I meant to write about this when I first saw it a few weeks ago, but wound up forgetting about it. By now, the perpetrator must be way off somewhere within the highest heights of Permanent Awesome Mode, but the incident still needs to be relayed to the broader public. Or, well, at least the slightly-broader-than-just-me public that reads this blog.
So I was on my way home one somewhat fine day and came across a most curious sight. A fairly large tree was freshly felled in a patch of grass next to the stairs outside my apartment building. There were cut logs, wood chips and sawdust scattered all about the stump. Sitting on top of the stump was a slightly bent, dented and scratched badminton racket.
Now, if your thought process even vaguely resembles mine, that was the funniest thing you've seen all month, possibly all year. Obviously, someone had come by and hacked down the tree in a fit of rage with their sturdy badminton racket. Or, someone had passed by the already felled tree holding an old badminton racket they were about to throw away and thought it would be hilarious to batter the racket a bit more and leave it on top of the stump, bringing the former scenario to mind in future passersby.
There are other possibilities of course. The racket could be the avatar of the vengeful tree, waiting patiently for that dude with the chainsaw to come back so it could get its revenge...somehow. Maybe the dudes who chopped it down found the racket inside the tree and didn't know what to do with it, so they just left it there. Perhaps a battered badminton racket is the calling card of the Great DC Tree Killer, infamous across the neighborhoods for his razor sharp teeth and inscrutable wit.
My preferred theory is that a student at a local high school had just come home from a really, really bad day of badminton practice. Hating the world, the slight young woman was ready to inflict a violent death on the first person who happened to look at her the wrong way. The racket she held in her trembling hand, the racket that she was so unable to find success with on the court, would do nicely for the task. That first person with the wrong look happened to be a tree.
It was all over in minutes. I mean, she PWNED that tree. FTW and such.
Useless now in its damaged, yet amazingly intact considering the deed it had just performed, state, she left the racket on top of her kill as a warning to the world. Oddly elated, she returned home and had mashed potatoes and porkchops with applesauce for dinner. All was well.
I think there's a lesson for all of us in that story. When faced with the desolation of a ruined day, when nothing seems to be going right, when life seems to be singling you out to be the object of all the little tortures it loves to inflict, just grab your trusty badminton racket and beat a large living thing to death with it and your life will turn around faster than you can say, "WTF?!"
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Lame Super Powers
Now, there is a restaurant in Delaware named "Crabby Dick's," but that is really neither here nor there. For the moment, let's focus on super powers that really won't get you very far if you are out to either (a) rule the world or (b) be all straight edge and stop people from ruling the world.
POWER # 1 = Microwave Ass
-Being ever-ready-and-able to "cook" a Hot Pocket inside your traveling microwave/anus isn't really that great, as convenient as that is, because you will only, amazingly, succeed at making Hot Pockets taste even more like ass. On the bright side, if you are a foot soldier in an evil villain's army, you can easily be converted into a suicide bomber: just stick a (metal) fork in your ass and you're done.
POWER # 2 = No-Scratch Throat
-"Look at him go! He's been coughing non-stop for days and his voice still isn't hoarse! He's amazing!" Yeah. Unless your goal is to set the world record for random offers for cough-drops in a one week period, this power likely won't get you very far. Perhaps you can drive people insane with your constant, pain-free hacking, snorting and throat-clearing, but you're probably more likely to succeed, and faster, with the most annoying sound in the world.
POWER # 3 = Hot Sauce For Blood
-The xenomorphs from the Alien series have fantastically corrosive acid for blood, making it incredibly dangerous to kill them. You have a solid job at a South of the Border restaurant after state regulators waived a section of the health code, allowing you to bleed on customers' nachos. The kids love the novelty of it and squeal with delight as you wince with pain after opening yet another wound on your scarred arm with a steak knife, dripping tastiness. You drink lots of Bloody Marys (instead of orange juice) to regenerate. When you get real drunk, your blood actually is kind of like a Bloody Mary. It all comes crashing down when the makers of Tabasco sue you and win in district court, resulting in an injunction ordering you to never come within 50 yards of an establishment that sells food. You fall hard, spending years in back alleys, cutting for hobos with chips and water, looking for a hotness fix. When you finally take your own life, the detectives dip their snacks in the pool of your blood on the floor when they think no one is looking. Years later and, alas, far too late for you, it is discovered that you would have made the coolest vampire and/or zombie ever.
