MP Test

Sock Drawer

2008-07-28T10:20:00.000-07:00

You lucky bastards. You must have been really good to deserve another sock drawer post already. Like, you must have totally signed up at BlogCatalog and gave my blog glowing reviews and stuff. You guys rock! If you keep this up, pretty soon this is going to be the number one mattress-related blog on BlogCatalog. Foam Mattress Central, you are going down!

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When the Apollo 11 guys went to the moon, do you think they knew that they were raising the bar for everyone from that point on? I mean, do you think they still would have done it if they had known that everybody was going to start saying, "We put a man on the moon but we can't [do something completely unrelated to putting a man on the moon]?"

I bet it's particularly bad for Neil Armstrong. His wife is probably like, "We can put a man on the moon, but just try to get him to separate his whites from his colors." And Neil Armstrong is like, "Baby, all I did is climb a ladder. The dudes at mission control took care of everything else." And his wife is like, "Yeah, you couldn't even get your one historic line right." And Neil Armstrong is like, "What does woman mean? Man said line perfect!"

What if that mission had failed? Would everybody be saying, "Well, it's no wonder we can't [cure cancer/find Osama Bin Laden/stop Britney Spears from reproducing]; we can't even put a man on the moon!"

What did people say before the moon landing? "We've sent men to Antarctica, and not all of them died, so I say we get started on trying to transmit music through frequency modulation!"

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The other day I was looking for some shorts at Target. I found a pair I liked, but they had some scuffing on them so I tried to find another pair like them. The next pair had the identical scuffing. I eventually realized that they were all like that. The shorts had been precisely pre-scuffed at the shorts factory.

How lazy have we become as a society that we can no longer be bothered to scuff our our shorts? Can you imagine explaining that concept to someone from the Third World? "No, they're not old, but we sometimes make our brand new clothes look old because we like the way they look. We give our old, worn clothes away to stores that sell them to people who can't afford brand new, professionally scuffed clothing."

I wonder if this trend will spread to other products. I think it would be cool to buy a professionally pre-dented Lexus, for example. Or maybe underwear with the skidmarks already in them, so I don't have to do it myself.

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According to the Bible, Methuselah lived to the age of 969. I would think life would really start to drag after a few hundred years. I wonder if he went through a mid-life crisis when he was around 500. You know, bought a really fast camel and started dating 300-year-olds.

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I'm always impressed with the knots that people tie in movies when they hang themselves. No matter how screwed up they are, they always manage to tie a perfect noose knot. And I don't think they teach that one in the Boy Scouts. It makes me wonder how many times these people have done it before.

I don't think I would kill myself like that. Too much pressure. I'd be worried about people laughing at my lousy knot. "Can you believe this idiot hanged himself with a modified midshipman's hitch? What a dumbass."

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Sometime I'd like to see a concert with Nickelback, Daughtry and Three Doors Down. It's not that I particularly like them, but I'd like some independent confirmation that they're not all the same band.

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Mrs. Diesel and I were watching TV yesterday when a character said something that I couldn't quite make out. I turned to my wife and said, "What did he say?"

She said, "It sounded like 'David Hockey.'"

I said, "Yeah, that's what I thought, but that doesn't make any sense."

She said, "Yeah, I know."

I said, "You know, if we're at the point in our relationship where we're both mis-hearing things the same way, there really isn't any added value for me."

"What are you saying?"

"I think we should see other people."

Caption Contest: Project Runway

2008-07-25T14:48:00.000-07:00

As a paragon of manliness, I cannot admit to ever willingly having watched Project Runway. Even the presence of megababe Heidi Klum cannot balance out the unprecedented gayosity of that show. Still, here I am with a couple of the early contestants, expressing something about something.

You know the rules. Submit your caption in the comments. I'll post the ten best ones in a poll on Tuesday. The winner will get to display the In Your Face award, and MIGHT get a copy of my book, IF there are any copies left. (Did I mention that today is your last chance to buy one for $9.95?)

I'm trying out a new word verification thingy in my commenting app, so let me know if it gives you any trouble. You can email me at diesel --at-- mattresspolice.com.

Make it work!

Thursday Shout-Out

2008-07-24T15:55:00.000-07:00

Some links for your edutainment:

Sinister Dan tells you how to blog, and more importantly, why. Also where, I think.
Rickey Henderson provides a well-thought-out review that actually makes me tempted to rethink my preference for Batman Begins over The Dark Knight. I still think Tim Burton is kind of a tool though.
Chris at Angry Seafood also wrote a review of The Dark Knight. "Well-thought-out" doesn't spring to mind, but he sure pissed off some chiroptophiles. Make sure you read the comments.
Joel tells us how to know if we're in the clutches of Satan.

In other news, remember that Friday is the last day to get a signed copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary, at the rock bottom price of $9.95 with free shipping. That's a savings of $5. Seriously, this is it. My wife won't let me give away any more of them, so you'd better just buy it.

"But what if $9.95 is still too much for me to spend?" You say. "I mean, I want to support the Mattress Police and all the good pro-Huey Lewis work they are doing, but I'm on a fixed income. Is there anything I can do to help?"

Why yes, friend, there is. You can go to BlogCatalog and join my neighborhood. Don't have a blog? No problem! Just click here and sign up. Seriously, it will take you like 10 seconds. If you're a fellow blogger, click here and you can get your blog listed as well.

Why do I want you to do this? Well, this may surprise you, but there are literally hundreds of people here in North America and its outlying continents who have never heard of this blog. By signing up at BlogCatalog, you can help spread the word. So sign up, join my neighborhood, rate my blog and leave me a nice comment. The more of you who do this, the more prominently my blog will appear in their listings. That means more readers for this blog, which means that I may be able to convince a publisher to take a chance on my crazy novel about a ping-pong-playing angel, which increases your chance, as a loyal reader, of getting an autographed copy of said novel. Ok? So just do it.

Seriously, do it. Don't make me beg. I can cancel the caption contest for this Friday if it will free up the time you need to sign up.

Okay, I wouldn't do that, but I could. See what you've done? You've provoked me into making idle threats. This demeans both of us.

I think I've said enough. If I haven't convinced you by now, then I never will.

But seriously, do it.

Last Chance!

