D'oh! Matt Groening On The Daily Show

Annoying? Yes. But Also Funny

If you can get through the annoying part, there's a pretty good punchline.

And Miles To Go Before I Get The Hell Out Of Here

As I’m writing this it’s not yet 10 AM, a fact which speaks volumes for what the rest of the remaining 8+ hours I’ve yet to spend here will be like.
I am heartened only by the fact that after today is over I won’t have to return for 11 days, as I’m heading home to Michigan for a week on Tuesday.
Yesterday it was confirmed that we have, in fact, hired Clueless the Wonder Intern.
Fortunately it was also confirmed that he will not be working on my shift.
Ominously, the news about which shift he would be on was qualified with “For now.”
Thursday night after work I met up with my realtor and we went to the house I’m interested in to discuss things with the owner.
We made her a good offer – the best she’s likely to get considering that the house was on the market for 320 days before her listing expired – and I think things went well, but she said she needed to think about it for a while.
There was something about the woman who owns the house that was familiar, but I think that’s because she’s a certain kind of person. So I haven’t necessarily seen her before, but I’ve seen people like her.
I think there are lots of people like that: people who appear to be variations on a theme.
I know I’ve discussed the notion before, so that’s all I’ll say about it.
The man she introduced as her “friend” seemed like a nice enough guy. He works in printing, so we had some common ground and traded some printing war stories.
Interestingly enough, he had actually worked on a print job for my realtor a couple of years ago.
In any case, we’ll have to wait and see how things shake out. If she doesn’t go for it, I’ll just walk away. It’s not like I’m under any sort of time crunch. I can afford to wait to find the right place.
One thing that was kind of entertaining was watching David, my realtor, run the numbers past her. I don’t think he was deliberately trying to confuse her, but it was sort of like watching someone run the shell game or the “I didn’t give you a ten I gave you a twenty” scam. Seriously, it was a tremendous example of sleight of hand, and it’s possible that he missed his calling.
The meeting after work meant that I got home a bit later than usual, so I ended up going to bed later than usual. Just in time, in fact, to be kept awake by stupid new dog barking.
On the previous night, he had woken me up at the same time.
At 3 AM this morning I was awoken by the crowd of loud drunks which I think congregates on the balcony of the owner of the stupid old dog.
So what was it that I was saying about not being under a time crunch to move?
*Sigh*
One good thing that happened yesterday, though, was that my Hot Chicks DVD had arrived.
When I opened it I was pleased to discover that they’d included a special bonus: three genuine Chick Tracts!
I’ve yet to watch the DVD, though I imagine I will be doing so at some point today.
In any case I’m unlikely to have much more to say that won’t consist entirely of me complaining about how long and boring the day is, so I guess I’ll bring this to a close.

Gee, THERE'S A Surprise...

You Are Very Skeptical

Your personal motto is: "Prove it." While some ideas, like life after death, may seem nice... You aren't going to believe them simply because it feels good. You let science and facts be your guide... Even if it means you don't share the beliefs of those around you.

How Skeptical Are You?

$142.39

The title refers to the amount of change I cashed in today.
My change urn has been filled nearly to capacity for a while now, so I’ve been curious to see just how much money that adds up to, and given that I’ll be going on vacation next week and will want to have some extra cash, now seemed like just as good a time as any to find out.
I ended up going out into the world a little earlier than usual today, as I’d gotten a text message from Scott letting me know that he wouldn’t be making it to the comic shop at our usual time, as he’d been late for work.
So, since I wasn’t going to be meeting him, I figured I’d just head out and get my comics and stop at the bank along the way.
And that’s what I did. The prophecy has been fulfilled!
Not much else of note has happened today, or is likely to happen.
Tomorrow, however, should be the beginning of the end of having to see Clueless the Wonder Intern, as I believe his internship ends next week, and I will be gone during that time.
There has been, sadly, talk of actually taking him on as full-time employee – over my objections – but even if they do, odds are he’ll be put on a different shift and I’ll seldom if ever have to interact with him.
Anyway, dull day makes for a dull entry, which explains why people have been coming here and getting consistently bored since 2004, so I guess that’ll do it for now.