POWER # 4 = Vocoder Voice
-What was once a pop music fad to everybody else, is an every day reality for you. Since birth, you can only speak like your voice is going through a vocoder. It makes ordering from the drive-thru window damn near impossible. Nobody likes to talk to your for more than three and a half minutes. You're the only one who can accurately sing that Imogen Heap song when out doing karaoke, but you're not going to be taking down super villains any time soon.
POWER # 5 = Super Slowness
-They may say, "slow and steady wins the race," but we all know that that's bullshit. You are the Usain Bolt of slowness and you've never won a race in your life. Well, unless you count that one morning when you raced to the tree, but the other kid fell, hurt her knee and went home crying; you "won" sometime late the next evening before being treated by medical professionals for exhaustion, dehydration and exposure. Next to a glacier you look pretty quick, but it is close enough to be a valid comparison. Perhaps it may be said that you have super-human patience, but you really don't have any choice about the fact that it takes you 90 minutes to put on flip flops. When you were a kid, you believed with all your heart that you would get a really long life-span to compensate (like maybe 10,000 years), but testing done in your teenage years showed that you were aging normally. Life may be a bitch, but yours is a torturous, mean-spirited, manically cackling bitch. You decide to become an evil villain to get back at all the kids that held cookies in front of your face, only to pull them away 30 minutes later when your hand had just about reached them. You hatch a plan for world domination and begin implementing it immediately. In several decades you expect to complete Stage 1: Buying a Lawn Mower and a Pair of Pliers. Humankind awaits its fate with bated breath and barely concealed indifference.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Oh, and did I mention that there's a restaurant named "Crabby Dick's" in Delaware? Seriously.
Hawker: "Come getchya Crabby Dick's here!"
Boy: "Oh mommy, can we?"
Mom: "Hmmm...well okay, just this once. Don't tell your father. Oh...oohhhh. It's a restaurant. I was totally thinking of something else. Awkwaaard~!"
Boy: "......mommy?"
POWER # 1 = Microwave Ass
-Being ever-ready-and-able to "cook" a Hot Pocket inside your traveling microwave/anus isn't really that great, as convenient as that is, because you will only, amazingly, succeed at making Hot Pockets taste even more like ass. On the bright side, if you are a foot soldier in an evil villain's army, you can easily be converted into a suicide bomber: just stick a (metal) fork in your ass and you're done.
POWER # 2 = No-Scratch Throat
-"Look at him go! He's been coughing non-stop for days and his voice still isn't hoarse! He's amazing!" Yeah. Unless your goal is to set the world record for random offers for cough-drops in a one week period, this power likely won't get you very far. Perhaps you can drive people insane with your constant, pain-free hacking, snorting and throat-clearing, but you're probably more likely to succeed, and faster, with the most annoying sound in the world.
POWER # 3 = Hot Sauce For Blood
-The xenomorphs from the Alien series have fantastically corrosive acid for blood, making it incredibly dangerous to kill them. You have a solid job at a South of the Border restaurant after state regulators waived a section of the health code, allowing you to bleed on customers' nachos. The kids love the novelty of it and squeal with delight as you wince with pain after opening yet another wound on your scarred arm with a steak knife, dripping tastiness. You drink lots of Bloody Marys (instead of orange juice) to regenerate. When you get real drunk, your blood actually is kind of like a Bloody Mary. It all comes crashing down when the makers of Tabasco sue you and win in district court, resulting in an injunction ordering you to never come within 50 yards of an establishment that sells food. You fall hard, spending years in back alleys, cutting for hobos with chips and water, looking for a hotness fix. When you finally take your own life, the detectives dip their snacks in the pool of your blood on the floor when they think no one is looking. Years later and, alas, far too late for you, it is discovered that you would have made the coolest vampire and/or zombie ever.