2008-07-22T14:55:00.000-07:00

A while back I asked whether anyone would be interested in buying a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary, for $9.95. The regular price is $11.95 plus shipping, but occasionally I'll order a bunch of them at a discount and let you have them basically at cost. There seemed to be enough interest to justify ordering another shipment, so I went ahead and ordered another batch.

I have to manually ship them all out, so I kinda want to do this all at once. You have until this Friday, July 25, to order your copy at $9.95 with free shipping. After that, it goes back up to $11.95 + $3.00 shipping. This is probably the last time I'm going to do this, and there's a pretty good chance I'm going to stop giving out copies as caption contest prizes too. If I'm going to continue to deduct all my website related costs as "business-related," I need to at least pretend that I'm actually trying to make money.

If you're interested, click on this button:

Don't use the link on my sidebar, because that will charge you the regular price.

If you've followed this blog for a while, you pretty much know what to expect from my book, but here are some excerpts to help you make an informed decision. I cover such topics as...

...how I came to be...

I have Woodstock to thank for my conception. My dad walked up to my mom, who was sitting on a blanket in the sun with flowers in her hair, and said, “Hey, are you done with that newspaper? I haven’t read today’s Peanuts. I love Snoopy’s little bird friend.” Well, it turned out that my mom hadn’t read it either, so there they sat, taking their break on a dumpster behind DOW chemical’s Agent Orange plant, reading Peanuts together. My mom took the vowels and my dad took the consonants, and just like that, it was love. Which was a good thing, because they had been married for six years.

...my positions on important issues...

I am strongly in favor of the War on Terror. In fact, I think the War on Terror should be drastically expanded to include all other unpleasant states of mind, such as Boredom and “the Heebie Jeebies.” I don’t think we should stop fighting until we are all happy all of the time. But we must stop before we hit Complacency, because the war will be on that too.

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...traveling with the family...

We pulled in at a suitably crummy motel called the Aloha – presumably because for any sane person pulling into this place, hello would also be goodbye. If there was a Hawaiian theme, I didn’t notice – unless the toilets in Hawaii make a horrific screeching sound that sounds like a hippopotamus gasping for air through a saxophone.

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...my exciting life...

I was accosted this morning by a large sea turtle. I had arisen early to steal the neighbor’s newspaper (I canceled my subscription when I learned the editor was a freethinker and a bigamist), and just as I stepped outside, I saw it. The turtle must have been a good 5 feet long and 3.5 feet wide (these are shell measurements), and I would estimate that it weighed at least 200 pounds. I certainly couldn’t lift him, and I’m hella strong. I attribute my exceptional strength to a daily regimen of vitamins and backgammon, although I’m also 1/32 Apache Indian, so that’s sort of an X factor.

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...and all the other stuff I know about...

You may object that such a solution is not “politically feasible.” To this I respond: Did John F. Kennedy pause to ask whether his plan was ‘politically feasible’ before committing 400 American “advisers” in an unwinnable conflict in Southeast Asia? No sir, he did not! And yet, JFK is revered as a hero for his exploits as captain of PT-109, demonstrating that if you have to go on a trip with a Kennedy, the surest way to avoid drowning is, ironically, to travel by boat.

You get the idea: the same sort of insipid self-congratulatory treacle that you find here daily, but 99.4% more book-like. Again, if you want to get in on the last chance to get this book for the rock-bottom price of $9.95, click the inviting yellow button below. And yes, I'll even sign it for you. Just try to stop me!

I'm still thinking about putting together another collection, but I really want to finish my novel first. (Yes, I'm working on a novel. It's about an angel who is supposed to be helping out with the apocalypse but would rather play ping-pong. I'm about 75% done with it.)

I'll be back tomorrow with a brand new post that's even funnier than cancer!

Sock Drawer

2008-07-21T11:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's time once again to clean out the disorganized sock drawer of my mind.

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One thing I've noticed when reading the obituaries is that a lot of people die after a "courageous battle with cancer." Nobody ever seems to die after a cowardly battle with cancer.

I hope I don't ever get cancer, because I'd completely wuss out and wreck humanity's unbroken streak of stalwart cancer patients. I'd be like, "Oh crap, is that cancer? Tell it I'm not home." Then I'd hide under the bed until it was gone. But eventually, after a long and spineless battle, I would succumb to cancer, and my friends would write an obituary that read, "Diesel died from cancer, the big pussy."

On the other hand, maybe there's a reason that all of the obituaries are about courageous cancer patients. Maybe only the courageous cancer patients die. So then the trick to surviving cancer would be to wuss out early on. There should be a special section of the paper devoted to people who wussed out in the face of cancer but didn't die: "Joe Smith found out he had cancer and cried like a little girl for three weeks. His family is happy to report that his cancer is now in remission, but they are also a little embarrassed about what a baby he was about the whole thing."

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The other day I heard an ad for Match.com in which they touted a new feature of their service, where you could get advice from "successful members of the Match.com community."

I'm curious about how they define "successful" in this context. I mean, is it just me, or is one key sign of success in a relationship the fact that you are no longer using an online dating service? In fact, the more experience someone has with Match.com, the more wary I would be of taking their advice. That's like Monster.com offering advice from chronically unemployed people.

Another promises that you would find "someone special" within six months or you'd get another six months of the service free. There's an incentive, eh? I know that if I just spent six months dating creepy losers, the one thing that would pull me out of my funk would be another six months dating creepy losers FOR FREE. And why don't they just give you twelve months up front? Are they afraid that you're going to find your soul mate in the first six months but then keep using the service for another six months just to stick it to them? "Sorry, honey. I know that we agreed to stay together forever, but I've got another six months of loser-dating to use up."

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I saw a display at Barnes & Noble recently of "16 month calendars." That's a great idea, isn't it? Now you only have to buy a calendar once every 1.33 years. I mean, assuming that somebody comes out with calendars that start with May. I guess that's how they get you.

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If you ordered cow tongue in a restaurant and the chef spit in your food, would you send it back?

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I tend to throw my clothes on the floor rather than hanging them up, so I have this spray bottle of stuff called "Wrinkle Releaser" that I use sometimes. I like the fact that it's called "Wrinkle Releaser" rather than "Anti-Wrinkle Spray" or "Wrinkle Eradicator." It makes me wonder where the wrinkles are being released to. I like to imagine a land where wrinkles run free in fields of wildflowers. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can see it.

