Eh?

What do they call black people in Canada? Are they African-Canadians? Or is North America loose enough a term they can still be African-Americans?

More Springfield Weirdness

No pictures this time so I will just have to paint the pictures verbally...

Weird #1)
I was sitting at a stop light and a car pulled up next to me, it's hood is about even with my passenger door so I can't see the driver. Rap music was a thumping and bumping very loud. (Please, let us not confuse, urban contemp. or hip-hop with Rap, this was RAP.)

Other than being reminded once again that this is the only form of music that I really do not care for I did not pay much attention one way or the other. Then the light turned green and the booming rap car gradually overtook me. The only occupant of the car was a grey haired old man!
Holy shattered stereotypes Batman!

Then I got this mental image of a guy with a boom box lashed to his walker shuffling down the hall of the "rest" home booming out, "So I busted a cap in my bitches ass..."

Weird, very weird.

Weird #2)
I was eating breakfast at a restaurant, I got up to leave. I am walking down a row a tables towards the door. At the table on the end of the row a woman is seated facing me. She has large boobs AND a very deep V cut shirt. Ladies, I do my best not to ogle and drool but c'mon! :)

So I am walking down the aisle towards her glancing at her occasionally as I get closer. Here are the thoughts that ran though my mind on each glance... (Bear in mind this is why they never made the other side of the movie "What Women Want" we already know what men are thinking all the time and we don't need to be reminded of it. :) )

"Oh my- Look at that! Thank you for sharing ma'am!"
"Might be a little much for a Sunday morning but I am not complaining, very nice."
As I get closer I can see a football shaped dark area right above the cleavage crack...
"What is that? Is that a shadow?"
Getting closer..
"The light is not right for a shadow- Maybe it's an odd sunburn?"
Closer still
"Is it a birth mark?"
Closer yet...
OH DEAR LORD IT'S HAIR! IT'S A PATCH OF LONG BLACK HAIR you can see from across the room! The hairs are actually long enough to be matted up! AIIIIEEEEEE!

Ok, I do NOT get this. If you have the kind of boobs you want to show off. (and you don't wear a blouse like this if you are not trying to show off) then my goodness do something about the fur! A shot of Nair? A razor? Black and Decker hedge clippers? Something! At the very least don't wear a blouse that pulls eyes eyes right to the patch of fur.

Yep, very weird.

With all that said though, now I am jealous, she has better chest hair than I do. :(

Ah Springfield

Just a post of odd things seen around Springfield lately. Well in addition to pajama's at the fast food joint.



I am sure someone thought this was very cute but it merely annoyed me!




Oh my god it finally happened! McDonalds killed one mid meal!

Notice the other guy caught me taking a picture of his buddy! That always happens to me at the topless beach too! I gotta learn to be more sneaky when snapping pics! ;)



Really? Harry Potter has to be around here somewhere looking for his train! I swear this picture is not doctored! I have never seen a half street before.



57? Really? 57? WTH? How did they pull 57 out of their butts? Not 55, not 60 but 57? That is soooo weird!

This is the kind of thing that makes you start to question the universe. Does it really exist? Are we all just figments of some mad god's imagination? How do molecules combine in such a way as to create life? I mean seriously, this the kind of thing that leads philosophy majors to commit suicide! Solipsism. SOLIPSISM!! AHHHHHH!!

Ok, I'm better now. Obviously Freshetta is trying to drive McDonalds out of business. I mean if all the philosophy majors commit suicide who will be left to say, "Would you like fries with that?"?

I suppose it's only right that someone take down those grandpa killing bastards!

Wake Up Call!

I was in a new clients offices and kind finding my way around and man did I get a surprise! I swore I checked the door and it said "Men's Room" but frankly I did not pay that much attention to it. So I go in and round the corner and I come face to face with...



What the heck? A quick scan and I see there are no urinals either (as if I needed more confirmation!) OH CRAP! My first day on the job and I am in the Women's restroom! Of great, tagged a pervert on the first day! I back out quickly looking around to see who might have caught me. No one is in sight so it seems like I am safe! So I am in the hallway outside the restroom ever so casually getting a drink of water, playing it cool ya know? I am looking for the real men's room now and what the heck? The door I just backed out of in a near panic is clearly labeled "Men's Room". Is someone pulling a prank on the new guy? Hanging a men's room sign over the real sign?





Well after talking to a few people it turns out the former occupant of this building was an insurance company. They almost exclusively hired women 'clerks'. The only men were mangers, so there were many women's rooms and few men's rooms. So when this tenant with a male/female ratio more in line with society as a whole moved into the building they were very short on men's rooms and converted several women's rooms into men's room. When I say "converted" I really mean they just taped a "men's room" sign on the door. :) (nice touch using logo watermarked stationary to print the men's room sign on. I mean it is important to know WHO'S mens room it really is, right? )

Ok, so surprisingly enough I have not spent a lot of time in women's rest rooms before. Man those stalls are just full of stuff! You got the BIG TP roll, the used "napkin" box (I assume), the seat cover dispenser, the pipes coming out of the wall...Man it looks like the engineering spaces on a WWII submarine in there! I keep waiting to hear the klaxon go off while someone yells "Dive! Dive! Dive!" over the intercom!

