The weight scale in the bathroom of my mother’s house is, I’ve decided, completely evil.
I’m not one to really watch my #’s, but I have a mild curiosity about it whenever I stop by.
The thing is, her scale lies. It flat-out lies. It might be trying to make you feel better, but at first step, it electronically informs you that you weigh X pounds. Then when you step on it the second time, immediately following that initial reading, the red LED’s read X+4. So in reality, you weigh Y, so X equals Y-4. (I need a shirt that says “I Love Algebra” to go along with my “I Love Puns” shirt that I want.)
That being said, in honor of Halloween, let this war of Evil Weight Scales commence!
AWFUL BATTLE… GO!
Reveals Your Pounds & Future Poundings
Watch As Your Weight Drops
Found In The Not Fair Department – A Glass Scale
Also In The Not Fair Dept – A Scale That Spins To Your Weight, As Long As You Weigh Less Than 120 lbs
It Ranks You On Everything… Kinda Like The Wii Fit
Courtesy of the Onion News Network comes this gem. What I like best is the part where they’re mean to the kids…
In My Brain While Sleeping… A Costume I Never Would Have Thought Of While Awake
Blah blah blah subconscious something something weird dream… I met a man wearing this costume and when I inquired about it, he pulled granite from his pocket, placed it on the last stair and said:
"I'm Rock Bottom."
Drunken Recollection… Two Gorillas Are Better Than One
My cousin Steve and I have matching costumes. We debuted them last week at my brother’s party. It was a blast. The next day, I had another party to attend, but I opted to go as Hipster Jesus. Another gorilla was there, and my heart broke a little…
Musical Musings… How Do You Kill The Gill Man?
Is this a good song? No. But does the Monster Mash really deserve being the only Halloween song? (Not counting Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, of course.)
Coinkydink Or Coinkydonk? Did PB Max Get “Discontinued” For Peanut Butter Twix?
PB Max... PB Twix... hmm...
I loved PB Max almost instantly when it was released in 1990. It was the companion candy to the caramel Twix bars I’d eat everyday. (There was a 5¢ mail-in rebate deal on each wrapper, so I binged one summer, sent them all in, and received a $5 check 6-8 weeks later. You can do the math.)
Anysweettooth, seemingly as quickly as the candy burst on the scene, by th mid-90’s, it was gone. A couple more years passed and all-of-the-sudden there was a Peanut Butter Twix bar (and the original became Caramel Twix with a capital-C, as you candyC see).
Whatever happened to all the razor blades in apples and the kidnappings? The night’s supposed to be scary for kids. It’s like a PG-13 horror film these days.
Worth 1002 Words… My Old Halloween Costume Edition
Boxing Match
(lyrics to Halloween Survival Guide, you know, in case your ears aren’t working)
Back in the last century, a song arrived on the scene that captivated audiences for like, weeks. That song: Lou Bega’s Mambo No. 5. Here’s the backstory about how it entered my life…
I was backpacking through Europe with one of my sisters, and I met up with my other sister in Italy. She told me above this crazy song she kept hearing everywhere, and I didn’t encounter it until arriving in Amsterdam. As a joke, I bought the single to give to her upon returning home, but little did I know that while we were travelling, our place of employment (Circuit Shitty) started playing Mambo No. 5 on the in-house TV network. Joke ruined.
Exciting, I know. It’s taken me many, many years, but I might have found the predecessor to Bega’s catchy minor hit, but I’m not sure which one lives up to it more. The options:
Michael Franti and Spearhead may have saved the day by stopping by to Say Hey.
Or maybe Pitbull (seriously, that’s his name) got a bite on the competition, and pooped out the earwormI Know You Want Me.
As I learned somewhere a long time ago, if you can’t figure something out, just make a chart. Was it a friend? A parent? Or a math teacher? We’ll never know.
When these commercials first came out, I loved them. I’ve worked in IT for almost ten years, and the lowest moment for me was the release of Windows Vista.