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I had a doctor's appointment a few days ago to get my cholesterol checked. I noticed that they stuck up a big sign that says "WE WILL NOW ONLY CALL YOU IF YOUR TESTS RESULTS ARE ABNORMAL." I guess that means they won't call you unless there is a problem, but wouldn't it be cool if they would also call to congratulate you on test results that are way better than normal?

"Hello, Diesel, this is Dr. Evans. I just wanted to call you about your fantastic cholesterol levels. Your bad cholesterol is virtually nonexistent, your good cholesterol is the highest we've ever seen, and in fact we've discovered an entirely new type of cholesterol in your blood that has the potential to cure several forms of cancer! Not the kind you have, unfortunately. Oh, did I mention you have cancer?"

Congrats to Acorn King!

2008-07-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

Newcomer Acorn King took top honors this week. Acorn King, you may display the coveted In Your Face award.

Email me your address at diesel --at-- mattresspolice.com and I'll send you a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary, as well.

robin came in second with:

Dude, for the last time I'm sorry, I didn't know she was your sister. Can you please stop pretending to ignore me and open my beer? Seriously, I have a goalie's glove for my hand and we all know Abe's useless with a pop-top can.

And Deb on the Rocks took third with:

Diesel, come on, what we have is special and forever. I didn't mean to hurt you. Bringing Abe in will just spice things up for a little while, that's all. But it's up to you, baby, it's up to you.

There were some really great captions this time around, guys. I'm always amazed at what y'all come up with. Even perennial favorite Brad couldn't squeeze into the finalists this week.

Have a great weekend, everybody. You know where I'll be.

WOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thursday Shout-Out: New Blogroll

2008-07-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

I took my blogroll down a while back because it was getting totally out of hand. I hated maintaining it, and it was getting too long to do anyone any good (that's what she said).

But now my guilt has gotten the better of me, so I've decided to put an abbreviated blogroll back up in an effort to balance out the karmic linky something something. So over to the right you'll see a heading that reads "Worth a Look," under which there is a list of 25 blogs. I've picked these blogs based on a number of factors, but mostly based on my guess as to what kinds of blogs visitors to this sight might also enjoy.

Limiting it to 25 makes it a manageable list, but it also guarantees that a lot of great blogs get left off. For example, avid supporters such as Beth, Claire, Jeffrey Ellis, Jinksy, Teri, and probably a dozen other people that I can't think of right now (because I'm retarded) get shafted. Sorry. I will be adding a links page back to this site in the near future that will have a lot more blogs on it, but I'm going to try to keep my sidebar list down to 25.

You may have noticed some other changes on this site as well. For one, there's a little button at the bottom of this post that looks like this:

Except that it probably says "smiley me!" which is another way of saying "Hello? Is this thing on? Anyone? Beuller?" It tracks the number of smileys a post has gotten on Humor-Blogs.com.

There is also a rank widget over to the right that looks like this:

That one shows the blog's overall ranking at HB.

The smiley count widget is a little tricky, and I've only tested it on Blogger. The ranking widget is super-easy, though, and will work on any blogging platform that supports Javascript (read: not Wordpress). There are instructions for plugging in both widgets on the HB Widgets page.

That's about it for today. If you're looking for something funny, try checking out one of those blogs. And don't forget to join my neighborhood at BlogCatalog and leave a nice comment for me over there.

Celebrities I Have Dreamed About

2008-07-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

If you think I come up with some crazy stuff while I'm awake, you should hear my dreams.

One of my favorites is a dream that I had when I was a little kid. I was walking through our house and I saw that there were wolves hiding behind the furniture. I told my dad, who announced authoritatively, "Well, we'll have to blow up the attic." I found this oddly reassuring.

Not too long ago I had a dream I where my older brother and I were sitting by the side of a road when a helicopter flew overhead carrying a milk carton the size of a house. I turned to my brother and said, "That is a big f---ing milk carton." End scene.

I'm pretty sure I dream about celebrities more than is normal. And not usually the celebrities you'd think -- there are a lot of real C-listers in there. You could throw the stars of my dreams together in a house and have a decent episode of The Surreal Life. Recently I was thinking about all the celebrity appearances in my dreams over the past few years, and I came up with the following list. The number of appearances of each celebrity appears in parentheses after the name.

Huey Lewis (3)
In the first two dreams, Huey was a sort of Godot-like figure. I waited patiently, and eventually he showed up, but was too busy to talk to me. In the third one we talked, but I can't remember what about.

Ed Kowalczyk, the lead singer of the band Live (2)
In one of the dreams, we discussed the Crummy Church Signs website.

Paris Hilton (2)
Neither of these dreams was sexual in nature. In one of them, we sat together in a coffee shop while I gave her career advice. "You're like a modern day Audrey Hepburn," I told her. "People expect more from you."

Charlie Sheen (1)
Also not sexual in nature.

Halle Berry (1)
No comment.

Howard Hesseman, star of WKRP in Cincinnati and Head of the Class (1)
My dream was actually a commercial for a nonexistent TV show called The Howard Hesseman Show. It consisted of various clips of the show, one of which was Howard saying, "I want to die in these pants. It really wouldn't be heaven without these pants."

Bill Clinton, George Bush Sr., Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon (1 each)
I have the distinction of having dreamed about every ex-president who was alive during my lifetime. I can't recall the details of any of the dreams. They seemed to be basically photo ops for the ex-presidents.

Jimmy Walker, star of TV's Good Times
This one is my all-time favorite (excluding Halle Berry). I was in church and Jimmy Walker was the minister. He was stoking the congregation into a frenzy, but instead of exclaiming "Amen!", everybody was shouting "Dyn-o-mite!" Honest to God, I'm not making that up.

I'm sure there were more, but when you've slept with as many celebrities as I have, you start to forget. I should probably start some kind of dream journal, although that sort of thing might be hard to explain if I ever run for public office: "Last night: Scott Baio - told me Fonzie was really an alien. I told him I really liked Joanie Loves Chachi, but was just being polite."

I'll keep you updated the next time some faded sitcom star or aging pop singer shows up in one of my dreams. I mean, unless it's Belinda Carlisle. A man's got to have some secrets.

Vote!