Pulp Education

For many years I’ve understood that comic books were inextricably linked to the old “pulp” magazines that preceded them, with comics often “borrowing” story elements and characters from them. Many companies have even gone so far as to publish comics based on the old pulp characters.
Despite having at least a passing familiarity with some of the major pulp fiction heroes, I’d never actually read any of the pulps until recently when I found a bunch of Doc Savage stories in e-book form and loaded them up on my PDA.
Since that time I’ve learned a lot, discovering just how deeply comics creators dug into the pulps in “borrowing” concepts, characters, dialogue, and, well, pretty much every element, and that their impact is not limited to comics. Pretty much every post-pulp fiction storytelling medium has been strongly influenced by those cheap, lurid little magazines.
Beyond that, though, I’ve learned many other useful things about life and the world we live it in, and I thought I should share them with you.

What I’ve Learned From Reading Doc Savage:

Eskimos stink!
Attractive people are smarter, kinder, and just generally better than unattractive people.
Conversely, unattractive people are roughly 99% more likely to be evil than attractive people.
The darker your skin, the dumber you are.
Having zero interest in the opposite sex and keeping yourself constantly surrounded by big, sweaty men does not necessarily mean that you’re gay, apparently.
Mongolians randomly say “Aiieeee!” in the course of casual conversations.
Lobotomies are the most effective weapon in the war on crime.
Even the smartest woman is still just a daffy dame.

And that’s just a sampling of the knowledge contained within. Bear in mind too that I’ve only read four complete stories, with nearly 30 more to go, so once I finish, my head will be bursting with useful information!
Not much has happened today, beyond getting my car back. For some reason it only ended up costing me about $40 as opposed to the $300 I was quoted yesterday.
Not sure what the deal is, as according to the invoice they did actually work on the clutch.
In any case, I'm not complaining.

My Beckham Dilemma

As various news outlets keep insistently informing me, Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham and her husband David have arrived in America.
Mrs. Beckham was a member of the 90’s pop group the Spice Girls, and her husband is a world-famous professional soccer player.
The dilemma I have is that I can’t decide which fact about her is a more compelling reason to not give a shit about anything she says, does, or wears, and I have a similar problem with her husband.

This Entry Contains Filler

I spent most of the afternoon working on a rather lengthy entry – a review and analysis of the Jack T. Chick film The Light of the World – that I’m not entirely pleased with and which I think needs to be retooled significantly before being posted.
So I’m not sure when/if you’ll get to read it, but I hardly think that constitutes a major loss.
I never got a call from the shop so I guess my car wasn’t finished by the end of the day.
I called my realtor to let him know what happened at my meeting this morning. Turns out he already knew, as he’d talked to the finance guy, and he said that there’s probably a lot we can do in terms of getting the price lowered on the property I’m interested in, which is good news, I think. I’m having to guess, as most of what he said …ounded…ike…is…utting…nd…out…efore dropping off completely.
When I tried calling him back I got his voicemail, so I have no idea what exactly he had to say on the subject.
When I was leaving the mortgage office this morning, the guy I’d been talking to noticed the ankh on the back of my neck and asked where I’d gotten my tattoo done.
Not wanting to say, “I got it in rehab” while standing in the lobby of an office building, I said, “Let’s just call it homemade.”
The office building is actually located in the little town center by that nice theater that Scott and I sometime go to. Since I was there, I had thought about taking in a movie afterwards, but the only movie I would have wanted to see – Knocked Up – wasn’t showing until after noon, and I didn’t feel like hanging around that long.
While I was waiting for Scott and Jamie to arrive at Uno’s for lunch, some guy came up to me and asked for directions on how to get to 28 South. I told him what I thought was the best route, while some lady whom he’d asked earlier sat listening and nodding her head. After he was on his way the lady said that she had a hard time trying to visualize the best route, which is why he’d had to turn to me after talking to her.
We chatted for a little bit until the person that she was meeting showed up. I told her about the time I’d lived in Red Wing and had been out walking one afternoon shortly after moving to where I was living at the time. A couple pulled up alongside me and asked me how to get to a certain street. I was forced to admit that I’d only just moved there and didn’t know any street names. They thanked me anyway and turned around and drove off in the opposite direction. Shortly after that I got to the end of the block and found myself at an intersection with the street they’d been looking for.
After her friend arrived and they went inside I thought to myself that this was just another example of how I never get to have chance encounters with attractive young woman, as this lady, while pleasant enough, was probably close to my mother’s age.
My own preferences aside, I don’t think even my mother is desperate enough for me to meet someone that she’d want me hooking up with someone in her age bracket.
Still, why couldn’t it have been an attractive woman my age? What is the universal law that prevents me from ever being in a circumstance in which I can just have this random chance encounter with someone other than guys and women in their 60s? Single women in their 30s don’t eat lunch?
Granted, even if I did have a chance encounter with someone other than a guy or a member of AARP the odds are that nothing would come of it, but it would be nice to find that out for certain.
Oh well.
In any case, this was mostly just a filler entry to make up for the entry I didn’t post, and seeing as how I’m not really under any obligation to post at al, I suppose I can bring this to a close.