Wont get fooled again!

Oh man they got me! Being a man I really don't pay that much attention to toilet paper. I generally grab whatever and am OK with it. Last time I bought TP though I got this stuff that was real thick and fluffy and just barely fit on the roll it was so big. I liked it. So the next time I bought TP I was looking for the same stuff again, (although I had no idea of the "make and model") so I was looking for the big thick rolls again. Aha found it!

Took it home and yeah, it's so big it barely fits on the roll alright but it is NOT soft and fluffy! This stuff is worse than what hiway rest stops usually provide. It's truly John Wayne TP (it's rough and tough and it won't take shit off of anybody) I mean you can actually see little flakes of bark embedded in it. This is clearly orphanage grade TP.

I'm too cheap to throw it away so I'll just be walking funny for a few weeks. Mmmmm, maybe I can use I use it to polish chrome or buff some scratches out of the car? It's about the right texture.

Speaking of No Pants...

See, as big a redneck as I think I am I am NOT the redneckiest! At least I wear pants in public, ummm and NO, pajama pants do not count! I am sure that is a rule written down somewhere.

Home Alone

Erika is gone on Vacation and the other room mate moved out today. Whelp, we won't be needing these pants for awhile! Ahhhhhhh!

:)

Redneck Roots

In this weeks reader mail Amanda asks, "I am interested to know what makes you call yourself a redneck. Will u tell me?"


Well sure I will tell you! I call myself a redneck because I grew up on a farm 10 miles outside of a town of 480 people. So in many ways I am a very simple man of very simple pleasures from a very simple way of life. From a place where everybody knew everybody (damn it, you *can't* hide anything) and the best place to pick up girls was family reunions. (kidding) :)

Our phone book was about 20 pages total including ads. I remember being a kid and seeing a commercial on TV for a variety show (who remembers those?) where they said, "See the worlds strongest man tear a phone book in half!" I remember being quite confused and thinking, "I am only 10 years old and I can tear a phone book in half. Why would they make a bid deal about that?

In spite of 8 years of higher education, outside of formal settings I still say "aint" quite a bit. In fact, "thatanna" is a word in my personal lexicon, as in "thatanna gonna work!". :)

My mother was not ready to be a mother yet so as a child I spent a lot of time with her parents and her aunts and uncles. So the people I thought of as my aunts and uncles were really my great aunts and uncles. So in many ways I was a generation behind as well being a hick! :) Then to top it off those folks were NOT into the latest and greatest. Case in point, my (great) uncle Frank used horse drawn farm equipment until after World War II. Then he used the hand crank to start his tractor until 1972. "A starter is just one more thing to break" he often told people

I was little but I remember that winter day when he could not get the tractor started. He cranked and cranked that little hand crank and that tractor would not start. It was bitterly cold that morning but I stayed warm just from the endless streak of cussing that burst forth between every bought of cranking. That after noon we went to town and ordered a battery, starter and generator for the tractor.(in a town of 450 people, other than groceries and general supplies you don't just go buy something, you order it)

Can you imagine? Three years after man landed on the moon we still hand started tractors.

Oh, you want to hear "Old School"? The first thing I had to do in the morning when I woke up was to start the fire in the kitchen stove. (that big cast iron stove took time to heat up to cooking temps!) Corn cobs and a little kerosene make good kindling then start feeding in the larger pieces of wood. For regular cooking I only had to stoke the firebox on one end of the stove but if my Aunt(s) were baking then I had to stoke the fireboxes on both end of the stove. The BIGGEST part of being a good baker is fire control!

So where did the fire wood come from you ask? Well, you see they had this long wooden handle with a wedge shaped piece of steel attached to one end. By swinging the steel wedge against a piece of wood enough times you could cut it. No, no! I *am* serious!

Now that the wood is cut to one foot lengths, think you are done? Heh, nope! After you cut it to length then you have to split it. The best firewood for cook stoves is about the same diameter as your wrist. So if you start with a piece of Sycamore one foot in diameter, that is a lot of splitting. I liked splitting better than chopping because with some practice you can split a piece of wood with one blow where as chopping took a while and I am totally into instant gratification!

Now in the summer it did not take long to chop and split enough wood to keep the kitchen stove going. The winter though was a different story. Besides the cook stove there were three other "pot belly" stoves in the house to feed wood to as well. Then I had heaters in three stock tanks as well. You have to keep the stock tanks thawed so the live stock can drink. An adult cow consumes 15 gallons of water per day. You can't have them licking ice! :) So with six fires burning 24 hours and a seventh at mealtimes firewood became a full time job.