2008-07-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

Man, it's getting really hard to pick these caption contest finalists. It's like picking a favorite from among my children, except that I don't have to worry about a bunch of captions on other websites that I don't even know about.

I finally narrowed it down to these ten:

Jay said...

Diesel: "I swear I have the crappiest HMO in the world."

Alex L said...

The first annual meeting of the I hate Thomas Kinkade association.

Fold My Laundry Please said...

Diesel's friends take Dungeons & Dragons VERY seriously!

Bunk Strutts said...

"Diesel, forget the midterms. The Chinese Chicks should be here any minute and you still don't have your Amy Winehouse costume on."

robin said...

Dude, for the last time I'm sorry, I didn't know she was your sister. Can you please stop pretending to ignore me and open my beer? Seriously, I have a goalie's glove for my hand and we all know Abe's useless with a pop-top can.

Carla said...

"Hang on a sec, I'm looking for that picture of you back in high school when you still had your horns."

carolinebender said...

HellBoy, "No, the 7th circle is pretty cool, actually. You have to call ahead to get that set-up, but you should totally come with us next year."

Deb on the Rocks said...

Diesel, come on, what we have is special and forever. I didn't mean to hurt you. Bringing Abe in will just spice things up for a little while, that's all. But it's up to you, baby, it's up to you.

Acorn King said...

Dude, you totally bite it on page 19.

Sherri said...

"Here's to whoever wrote the words to Kumbaya."

Opinion Polls & Market Research

I'll announce the winner on Friday. As usual, the winner will get the In Your Face award and a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary.

And while you're in a voting mood, make sure you head over to BlogCatalog, join my community and rate MattressPolice.com. I've been doing some recon behind enemy lines lately, checking out other blog directories. Most of them suck compared to Humor-Blogs.com, natch, but BlogCatalog is actually pretty cool. It's a nicely designed site, and it has a friendly, sensible ranking/categorization system for blogs. So if you enjoy my writing, head over to BlogCatalog and rate me and leave a nice comment, before Johnny finds out about it and kicks my ass over there as well.

Close to Ten Tips on Writing a Funny Blog Post

2008-07-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

As you know, my Meme-Wraith, Grundir the Implacable, generally dispatches all troublesome rodents and memes that attempt to violate the sanctity of Chez* Diesel. Today, however, Grundir humbly approached me cradling a delicate young meme bearing an insignia resembling a giant malformed spermatozoan.

“Cast it into the Crack of Mount Doom, you fool!” I howled at my Nazgul minion. Then I burst into a fit of giggles, because I can’t say “Crack of Mount Doom” without laughing. Grundir tolerates this with admirable aplomb. Being dead for 900 years gives you a certain amount of patience.

“It’s bears the ominous mark of Brent Diggs, m’lord,” rasped Grundir.

“Ah yes,” I said. “The universally recognized Giant Malformed Spermatazoan of Brent Diggs!”

“I believe it is a comma, sir. An Ominous Comma.”

“I know what a comma looks like!” I snapped. “Why, my gentle wraith, surely you’re aware of my affinity for the comma, the most sublime of punctuation marks, the enabler of superfluous modifiers, the – ”

“Indeed, m'lord. Shall I bury this meme in the orchard with the ditch digger?”

“It’s called a shovel, worm-brain.”

“No, m’lord, I mean…”

“Silence, fool! I must maintain plausible deniability. No, my rotted friend, I shall answer this meme. Read it to me, please. My eyes fail me in this light.”

“As I’ve tried to tell you, m’lord, your perpetually tinted glasses –”

“I’ll perpetually tint you if you don’t start reading, Stiffy.”

“It reads, ‘In my brief foray onto the internet I have –’”

“Good lord, how long is this thing? Cut to the part with Liv Tyler already!”

“He wants you to write something funny and yet educational. To impart some of your wisdom about blogging to the masses, if you will.”

“Brilliant! I shall give the masses Ten Tips on Writing a Funny Blog Post.”

“Excellent, m’lord.”

“Tip number one: Self-reference is always funny.”

“I’m sorry, m'lord. Would you care to elaborate?”

“Yes, take this down: ‘As you know, my Meme-Wraith, Grundir the Implacable, generally dispatches all troublesome rodents and…’ Wait, how many commas is that?”

“Three, m’lord.”

“Ok, good enough. Point number two: Don’t belabor a joke. Stop right before the reader understands what you’re doing. Good readers like to think a little. And bad readers, well, f—k ‘em. Except don’t write ‘f—k.’ Put dashes in the middle or something.”

“Very good, m’lord. What else?”

“Point four: Writing a post in dialog form automatically makes it 43.7% funnier. Oh, and point five: Needless, unjustifiable precision is also funny.
“Point six. Wait, I’m not sure about point three. Strike that one for now. Remind me to come back to it later.”

“As you wish, m’lord.”

"Where was I?"

"Point six."

"Right, point six. Sprinkle your post with obscure pop culture references. They'll go over the heads of a lot of your readers, but the real Ainur will eat it up. Point seven. Make fun of yourself, but don’t be too obvious about it. Make yourself out to be a huge ass, even if you’re really a nice guy. Of course, it works better if you really are a huge ass, like me. Am I talking too fast for you, Casper?”

“No, m’lord.”

“Point eight: Give yourself a straight man. Somebody the readers can identify with. But somebody who doesn’t seem very relatable at first glance. Toy with the readers’ expectations a bit.”

“Very good, m’lord. I never could have devised such a brilliant notion.”

“Of course not. You’re a 900 year old medieval jerkwad who sold his soul for something shiny. And finally, point nine: Always leave the reader wanting more. Now slap the Mattress Police seal on that baby and send it back to Diggs. We’ll show him what a real blogging insignia looks like. No sperm for us!”

“Of course not, m’lord.”

“On second thought, throw a little sperm on that baby. Can’t hurt.

“Yes, m’lord.”

For this non-meme, I anoint the following individuals:
1. Dave Barry
2. Sinister Dan
3. Scott Adams
4. Ecstatic Wavelength Lady
5. David Sedaris
6. Sue Piltdown
7. Bill Watterson
8. Leigh (on the condition that she does not offer any boob-related advice or pictures)
9. Voltaire
10. Jocelyn Hergenfliffer

*Pronounced "CHEEZ"

Caption Contest: Hellboy

2008-07-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

Check out this picture I found of me hanging out with Hellboy and his buddy Abe Sapien. Why, it practically screams for a caption contest.