POWER # 4 = Vocoder Voice
-What was once a pop music fad to everybody else, is an every day reality for you. Since birth, you can only speak like your voice is going through a vocoder. It makes ordering from the drive-thru window damn near impossible. Nobody likes to talk to your for more than three and a half minutes. You're the only one who can accurately sing that Imogen Heap song when out doing karaoke, but you're not going to be taking down super villains any time soon.
POWER # 5 = Super Slowness
-They may say, "slow and steady wins the race," but we all know that that's bullshit. You are the Usain Bolt of slowness and you've never won a race in your life. Well, unless you count that one morning when you raced to the tree, but the other kid fell, hurt her knee and went home crying; you "won" sometime late the next evening before being treated by medical professionals for exhaustion, dehydration and exposure. Next to a glacier you look pretty quick, but it is close enough to be a valid comparison. Perhaps it may be said that you have super-human patience, but you really don't have any choice about the fact that it takes you 90 minutes to put on flip flops. When you were a kid, you believed with all your heart that you would get a really long life-span to compensate (like maybe 10,000 years), but testing done in your teenage years showed that you were aging normally. Life may be a bitch, but yours is a torturous, mean-spirited, manically cackling bitch. You decide to become an evil villain to get back at all the kids that held cookies in front of your face, only to pull them away 30 minutes later when your hand had just about reached them. You hatch a plan for world domination and begin implementing it immediately. In several decades you expect to complete Stage 1: Buying a Lawn Mower and a Pair of Pliers. Humankind awaits its fate with bated breath and barely concealed indifference.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Oh, and did I mention that there's a restaurant named "Crabby Dick's" in Delaware? Seriously.
Hawker: "Come getchya Crabby Dick's here!"
Boy: "Oh mommy, can we?"
Mom: "Hmmm...well okay, just this once. Don't tell your father. Oh...oohhhh. It's a restaurant. I was totally thinking of something else. Awkwaaard~!"
Boy: "......mommy?"
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Let's Play a Game
In the spirit of interactive web-fun, let's play a game. No, not Global Thermonuclear War (sorry Scott). It will be simple. I'll provide a word or phrase that I have not yet googled and then you will google it and report back your findings. You may need to slightly modify your search query to get results. I will have no idea what you will find on your little excursion into the depths of the internets (I make no guarantee results will be safe for work), but you'll let me know if there was (a) hilarity, (b) awesomeness, (c) lameness, (d) fail (i.e. nothing/nada), (e) WTF?! or (f) "I didn't find anything for that, but I'm totally going to make that happen. Google the same thing next week and hopefully you'll find my creation."
Let the games begin. Search terms are bold.
-Zombie Lord of the Rings
-Carl Jung vs. Karl Marx Dance-Off (maybe also try Carl Malone with one of the other two)
-Rahmstein ("Du hast mich, you fucking retards, don't you?!")
-Chunk the Destructor (he is invincible after all)
-Intergalactic wok recipes
-Cannibalism in children's books (speaking of food...)
-Funk da Maastricht Treaty (or maybe Westphalia)
-Monty Boa and the Holy Fail ("The Canadian version was just as good! Really! It was.....I hate it when you look at me like that.")
-Unsung heroes of AIG (speaking of fail...)
-Revolution Bastille first date ideas guillotine Louis (maybe remove just the first and last words for a second try)
-Rage Against the Bean tofu hate
-Biotechnology cybernetics advances Han Dynasty
-Charlie and the Nike Factory
That should be enough to get things started. If this turns out to be fun, we'll play again. If it sucks...well, no, you can't go back to Constantinople, I'm afraid.
Let the games begin. Search terms are bold.