Which is why the Mac Vs. PC commercials always made me smile – they had a point. In reality, if I had to deal with issues involving Vista any more than I did, I would have switched to Apple’s operating system (and more expensive equipment) in a heartbeat.
But now, with the release of Windows 7, which is getting reviewed way higher than its predecessor, are these commercials going to be obsolete:
Will they be like The Daily Show with John Stewart in a post-Bush era? (Still funny, but not as biting…) Or will Windows 7 fail to impress in the long run, thus providing continual fodder for the mocking ads?
I think the jump ship mentality that Vista wrought has come to an end, and I have had limited interaction with 7 so far. I have another friend that works at a different level of IT than I do, and he claims to love it (out of 700 pc’s he’s worked on at clients, less than 2% used Vista… or at least thereabout).
So is the campaign still ripe with humor? Or has something that was The Shit become Just Shitty? I’m inclined to think Apple’s advertising team needs to go back to the drawing board or whatever high-end technology they have, despite how funny I think John Hodgman is, or how funny Justin Long arguably may be.
One question remains though. How did they count to Windows 7?
By my count:
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows Me
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
But Windows 3.1 was Version Three-Point-One. And what about this Windows 2 that’s mentioned in the commercial above? That’s either Just Shitty writing, or it’s flat-out Just Shitty.
I was about cook up a plate of Soylant Green before I sealed up the doors and windows. We want to keep out those pesky vampires (or zombies… no one’s for sure). The reason why I’m doing all this? It’s because hell has arrived on Earth in the form of:
Why is the theme to Rugrats stuck in my head?
Recently on display at the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, the company states via their website that product will be available Winter 2010.
Samples:
All I have left to say is this: pack for cold weather.
We’re for damn sure heading to the coldest layer of Dante’s Inferno.
I’ll be joining everyone else as soon as I finish eating this old person sandwich.
I intended to write a Drunken Recollection on another subject (you’ll just have to wait for that now), but someone my friends and I met tonight changed all that:
Tara – The Drunk Girl at the Bar.
My friend, Chris, hosts a live trivia show at a particular bar on Mondays, and I typically don’t attend. Nothing against him, but Mondays are one of my “laying low” days. On this particular Garfield’s favorite day of the week, I had planned on picking up some topsoil to do some yard work before winter hits, but I got stuck late at work. My other friend, Jeremy, had his class cancelled, and Chris’ wife Venessa was going to trivia, so I bit.
Upon arriving, the three of us sat at the end of the bar, and Chris was at the windows. He had to inform us that he had a fan – Tara. As she repeatedly told everyone, she was his “ass-sistant,” and she thanked everyone with a kindly “konnichiwa” as if it was a “domo arigato.”
She was there alone no domo arigato to her friends.
She met Chris’ “wifey” and shared the tale of how she was engaged for four years until she broke it off
…in May or March… one of those M months. Maybe April…
because he wanted her to be a baby making machine.
She had school and worked nine-to-five and didn’t seem much older than 22.
What Tara made me question about life is this:
How responsible are we for other people?
She somehow became attached to our group (namely Chris), and I wondered who was looking out for her. Luckily, her parents came to pick her up, but it made me think about a creepy dude I had seen in Best Buy’s parking lot prior to heading to trivia. He stood at the edge of the lot, near his rusted minivan, with his hipster ensemble: too tight vintage clothes, an over-sized snapshot camera, and a creepy beard. He surveyed the adjacent Meijer’s parking lot. Something about it didn’t feel right… like I should intervene and do something…
Smallville's Sam Jones & Big Brother's Adam Jasinski
I don't oxycodone the abuse of prescription medication.
Within 24 hours, it was announced that two former “tv stars” were picked up by the DEA in connection with buying and selling oxycodone AKA oxycontin AKA hillbilly heroin AKA Rush Limbaugh’s best friend.
Sam Jonesplayed young Superman’s best friend in the first three seasons of Smallville, and Adam Jasinski played “Baller” on the ninth season of Big Brother.