You know the rules. Submit your caption in the comments. Mrs. Diesel and I will pick our faves, which will be posted in a poll next Tuesday. The ultimate winner gets a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary, if I can dig up another copy somewhere.

Have fun. I'll be back with a wondrous new post on Monday.

Thursday Shout-out

2008-07-10T20:57:00.000-07:00

Man, has anyone noticed that my posting schedule is in danger of shifting an entire day? It's a good thing I'm on Pacific time, or this would be the Friday shout-out.

I don't have much to post anyway. I did want to mention the PayPal fund that Humor-Blogs member Kadi has set up to benefit the two children of an acquaintance of hers who recently killed himself. I was going to try to summarize the whole story, but it's probably better if you just go to Kadi's and scroll down until you find the post(s) about Scott. The PayPal button is at the upper right on her blog if you feel moved to help out.

I also wanted to thank all of the people who have been so appreciative and supportive of Humor-Blogs.com and the recent revamping of the ranking process. There were a few glitches, but everything seems to be working now. And thanks to everybody who has been giving my posts the nice LOL smileys! Thank God Johhny Virgil is still kicking my ass, or people would totally accuse me of cheating.

Haven't done a caption contest for a while, so I guess I'd better get on that. See you back here tomorrow.

Oh, I almost forgot -- In case you're wondering what the Humor-Blogs.com traffic looks like since the upgrade, check this out:

The upgrade happened on July 6. Pretty cool, huh? Hopefully all the members are seeing some increased traffic.

If you want to get your blog listed or if you just want to sign up to rate posts, click here. Come on, it's easy.

Stumble THIS!

2008-07-09T21:26:00.000-07:00

Suzy once told me she never reads her reviews. I don’t know if she’s just gotten a lot of bad reviews, or if she just figures that she’s going to do what she wants to do, so, you know, screw other people’s opinions.

I read my reviews, such as they are. It’s probably a mistake, but I can’t help thinking that constructive criticism is always worth listening to. Now if someone would just give me some.

I’ve been getting a lot of of traffic from StumbleUpon lately, which presumably means that a lot of people are recommending my posts. Along with the recommendations, however, come critiques. Actually, not so much critiques as attacks. I get called an asshole a lot. I can kind of understand this, considering some of my posts, but sometimes I really don’t get it.

For example, there’s my Captain America post, which riled up the comic book fanatics. One of them called me a “smarmy asshole.” I mean, come on. I was poking fun at a fictional character. That qualifies me as an asshole? I’d hate to see the murderous rampage this guy would embark on if somebody looked at his sister funny.

Two other reviewers noted that I couldn’t be relied on to write insightful commentary on superheroes since I don’t read comic books. This is such a helpful bit of information that I provided it myself at the beginning of the post. So either these “reviewers”:

(1) Missed the first paragraph of the post.
(2) Read the first paragraph of the post and decided it would be a waste of time to read the rest, so they wrote a review of something they hadn’t read. In other words, they did exactly what they criticized me for doing.
(3) Read my initial warning, ignored it, and continued to read the rest of the post, after which they wrote a review adding nothing to my first paragraph.

The only conclusion that I can come to is that these people aren’t really interested in offering any helpful criticism or guidance to other readers. They are just looking for an excuse to tear another person down. This makes me sad, not because I take their vitriol to heart, but because it’s disheartening to realize that there are such people out there.

Then there was the post in which I complained about the unnecessary complexity of my car’s AC controls and my microwave. This one got me called “not very bright” and “retarded,” among other appellations. Now I’m not claiming to be a genius, but I’ve built a house and created the number one directory of humor blogs on the web, and I build applications for the world’s foremost internet company, so presumably I have at least some vague inkling of what goes into good design. And the really funny thing about that post is that it was prompted by a remark my older brother made about how ridiculously complicated the ventilation controls were in his car. My brother, in case you are wondering, is literally a rocket scientist. He used to work on, among other things, the navigation system for Air Force One.

A lot of reviewers responded with the acronym “RTFM,” which stands for Read the F___ing Manual. Right. Because whenever you borrow a friend’s car, the first thing you do is crack open the manual and spend half an hour familiarizing yourself with the climate control system. Look, if the average person (not to mention an idiot like myself) has to read a manual to turn on a car’s AC, then the car’s AC controls are too complicated. Period. Whether or not I’m a “douchebag” isn’t really relevant.

One guy noted that he had never run across a microwave or ventilation system that took him more than ten minutes to figure out. Holy crap, ten minutes? In ten minutes I could start a fire with flint and steel and roast my Hot Pockets over an open flame. This is progress? I’m pretty sure that given enough duct tape and bailing wire, my brother the rocket scientist could build a microwave in ten minutes.

What bothers me most, though, isn't that some people don't like my writing; anyone who has aspirations of being a writer has got to be prepared for bad reviews. And I can accept it when some humorless dolt gets their panties in a bunch over a post about fat people or Harry Potter. What irritates me is that a lot of people act like I am somehow transgressing against them personally by having the gall to post something that they don't find particularly funny.

Reviewers will make enlightening comments like, "Douchebags like this are the reason the acronym 'RTFM' was invented. For f--k's sake." Or "whywhywhywhywhywhywhywhywhywhy the F--K do I keep stumbling this garbage."

Here's the deal, guys. The world isn't obligated to entertain you. I write because I enjoy writing, and because a certain segment of the population seems to enjoy what I write. I have a little blog that has a few hundred readers. It's not like I'm Michael Bay or Thomas Kinkaid. It's pretty easy to avoid me if my creative endeavors don't give you the instant LOLCAT fun-gasm that you require. Just one click will take you to any of a million other sites, many of which have the pictures of cats wearing pajamas that you require.

And if you feel compelled to write a review, try actually writing something that has the faintest chance of giving other potential readers the information they need to make up their own minds. Here are some starter sentences, off the top of my head:

This post is far too long. Get to the freaking point already.
The author's self-obsession is somewhat disturbing, despite his basic mechanical proficiency with words.
This writer has that annoying habit of using 'their' as a gender-neutral singular pronoun in their writing.