-Zombie Lord of the Rings
-Carl Jung vs. Karl Marx Dance-Off (maybe also try Carl Malone with one of the other two)
-Rahmstein ("Du hast mich, you fucking retards, don't you?!")
-Chunk the Destructor (he is invincible after all)
-Intergalactic wok recipes
-Cannibalism in children's books (speaking of food...)
-Funk da Maastricht Treaty (or maybe Westphalia)
-Monty Boa and the Holy Fail ("The Canadian version was just as good! Really! It was.....I hate it when you look at me like that.")
-Unsung heroes of AIG (speaking of fail...)
-Revolution Bastille first date ideas guillotine Louis (maybe remove just the first and last words for a second try)
-Rage Against the Bean tofu hate
-Biotechnology cybernetics advances Han Dynasty
-Charlie and the Nike Factory
That should be enough to get things started. If this turns out to be fun, we'll play again. If it sucks...well, no, you can't go back to Constantinople, I'm afraid.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
A few (relatively) recent observations...
-I was borrowing an air mattress to sleep on the floor of an Atlantic City hotel room on New Year's Eve (yeah, I know). It was a fancy air mattress, with a built-in air pump and an attached controller. That controller had a button for "inflation" and a button for "deflation," but it did not have a button for "stagflation." That made me very sad, as I was quite eager to see what would happen when I pressed that button. Clearly, the air mattress was not built by economists...which probably explains why it didn't catastrophically collapse during the night, killing everyone in the room.
-Rest Assured(tm) is a toilet seat cover. You know, those filmy things that you can find in nicer public restrooms. They're there for you to place over the toilet seat if you're so afraid of germs touching your bare ass that wiping off the seat with toilet paper isn't good enough and you simply must have another layer between bum and bowl. Can someone please tell me why, "We got your ass covered," is not their slogan? What the hell were they thinking? Clearly, they were not. Thinking, that is.
-If the Zombie Apocalypse hit right after Michael Jackson died, how many people do you think would have been frantically swarming around his walking, moaning, flesh-craving corpse, desperately hoping that their crowning achievement in life would be getting bit by the King of Pop?
-My office window looks out over the Russian embassy on 16th Street. The whole time we were laboring under the 2 ft of snow that Snowmaggedon II: Snow Harder brought to DC (correction: I was laboring every day that week while the rest of you were "working from home" [i.e. eating Oreos and catching up on "Lost"]), I often wondered what the Muscovites next door were thinking. My thoughts were along the lines of, "Ha! Look at these pitiful Washingtonians, paralyzed by 2 ft of snow! Back in Moscow, we break out the shorts and sandals when there is only 2 ft of snow left on the ground." But then I came across this article. Apparently, Moscow just got hit with a record snowfall this past Monday and Tuesday...and it was only about 25 inches. My first thought: lame! That isn't that much! My second thought: hooooly shit, how much does it suck to be the guy that just got transferred back home after dealing with DC's near-record snowfall, just to face almost the exact same thing as soon as he lands in Moscow. My third thought: there's a "In Soviet Russia, ____ [verb]s you!" joke in there somewhere, but then figured that's been way overplayed. Have at it in the comments, if you like.
-I'm currently reading a book that weighs more than my laptop. It kind of makes me feel like a rebel. Like the very act of pulling the enormous approx. 1300 page tome out of my bag, setting it on my lap, flipping to my spot and settling down to read is an enormous "FUCK YOU!" to the yuppie with the Kindle sitting across from me. Is there such a thing as an anachronistic rebel? Well, maybe the rebel feeling also stems from the fact that the book is a circa-1950 hardcover copy of Max Eastman's translation of Leon Trotsky's "The History of the Russian Revolution" that I got from a local bookstore. It is a kind of visual joke, in and of itself. Feel free to get a pool going over how long it takes someone to ask me, with an ironic smile, "Doing a little light reading?"