Jones was picked up in Los Angeles and had in his possession 10,000 pills; Jasinski was picked up North Reading, Massachusetts with 2000 pills, which he purchased with the half-million dollars he won on the summer long show.
What’s the connection that makes this a possible Coinkydink or a possible Coinkydonk?
The fact that they happened so close together, people. Isn’t that enough?
How weird is it that the DEA targeted two individuals selling hillbilly heroin in two different states with two different amounts in their possession? How weird is it that they were featured in two different shows on two different networks and that were opposite styles (sci-fi drama and reality)?
Jones could have been the Hollywood mastermind, a real-life villain if you will. And he used his connections to lure the champion Jasinski that just won $500,000 to distribute pills in a sorta small town.
Real-life villain… Superman meets reality tv… small town… North Reading like Smallville… the feds are watching… Big Brother has cameras everywhere… their last names both start with J… Jor-El is Superman’s father’s… Julie Chen hosted Big Brother… anything?
For those of you uninitiated in the ways of the world wide web, ASCII (pronounced ass-KEE) stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
BASICally, this encompasses all 95 printable characters on your keyboard. A term more commonly used in the early days of home computing, many pieces of arthave been created using ASCII (and summarily ink ribboned out through dot matrix printers and onto continuous sheets).
Until now, I have not witnessed a masterpiece like this:
Never upset a WOOCII...
Okay, the art is sub par, but the site is insane (click here). It’s (almost) the entire first film animated in ASCII! DOS it help erase the memory of the prequels? Not quite. But Rob Bricken of the awesomely nerdy Topless Robot has theories about what went wrong (or did everything go as planned?):
I’ll tell you my greatest nerd theory, which I’m still kind of proud of — regarding the midichlorians from Phantom Menace. Like all of you, I was aghast that the Force had suddenly turned into biology and racked my brain trying to explain it. And I did — I became convinced that (George) Lucas had put it in the movie to suck on purpose. I reasoned that Lucas was intentionally making these early Jedi shitty, to which I also ascribed Qui-Gon’s dickish refusal to un-enslave Anakin’s mom — and that Lucas was trying to tell us these Jedi had lost their way with the Force. They had turned it into a science, forbidden Jedi from loving. Had shitty committee meetings instead of doing good. They’d lost their way, and that’s why they could no longer sense the Dark Side when it was right under their fucking noses. So I figured by the third movie, there was going to be a major moment of revelation as the Jedi were getting destroyed, probably by Yoda, about how they’d screwed up, and in that sense, by destroying the corrupted Jedi, Anakin truly was bringing balance back to the Force. And when Luke restarted the Jedi order, he would embrace the spirituality and the compassion that the Prequel Jedi had forgotten, finishing the work.
Wow! What a difference! (In the people's sizes...)
This dream had me in some seafaring town, like Jaws’ Amity, Lost Boys’ Santa Carla, or Dogma’s New Jersey boardwalk. I was discussing with some friends the prices that Blockbuster pays for movies. One that came up:
A Hallowizzle Classizzle
Late at night, on that very same pier, a creature as silent as the night (or at least quieter than the crashing waves), accosted me. With its razor-sharp claws and fangs, it dismembered me. I didn’t fight back. In fact, I was rather accepting of my fate.
I remember coming back to awareness, but by this point, I was merely bones picked clean of their meat, buried beneath the wood planks.
Still sentient, I was fully aware of the conversations being held above about the Blockbuster store and the amount of rentals they needed to make their money back on each movie. Nobody seemed to miss me.
I THOUGHT YOU WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO DIE IN YOUR DREAMS!
In retrospect, I’m wondering if my subconscious was really thinking about the plot of this film:
Well, not the whole plot...
Or maybe it was about my hidden concerns about the future of Blockbuster itself. Ha! Of course it’s not that!
INGREDIENTS: The usze… beer.
(SIDENOTE: Does the usze work as a shortened version of the usual? Would the ush be better?)
All I have left to say is this: pack for cold weather.
monkeyBLOG monkeyDO 