Calling me an "asshole," or a "douchebag," while cathartic for you, is surprisingly unhelpful as a critique of my writing -- either to me or other potential readers. Of course, providing more than that would require that you put some thought into your reviews and actually create something of substance, which could then be shot down by other reviewers. And that's not what you're about, is it? You're not interested in creating anything. You just want to tear down other people who are doing their best to create something of value for other people to enjoy.

That's right, tedomatic, I'm talking to you. Grow up already. The world isn't one big XBox waiting to entertain you. And you, clkwhrr. I'd take your criticism a little more seriously if you could write a sentence without the word "f--k" in it. And ProjectSilence, greenchair, and all the other reviewers who seem to be cruising StumbleUpon during third grade recess. I dare all of you to create something for all the world to see, so that complete strangers can hurl insults at you for failing to entertain them. I frankly don't think you have the balls, much less the talent.

And to everybody else: Stumble this. I dare you.

Best of MP: The Force is Middling in this One

2008-07-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

This may be my personal favorite of all the posts I've done over the past (nearly) two years. There's probably no more fertile ground for parody than the Star Wars universe, with its black-and-white moral framework, cardboard characters and fortune cookie philosophizing. "The Force is strong in this one," observes Darth Vader in the original Star Wars (which I refuse to call A New Hope), hinting at Luke Skywalker's secret lineage and his ultimate Destiny.

That's the stuff of an epic intergalactic saga, but I always wondered what happened to the guys who weren't quite as strong in the Force. What about the guys who were just a few notches above average on the Midi-Chlorian scale? Did they end up like the high school football star who wasn't quite good enough to go pro, and now hopes to some day take over his dad's landscaping business? This post, which I originally posted back in December of 2006, is my attempt to answer that question.

*****

The Force is Middling in this One

6/30/06

Cam Cloudhammer, Director of Human Resources, Order of the Jedi

Dear Mr. Cloudhammer,

As a recent graduate of the Tatooine Academy of Arts and Sciences, I was excited to hear about the opening with the Jedi Knights for an entry level Force Technician I. I have long dreamed of joining the Jedi Order and I think I will be a valuable asset to your organization.

As you can see from my enclosed resume, I graduated with a 3.2 GPA and I scored a 1242 on the Force Assessment Test. I did particularly well in Advanced Midi-Chlorianology and Pre-Imperial History. I believe I could have performed even better academically, but I worked my way through school recalibrating moisture vaporators. I think the combination of my rigorous coursework and practical experience will serve me well as a Force Technician I.

I'm available for an interview on short notice on most weekdays. I know my resume probably isn't the most impressive you will receive, but I think you'll find that I'm "good Jedi material" if you take the time to meet me in person. I thank you for your time and look forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards,
Kenny Skywalker

P.S. I forgot to mention that I can type 40 words per minute and levitate small objects with my mind.

P.P.S. Not to name-drop, but in case you're wondering, Luke is my second cousin.

8/21/06

Heinous Vlaak, Personnel Director, Order of the Sith

Dear Mr. Vlaak,

I recently graduated from the Tatooine Academy of Arts and Sciences and was interested to learn of the part time Tractor Field Operator position that was recently posted on the Sith website. I have long been intrigued by the shadowy workings of the Sith, and have recently begun to consider a career in the service of the Empire.

As my enclosed resume indicates, I am an above average student, but I think that the highly structured nature of the Tatooine Academy prevented me from reaching my true potential, as I am something of an "outside the box" thinker. It's true that my experience with the Dark Side is limited, but my current job at the Mos Eisley Spaceport Cantina requires that I be very assertive with droids and others whose kind we don't serve. I am also led to believe that my destiny lies with the Dark Side by my co-workers' frequent reminders that I'm "really not a people person."

I thank you for your time and look forward to hearing from you.

In Your Service,
Kenneth Skywalker (No relation)

P.S. I once pantsed a Jawa, which is considered pretty evil around here. I am also good with Excel.

9/29/06

Boba Fett, Proprietor, Fett Investigations, Bounty Hunter and Polygraph Service

Dear Mr. Fett,

Boy, are you hard to track down! I got your contact information from a mutual acquaintance who indicated that you may have an opening for a henchmen/tough. I know that with my B.A. in Force Theory I may seem overqualified for this position, but I've decided that I'm more interested in a life of adventure than a stable job with a reputable organization at this point in my career. I've dealt with my share of rough characters at my current job at Mos Eisley Spaceport Cantina and my neighborhood is pretty regularly terrorized by Tusken Raiders, so I don't think I'll have much trouble adjusting to the life of a bounty hunter. Please contact me as soon as is convenient for you, because I'm anxious to get started!

Sincerely,
Ken Skywalker

P.S. In case you're concerned about my academic background, I only attended the Tatooine Academy to get my parents off my back. Trust me when I say that I have learned that hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.

11/4/06

Jabba the Hutt, C.E.O., Hutt Enterprises, Inc.

Dear Mr. Hutt,

I recently learned of an opening with your crime syndicate here on Tatooine. I'm not sure what the job entails exactly, but I think I'm up for just about anything after working as the Assistant Manager of the Mos Eisley Cantina Spaceport. Since I was put in charge of marketing, we were named 2nd runner up for "Most Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy" by the Imperial Travel Bureau. Although I've never killed anyone myself, I am often expected to clean up the charred corpses of bounty hunters and other scoundrels, and I think I'm becoming rather inured to the spectacle of mutilation and manslaughter.

I know I probably don't fit the typical profile of your applicants, but I think that if you give me a chance you won't be disappointed. All I'm asking for is a chance.

Eagerly awaiting your reply,

Ken S.

P.S. I don't need health insurance and I don't mind sleeping on the floor or whatever.

12/27/06

Dear Uncle Skip,

Do you still own that Chili's in the Dagobah system?

Your loving nephew,

Kenny

*****
Edit 7/9 7:02 AM: Holy crap, I just noticed that this is my 500th post! I totally was going to have a parade or something. Damn.

...Or Maybe Barrabas

2008-07-07T14:25:00.000-07:00

On the way in to work in the San Francisco Bay area, I often drive past cars bearing a patchwork of bleeding heart bumper stickers, giving lip service to causes from Greenpeace to NOW. Today, however, I saw one that I hadn’t seen before. It read simply: “Jesus is a liberal.”