No wonder I was such a skinny kid!

It's also no wonder I grew up dreaming of space travel. There is no wood to chop in space!

Is that enough Amanda or shall I go on? :)

Ouch!

This vision of ruin and destruction brought to you courtesy of my boat.

These were transmission gears. A few large expensive parts were converted into many smaller worthless parts in less than a second! I never thought of a transmission in that way before, a sort of a matter converter if you will. :(

{sniff} Yes, I'm feeling quite pouty.

Ah technology!

I finally broke down and bought a fancy smart phone. As a geek I LOVE smart phones but as a redneck I break a lot of things so I tend to shy away from expensive delicate things.

However, I finally reached the critical tipping point where enough people were annoyed at my lack of texting ability that I finally shouted down my inner redneck and bought a phone capable of texting. Never being one to half-ass it as long as I was going to text it was gonna have a real keyboard, I mean none of this hokey press 7 four times for S crap for ME! :)

See it here if you care

So now I can surf the web and play games and all that stuff too. Plus my inner redneck loves how the phone slides two ways. To top it all off this phone is made at least partially out of this mysterious ancient material called met-all. When I was kid they made everything out of this odd substance, lunch boxes, cars, TVs, furniture, almost everything! Nowadays most of that stuff is made with solidified petroleum byproducts.

I like my met-all phone! It's feels quite manly!

And armed with the latest gee-whiz smart phone technology I don't have to wait until I get home and boot up my 'puter to delete my spam. My spam follows me everywhere I go and even politely chimes to get my attention! Ain't technology cool?

twit-ing?

Why are individual posts on twitter called tweets? Wouldn't the singular of twittering be a twit? How is that a tweet?

We will add this to the long list of human behaviors Rob's does not get.

Oh Dear Lord!

Kill me now, I have now seen everything and can go in peace! I just saw a sign advertising "Pet Massage"! In-home pet massage no less! I mean who can be bothered to take their pet to the pet massage studio? Only in-home will do!

Wow! I would really love to meet the loon that actually pays someone else to massage their pets! I'll bet I could really sell them some stuff. Maybe some credit card bingo where they read their credit card numbers to me then I tell them if they won or not. Then followed up by a game of hangman where their mothers maiden name is the secret word.

In-home pet massage!? What's next, doggie hookers? Oh wait, they already do have 'stud service'! Eeep!

Random Weird Observations

Yesterday I was at Wal-mart and I had a weird moment- there was a young man (early 20’s) who was CLEARLY very fit doing his shopping in one of those little electric scooters Wal-Mart provides for the elderly. Even though it was a WTF moment it really made me feel better about myself. I mean I get lazy and procrastinate on housework or yard work or going to the gym and I feel bad about it but WOW, at least I am not too lazy walk when I buy food!

Another Burger King post- seems like every time I go there it’s a weird moment. I got some breakfast there this morning on the way to work. I ordered milk. The drive through person asked if I wanted white milk or chocolate milk? That struck me as weird. Who does NOT say chocolate milk when they want Chocolate milk? Plus “white” milk struck me as an very odd word choice. I don’t think I have ever heard plain milk called white milk before. I mean do they have yellow milk or blue milk? We really need to nail it down that I, in fact, want the white variety of milk?

White milk. So does the fact I don’t care much for chocolate milk make me a racist?

Oh God! Now I know why I love Fruity Pebbles but don’t care much for Cocoa Pebbles! (or Cocoa Puffs). I guess like the all the celebrities I need to check into rehab to deal with my preference for "white" milk.

Wow. The things we learn about ourselves while visiting Burger King.

New Gameshow!

It's America's most exciting new game show! "Count the Illegal Aliens!" In this weeks episode we will count the illegals after a potentially life ending major felony! So go ahead and join the fun America!

The one who comes closest to the actual number of illegals without going over wins! Sounds easy right? So click the button and try your luck!



So how many did you get?

Sleeping on the Plane

This last trip home I actually fell asleep on the plane.

This is a big deal because I often don't sleep well and very rarely can I sleep during the day at all and I just never fall asleep on airplanes.

I was taking the old Southwest home reading my Popular Science en route as usual. My eyes were burning while I was reading so I shut them for a minute and BOOM! The next thing I know it's an hour later and the flight attendant is waking me up asking me to put my seat up for landing.

Wow. That has never happened before so it was very weird.

I felt very refreshed for the rest of the day so that was part was very cool but I am not sure I am ready to start sleeping in public on a regular basis. I mean a little drool on your pillow is not too big a deal but unless you are a baby, having drooly chin in front of 150 people is just not very suave.