-Of the many, many words and phrases I've invented over the course of my life, possibly the one I'm most proud of is the verb "to squirk" (squirking, squirked, etc.), as it has entered my normal lexicon over the past three years since I came up with it. I feel quite natural using it in regular conversation. Definition? When you are trying to pee, but you can't; the frustrating time between when you try to take a leak and when it actually begins flowing. This seems to be a more common phenomenon (and one that lasts longer) among males than females, owing to differences in anatomy. When you are suffering from "stage fright," you are squirking. Sometimes, you will be squirking for quite a while until you let out a fart, at which point the flood gates mysteriously open up. I squirked for like 30 seconds earlier today and it was pretty annoying.
-Morrie Scheisse is a venerable old man. His name also doubles as a superlative swear word, sometimes shortened to just, "Morrie!"
-Rest Assured(tm) is a toilet seat cover. You know, those filmy things that you can find in nicer public restrooms. They're there for you to place over the toilet seat if you're so afraid of germs touching your bare ass that wiping off the seat with toilet paper isn't good enough and you simply must have another layer between bum and bowl. Can someone please tell me why, "We got your ass covered," is not their slogan? What the hell were they thinking? Clearly, they were not. Thinking, that is.
-If the Zombie Apocalypse hit right after Michael Jackson died, how many people do you think would have been frantically swarming around his walking, moaning, flesh-craving corpse, desperately hoping that their crowning achievement in life would be getting bit by the King of Pop?
-My office window looks out over the Russian embassy on 16th Street. The whole time we were laboring under the 2 ft of snow that Snowmaggedon II: Snow Harder brought to DC (correction: I was laboring every day that week while the rest of you were "working from home" [i.e. eating Oreos and catching up on "Lost"]), I often wondered what the Muscovites next door were thinking. My thoughts were along the lines of, "Ha! Look at these pitiful Washingtonians, paralyzed by 2 ft of snow! Back in Moscow, we break out the shorts and sandals when there is only 2 ft of snow left on the ground." But then I came across this article. Apparently, Moscow just got hit with a record snowfall this past Monday and Tuesday...and it was only about 25 inches. My first thought: lame! That isn't that much! My second thought: hooooly shit, how much does it suck to be the guy that just got transferred back home after dealing with DC's near-record snowfall, just to face almost the exact same thing as soon as he lands in Moscow. My third thought: there's a "In Soviet Russia, ____ [verb]s you!" joke in there somewhere, but then figured that's been way overplayed. Have at it in the comments, if you like.
-I'm currently reading a book that weighs more than my laptop. It kind of makes me feel like a rebel. Like the very act of pulling the enormous approx. 1300 page tome out of my bag, setting it on my lap, flipping to my spot and settling down to read is an enormous "FUCK YOU!" to the yuppie with the Kindle sitting across from me. Is there such a thing as an anachronistic rebel? Well, maybe the rebel feeling also stems from the fact that the book is a circa-1950 hardcover copy of Max Eastman's translation of Leon Trotsky's "The History of the Russian Revolution" that I got from a local bookstore. It is a kind of visual joke, in and of itself. Feel free to get a pool going over how long it takes someone to ask me, with an ironic smile, "Doing a little light reading?"
-Of the many, many words and phrases I've invented over the course of my life, possibly the one I'm most proud of is the verb "to squirk" (squirking, squirked, etc.), as it has entered my normal lexicon over the past three years since I came up with it. I feel quite natural using it in regular conversation. Definition? When you are trying to pee, but you can't; the frustrating time between when you try to take a leak and when it actually begins flowing. This seems to be a more common phenomenon (and one that lasts longer) among males than females, owing to differences in anatomy. When you are suffering from "stage fright," you are squirking. Sometimes, you will be squirking for quite a while until you let out a fart, at which point the flood gates mysteriously open up. I squirked for like 30 seconds earlier today and it was pretty annoying.
-Morrie Scheisse is a venerable old man. His name also doubles as a superlative swear word, sometimes shortened to just, "Morrie!"
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