Next to this bumper sticker were plastered two Barack Obama stickers, which raises the question: If Jesus is a registered Democrat, doesn’t it seem like going with Barack Obama is settling just a bit? Even with the deification that Obama has received in the media, I can’t see him at the top of an Obama/Jesus ticket.

If I were a Democratic strategist, I’d put Obama in the veep slot, although I’ll admit it’s a little chancy putting a Jew at the top of the ticket. Jesus’ age could also be an issue. He’d be the oldest president since Reagan.

If Jesus were Obama’s vice president, I think you’d run into a Bush/Cheney situation, where Obama is nominally in charge, but everybody knows that Jesus is the one pulling the strings. (Except, of course, Jesus wouldn't have to ingest the still beating hearts of baby golden retrievers in order to stay alive.)

People would come to President Obama and say, "Hey, Mr. President, can you turn this water into wine?" And he'd be like, "Sure." And then they'd have to call up Jesus in his undisclosed location and say, "Mr. Vice President, we've got a 4211!" And Jesus would be like, "4211, that's, um..." And they'd be like, "Water into wine, sir." And He'd be like, "I know what it is!" And then He'd be like, "Sorry I snapped at you, Tim. This is a high pressure job, what with that time I had to break a tie in the Senate and that time that I had to bear the weight of sin for all mankind by dying an agonizing death on the cross." And then Tim would be like, "One time Dan Quayle locked himself in his car and had to survive for three days by drinking his own urine."

Also, if Jesus were elected President, you'd have the dicey matter of the Constitutional order of succession. What if Jesus was betrayed by His Secretary of the Treasury and assassinated by the Romans? Would Obama be sworn in immediately, or would we have to wait for three days to see if Jesus snapped out of it? Can you still be President after you've been legally dead for three days? Man, if only John Kerry had been elected, we'd have a solid precedent.

I have my doubts whether Jesus would even get elected. The Republicans would have to counter by nominating someone who is tough on crime, against gay marriage and strongly pro-Israel. The obvious choice would be Jesus's dad, God the Father. That would be a tough race to call, especially if Ralph Nader is running as an independent. And all bets are off if the Holy Spirit enters as a dark horse candidate.

A Jesus candidacy would also complicate things for churches, which would have to remain neutral or lose their tax exempt status. Churches would either have to refrain from making any pro-Jesus comments, or they'd have to modify their services to give equal time to competing candidates. Some songs would have to be altered a bit, for example:

Jesus loves me, this I know
for the Bible tells me so
And at the spectrum's other end
There's John McCain, my Myspace friend

And of course Jesus wouldn't be allowed to speak in church, which would be a little weird. Although come to think if it, I'm pretty sure that rule only applies to Republican candidates. He should probably stick to black churches, though, just to be on the safe side.

If Jesus really is a liberal, a lot of churches probably wouldn't want Him to speak anyway. I mean, maybe if He stuck to the classics, like the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the prodigal son. But I don't think the Sermon on Carbon Emission Caps or the Parable of the Third Trimester Abortion would go over very well.

No, now that I think about it, maybe Jesus isn't the best choice. Still, it can't hurt to have Him on one's side. Maybe tomorrow I'll hang Him up on my car too.

Fly, Little Birdie, Fly!

2008-07-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

Humor-Blogs.com 3.0 has been released into the wild. Let's hope it flourishes out there in the interwebs.

The changes should be pretty obvious. If you click on a link from a blog that is listed on Humor-Blogs.com (like this one, for example), you'll be greeted with a list of posts from that blog. You can click on the smiley if you like a post, or the smiley if you don't like a post. Posts are listed in order by the number of smileys they've gotten minus the number of smileys they've gotten. A blog's total score is determined by adding up the scores of all of its posts for the past 30 days.

If you haven't already, you'll need to create an account to rate posts.

As always, you can use the contact form or email me at diesel -at- mattresspolice.com if you have any trouble.

Now I would never use my power as unquestioned despot of Humor-Blogs.com to influence the rankings in my favor, but I'm not above appealing to your sense of pity, having spent the better part of the holiday weekend getting this damn thing up and running.

So, for example, if you found my Fishy post funny, you could vote for it. Or maybe my Fat Chicks post made your belly quiver with mirth. And then there was my Science vs. Democracy post, my Internet Stalker post and my Big Knob post. Just click on the Rate this post on Humor-Blogs.com link at the bottom of any of the posts.

I only ask that you follow your heart.

I'll be back tomorrow with a post that has absolutely nothing to do with Humor-Blogs.com, I swear. In fact, it will be so great, that it may just be the perfect post for you to vote for on Humor-Blogs.com.

Humor-Blogs Changes Looming!

2008-07-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

I'm preempting the Thursday Shout-Out this week for a special announcement: Humor-Blogs.com 3.0 will be launched this Sunday, July 6.

The main change is going to be the way that blogs are ranked. We stopped doing blog reviews several months ago, and I've been trying to come up with a way to fairly rank blogs without so much manual effort. I've settled on a sort of thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system similar to that of StumbleUpon or Digg. When a user clicks on a link to H-B from a post on your site, they will be given the option to "smiley" the post: They can give it a laughing-out-loud smiley, a happy smiling, or a grumpy smiley. In order to help prevent fraudulent voting, users must have a Humor-Blogs.com account to smiley posts.

A post's score will be determined by adding up the LOL smileys it has received and subtracting the grumpy smileys. Posts will be listed on the H-B home page in order by their score, from highest to lowest. The overall blog rankings will be determined by adding up the scores of each blog's posts for the past 30 days.

The new system will also be more egalitarian. In the past, only the top 50 ranked blogs have had their posts show up on the home page, but with this new system everyone will have a chance. Blogs will sink or swim based entirely on the votes they get. To make things completely fair, I will be resetting the scores of all the blogs (including mine) back to zero. Sorry, Johnny!

If you're an H-B member, don't worry, you don't have to change anything on your blog. You can keep linking to H-B the way you always have. If you have provided your feed url, any posts that have a link to H-B will show up on H-B.

My goal is to make H-B as fair and simple as I can for the members, and to make the site a more useful resource to visitors looking for funny blogs. This should result in increased traffic, which is good for all Humor-Blogs.com members.

If you have a funny blog and haven't joined Humor-Blogs.com yet, what are you waiting for? Join now! If you're not sure it's worth the trouble, ask any one of the eight bloggers who is ranked higher than me what they think.