A Few Updates

So it looks like I can actually afford to buy the house I like, though there is still some question as to whether I will.
I dropped my car off early this morning and got the loaner.
Turns out that my clutch is 65% worn out, which is not worn out enough for my warranty to cover replacing it. However, if I were to wait for it wear out completely it might do so after the warranty has expired anyway, and, with the warranty work that's being done today, if I had the clutch replaced I'd only have to pay for the parts, as the labor is essentially covered by the warranty work.
It's till $300, but I suppose it's better than gambling on it wearing out later and costing me upwards of $1,100.
On my way back home from meeting with the finance guy I stopped at Wal-Mart and realized that it was close to noon, so I called up Scott to see if he wanted to meet for lunch. I had him invite Jamie as well, and we met at Uno's.
I decided to put off my grocery shopping until tomorrow, as, after being out and about since 7:30, I just wanted to go home.
I may have to go out again, though, as there's a chance (I'm guessing it's a slim one) that my car will be finished today.
I think the loaner they gave me is the exact same car they gave me last time I needed a loaner. It's definitely the same model, but I'm pretty sure it's the same car, too.
Anyway, I'll post a lengthier entry later.

The Quest For The Lost Mug or I'd Need A Ladder To Reach Her

When I got home from work last night and was pulling into a parking space the lady from downstairs was on the sidewalk walking stupid dog.
I would be lying if I said that I didn’t contemplate “accidentally” gunning the engine, jumping the curb, and turning the little bastard into a nothing more than a stain.
Of course I didn’t do that and instead returned the lady’s friendly wave.
Tomorrow I’ll be meeting with the lender my realtor likes to work with to see if it’s even remotely possible for me to get a loan that I can afford to pay on the house I want to buy.
At the very least I’ll get an idea of what I can afford if it’s not possible, and will have a better idea of what to look for in terms of potential housing.
My weekend at work was largely uneventful. The only noteworthy thing that happened was the loss of my insulated company logo mug – which no longer has the company logo on it, as it wore off some time ago. It was the old logo anyway.
In any case, the mug had faithfully served all of my water holding needs for years, until that fateful day last week when I left it on the sink in the locker room when I stopped to use the facilities on my way out to my car at the end of the day.
I didn’t notice that it wasn’t in my car until Wednesday morning when I went to take it out so that I could transfer it to the loaner that I thought I was going to be using, and I forgot to look for it when I went in for training Wednesday afternoon.
On Thursday morning I was looking around for it, and was checking the cabinet in the break room where people keep their mugs when someone mentioned seeing one on the sink in the locker room the day before. That’s precisely where I thought I’d left it, so I went in to check. Alas, it wasn’t there, though there was someone in the locker room who confirmed that it had been sitting there all week.
I checked with security to see if anyone had brought it to them for lost and found, but no one had.
So I sadly accepted the fact that my mug was well and truly gone.
And then grabbed one from the cabinet that didn’t have a name on it, washed it out, and claimed it as my own.
What, I was supposed to mourn for a mug?
And that was pretty much the extent of my excitement at work over the weekend.
Last night marked the season premiere of Property Ladder on TLC.
(Quick side note: remember when I did my entry about cable networks and mentioned TLC’s obsession with little people and suggested that they might end up sending the little people to Miami to get tattoos? Well, on the ads for the next episode of Miami Ink, guess what I saw? A little person getting a tattoo. Sure, it’s not someone from the actual little people show, but it’s still kind of an eerie coincidence.)
If you’ve never seen the show, it’s essentially yet another house flipping show, though it focuses primarily on people who are trying the whole house flipping thing for the first time and really have no idea what they’re doing. As a consequence, there can be some severe train wreck episodes in which you see people burying themselves in debt, marriages collapsing due to the various pressures, and quite frequently things just don’t end happily.
