legs in constant pain, the kind of pain that even the best drugs can not sate. He said to me today that, “If you (that being me) could take away the pain, I would be forever in your debt.” After that, it got spooky.

George said to me, and I will quote, “You are a very kind and loving man. Not just a man, but a kind and loving human being. When they find me tomorrow, please make sure that the note on my chest still says ‘too much pain’.”

He did go on to say that he figured his children would simply bury him in the back yard so that they would be able to continue collecting his disability and retirement checks from where he worked. So is that human nature? If it is I want right the hell out of this “race”.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this whole story is that I will likely be the first person to enter his home after he dies. I really don’t think that he was joking today, I think this might be it for him. I don’t know what I could do to stop him from it: he already has every drug in the hospital in his system.

Here’s to hoping that George wakes up again tomorrow.

Bush Vs. Bono?

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I really strive to avoid ever putting anything political on this site. The main reason for that is that I feel I am well enough informed to make my own decision on issues, yet not so informed that I would want anyone to read this and take my opinion as a truth. I know that everyone who reads a blog-type-thing with any objectivity will take the opinions with a grain of salt, but I am not even sure my personal opinion is worth that grain.

There are, of course, times when even my small-minded understanding of politics can be dead-on and unarguable. One of those times happened today as I was doing a cursory search of the Yahoo news.

Just for fun, here is the news story that I found on Yahoo news:

Bush, Kerry Converge on Iowa Battleground

The first paragraph, which is usually listed along with the headline, said;

DAVENPORT, Iowa – President Bush (news – web sites) and Sen. John Kerry (news – web sites) clashed at close quarters along the banks of the Mississippi River on Wednesday, the Republican incumbent pledging to “spread ownership and opportunity” if re-elected while his Democratic challenger campaigned as a fiscal conservative able and eager to fix the economy.

That is all well and good. I only clicked through to the article because of the photo that was shown beside the headline (which I will get to in a moment). After reading the headline and the first paragraph, I would think that if they were going to show two photos in the story it would be one photo each of Kerry and Bush, right? Nope. Below are the two photos that were accompanying that article, in no particular order. See if you can guess who is who! (both photos are from the Associated Press, by the way, though I am not going to waste my time looking for the names of the actual photographers.)

If you guessed that this first photograph was George W. Bush holding a baby, you would be correct!

If you guessed that this photograph was of the other candidate, whats-his-name, you would be wrong. No, see, this is BONO. He is a member of the band U2 I think, and certainly not John Kerry. How did it happen that a prominent site like Yahoo accidentally put a picture of Dubya holding a baby right next to a picture of BONO? This could have been a simple mistake, of course, but for the next hour and a half the pictures remained the same. Though as I checked just now, there is a photo of Kerry on the top with the photo of BONO still the second photo.

Now, please look again at that photo of Bush. Doesn’t it look a little bit like Dubya is giving the evil-eye to a baby who has slapped his hand to his(Bush’s) forehead, possibly in the hopes of slapping the Devil out of him? I don’t know. What I do know is that putting the picture of Bush holding a baby up as the Republican point photo, then following it with a photo of BONO (regardless of how democratic he happens to be) is going to swing to the advantage of the Republicans…Unless, of course, people see that even the baby hates Bush and is trying to push him away.

There are people on the Republican side (damn near all of them) that express that the problem with the “war on terror” is all based on the fact that the media is very liberal (slang for democrat). Anyone with a single shred of intelligence understands that it is completely the opposite, but that myth still persists. That has led all of us in the ‘lunatic fringe’ (Republican slang for Democrat) to find our news from sources that are not owned and operated by corporations that are spending millions of dollars a year to keep Bush in office. Every national station has interest in either Bush himself or the interests that Bush & Co. are kicking back money to. I really used to think that the news I read on the internet was not biased…I guess I better rethink that one…

oddities in lexicon

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Not only have I missed several riveting installments of this page in a row, I have also forgotten to update the little sidebar additions on the last few posts. If I didn’t know any better I would think that I am really starting to do a really half-assed job with this whole webpage thing. I did spend a little bit of time trying to makes sense of some of the stuff that I do not yet have indexed in the archive page over the last couple of days. I didn’t make enough headway that I really felt like uploading the additions though, My page, my rules.

The reason that I haven’t put anything new up here in the last few days is pretty simple, I didn’t have anything on my mind worth bitching about. Usually I can look at the Yahoo news to get some bitching fodder, but with the Democratic National Covention going on I have not been able to find anything that I really cared about. No point in discussing the Democratic convention here when 1) I just don’t care, and 2) you could find a lot better coverage and opinions anywhere else but here. I know my limitations.

I usually don’t go into writing these with any idea what I am going to say at all. When I do get the occasional email, whether agreeing or disagreeing with what I said, it makes me smile. The funny thing is that I usually get emails regarding the little anecdotes from my childhood, while I rarely ever get one if I voice a strong opinion on any item that can be found in the news. Even when I went on a rant about mandatory birth control for women on government assistance (which I can’t find right now since some jack-ass is lazy about archiving) I didn’t get a single email about it. I know that my readership could easily be counted on one hand, but still, why do people feel the urge to send the email when I share a story from my past, yet not when I voice a strong opinion about a pretty controversial issue? That’s people for you.

• In a random, out of the blue, thought that I had today (which I can not take full credit for, since it was initially brought to my attention by a girl named Tina that I used to work with), why is it that people always substitute O for 0 when speaking? I don’t know how to do the special characters to make the phonetic o sound on a keyboard, but follow me. Most people will say their phone number like five, five, five, O, three, two, two. So that is six numbers and one letter? I know that it is simply a force of habit for us lazy Americans to cut any corners that we can, but come on ‘zero’ has only one more syllable than ‘o’, if you are in that much of a hurry you might have other issues. The reason that this came back to mind today is that we have a money transfer service thing where I work, it is strictly for sending money to Mexico and overseas, while the operators that run it are all bilingual, they get confused when you use the letter o instead of the number 0. While I was on the phone with one of the operators today I caught myself doing that very thing (which I have myself pretty well trained against) and she asked me to repeat myself. I said, “seven, o, four, o, one”. When she again asked me to repeat myself I realized that I had made that mistake, and when I said it again, but as seven, zero, four, zero, one, she immediately was able to access the information.

The reason that I bring this up is that it made me think about yet another thing, Pig-Latin. When I was growing up we used to use it all the time and thought that it was pretty funny, especially so in the movies where there is some dumb crook who doesn’t understand it. Until today I had never thought of the possibility that someone who has a different first language might also not be able to understand it. Think about it. If you learn all of the words in the English language from a book, but don’t hear a lot of people speaking the language, then someone throws out the word “ishway”, for instance, it probably wouldn’t pop immediately into your mind that the word was “wish”. I am certainly not meaning to imply that this is a really complex code or anything of that nature, but imagine if you were using a similar or even different method of talking to friends around someone who wasn’t “in the loop” on the method.

There was this really weird thing that my friends started doing, just for fun, back in the late eighties. They called it “op talk” which is pretty self explanatory when I make the following example “mop e top a lop lop i cop a”, of course all of the vowels sound like someone saying uhh. I don’t know where the whole thing originated but it sure was fun to screw with my parents using this method. This sort of thing continues, varying by generation, to the point that if you don’t take in enough television or popular music you might just get lost in the whole thing. Sort of like the Rap moguls now using terms like “shiznit” which is a pretty obvious one, but branching out into using only the first letter of the word like they do with heazy heezy, forget that example…How about “hizouse”, I hope I spelled that one right…

Boy do I ever rop a mop bop lop e.