Quite honestly, it’s a little painful and kind of depressing to watch.
As sort of a twist, at the beginning of the show the host, a real estate expert, consults with the would-be flippers, listening to their plans and offering suggestions – and criticism – in an effort to help make sure that their budgets and schedules are realistic and to try to get them to maximize the payoff for their efforts.
Sometimes they listen to her. Most of the time they don’t. When they do, things generally work out better for them. When they don’t, well, like I said: train wrecks.
She shows up at various points in the process to see how they’re doing, and, without doing so in so may words, say, “I told you so,” as they tell her about how not taking her advice made them blow their budgets and their timelines.
Now, to be honest, the host is the primary reason I watch the show because she’s hot...yet ice cold.
Her name is Kirsten Kemp, and she is a tall cold glass of ice water. She tries to come of as warm, always hugging everyone and smiling, but she’s not fooling anyone: that is one frosty bitch.
Think Martha Stewart, only younger, and sexy, and with a kick-ass rack.
Kirsten is all passive-aggressive cocked eyebrows and barely-restrained contempt.
(I like to call her Kirsten Contempt.)
She would not look out of place with a riding crop in her hand.
Oh sure, she’s supposedly trying to help people and looking out for their best interests, but you know she doesn’t want them to listen. She wants them to fail so that she can lord it over them. If she could get away with it, she’d be wearing spiked heels and using them to grind the failed flippers’ faces into the cheap-ass laminate floors that they put in despite her insistence that high-end requires real wood.
And I have to say, she gives me real wood.
Let me tell you, I would love to have her look at me like I’m a retard when I tell her my too-aggressive asking price, or raise that eyebrow contemptuously…right before I make that ice queen melt into a puddle.
(Or file a restraining order.)
The only problem with Property Ladder is that we really don’t get to see enough of Kirsten (in more ways than one). She shows up at the beginning to give her advice, stops by somewhere in the middle to check the progress, and then comes in at the end to see how things turned out and to try one last time to talk some sense into them (and, as mentioned, say “I told you so.”).
All told, we get maybe ten minutes’ worth of Kirsten.
Still, there are other reasons to watch the show. In general, I like to see the whole “before and after” aspect of house flipping shows, and I’m interested in seeing some of the design ideas people come up with.
And though there are often train wrecks, I generally do hope that things will work out for them and I hate to see them fail, especially when they work really hard at it but just can’t seem to catch a break.
(Like the cute girl whose cabinet doors were stolen by the guy she’d hired to resurface them for her, though in the end things worked out and she actually sold her place for more than her asking price. Of course, things worked out for her, I think, just because she was so cute. I’ll bet the person who bought the place was a guy and he did it hoping that she’d go out with him. Seriously, she was a hot bartender who got most of her labor done for her by her male regulars from the bar.)
I generally don’t have that much sympathy for the people who totally and willfully ignore Mistress Kirsten’s commands…I mean, Kirsten’s advice, in part because they tend to be kind of stupid and make really, really idiotic decisions, but mostly because she’s just so hot when she’s smug and delivering well-deserved punishment, and it just makes me want her to tell me that I’m bad and that I need a spanking.
*Sigh*
They seriously need to put her in fishnets and leather.
In any case, if you’re into house flipping shows – or hot blonde pseudo-dominatrixes – you should definitely check it out. It’s on Saturdays at 8 Eastern on TLC.
That’s all I have for now. I’ll likely be posting a special Jack T. Chick-centric entry within the next couple of days, so you have that to look forward to (or to avoid).
(In the interest of fairness, I should note that I have no doubt that in real life Kirsten is a very nice and genuinely warm person, and I have no real basis for believing that the heft of a cat o’ nine tails would feel comfortable in her hand. I will say, though, that I have no doubt that she would look amazing in a corset and thigh-high boots with stiletto heels.)