And if you're a blog reader who would like to help promote some of your favorite blogs (like this one, for example), get a jump on things and sign up now. You don't have to sign up if you already have a blog listed on Humor-Blogs.com.

No caption contest tomorrow. I'm going to take the day off to celebrate the 4th and make sure everything is in place for the upgrade. I will post more information here after the upgrade is complete.

Strange, Weird. Weird, Strange.

2008-07-02T11:29:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I posted a sort of review of a book (Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life) written by a childhood friend of mine, John Sellers. In a way, his story is the mirror image of my own: we grew up in the same town, suffered through the same "education" at the hands of jerkwad junior high teachers, and attended a Huey Lewis concert together in 1987.

But that's where our stories diverged. Sellers went off to a huge secular university in pursuit of an MBA, eventually becoming disillusioned and embarking on a quest to reinvent himself as a writer and indie music aficionado.

I, on the other hand, attended a small Christian college with no particular aim in mind, eventually ending up with a BA in philosophy. Tired of being dirt poor, I decided to shift gears and teach myself something about computers so that I could get a decent job.

Now, some 21 years after that Huey Lewis concert, our stories have oddly dovetailed. Sellers is a professional writer, having written for publications like GQ and Entertainment Weekly, and of course he's published a book. I spend my days building software applications, but writing is still my passion. I've self published a collection of my humor pieces, and I'm nearing completion of my first novel.

In junior high, Sellers and I used to trade bizarre stories about Dr. Weird (my alter ego) and Dr. Strange (Sellers' alter ego -- no relation to the Marvel comics character). Sellers would write a Dr. Strange story in which Dr. Weird played some part, and then I would write a Dr. Weird story, using that incident as a jumping off point. Dr. Strange would then show up at some point in my story, and Sellers would incorporate that into his next installment. In this way, we developed a sort of semi-unified narrative, our characters inhabiting the same universe, like Daredevil and Spider-Man. Of course, in my stories, Dr. Weird was always the hero, and in Sellers' stories, it was Dr. Strange.

So when Seller's responded to my rebuttal to some of his recollections in Perfect from Now On, I had an odd sense of deja vu (Side note: how is it that Firefox recognizes deja as a word but not vu?). Here we were again, Dr. Weird and Dr. Strange, inhabiting the same universe, but somehow each the hero in our own stories.

In any case, I thought it was only fair that I post Sellers' response so that you can all hear his side of the story. It might not make much sense if you haven't read my original post, however. And if you really want the full story, buy Sellers' book, Perfect from Now On.

Anyway, enough with the intro already. Here's Sellers' response.

------------------------------------------------------

First of all, Diesel -- if I may call you that -- thank you for the shout-out and the well-argued post about my book.

And thanks for refreshing my memory about this:

"Sellers was so convincing in his indignity at the people who had illegitimately snuck into the sixth row ("We're supposed to be here!") that the security guard didn't even bother to check our tickets."

Indignant misdirection, of course, was a ruse commonly employed by Ollie North himself, that "American hero."

(Did I ever really call him that? Holy, holy crap. I can tell you with perfect honesty that I never gave a rat's heinie about him, at least not until he appeared on a few episodes of JAG, which I liked for some damn reason.)

A lot of your points about my personality back then are completely valid. My insecurities -- and I had (still have) a lot of them -- were a product of 1) growing up in a hugely dysfunctional family, 2) attending a private school where everyone's parents seemed to have more money than mine (or at least owned their own homes) and weren't divorced and 3) extreme adolescent confusion brought on largely by genetic betrayal. I tried to hide these insecurities and probably did an okay job of it but most of the time I just wanted to hide. Which I did partly by moving from crowd to crowd.

I love the term crossover dork, and it so perfectly describes me that I may as well go back and change the title of Perfect From Now On to Crossover Dork From Now On.

Still, I don't think it's fair to extrapolate some of my 8th and 12th grade flaws to what I'm like today. I'm a bit of a late bloomer.

Musically, though, I have always without a doubt listened to music purely for the joy of it. My musical tastes have simply shifted over the years.

I used to LOVE Huey Lewis. You know that. I still think he's a cool dude; I even saw Duets. Wasn't the biggest fan of Fore, and I think that's where he lost me, but Picture This and Sports are still played in my p.o.s. Chevy Corsica, which ridiculously has a cassette deck. But I also listen to a lot of other stuff that I genuinely like, and which I genuinely rock out to with the same abandon that you do on I-580. A lot of this happens to be indie rock (and I might point out that the more popular formerly or currently indie artists, like REM and Radiohead and the Shins, could be described as the musical equivalents of "crossover dorks"). That geeky formula came about mostly because, well, I'm a geek, but also out of a desire to make less geeky people laugh about said geekery.

Two other points:

1) Did we ever kill goblins in your basement? I recall a lot of bugbears and orcs and frost giants -- but no goblins. I do of course remember the Towne Club pop and JT's pizza, as well as the time that Kyle (who was more "terminally hyper" than a rebel, in my opinion, although I'll grant you Van Wynen and yeah, yourself) "died" a mere five minutes into a module out of rabid disinterest in D&D.

2) I interviewed E. Gary Gygax [the creator of Dungeons & Dragons -- Diesel] before he died, and it was one of the more significant moments of my life. Maybe I should interview Huey Lewis, just for you (and the person I was at age 15).

------------------------------------------------------

Sellers informs me that he still has some of the stories we wrote together; I'm trying to get him to photocopy them and send them my way. I'm not sure how entertaining they will be at this point, but I think they would give you an idea of how demented we were as children.

The pictures, by the way, are from our 1984-85 yearbook. Glacial Spain and I did the 'caricatures,' such as they are.

Something Fishy This Way Comes

2008-06-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

Some of my new readers may be surprised to learn that I am, in fact, a Christian. I know it's kind of hard to tell, because I don't really believe in pushing my beliefs on people. Also, I'm kind of a jackass.

Maybe what I need is a blog banner with one of those fish symbols on it, like you see on the back of people's cars. You know, like the song says: "They will know we are Christians by the crap we stick on the backs of our cars."

I don't actually have a big problem with the fish insignia trend, but I do wonder how much thought goes into the decision to stick something like that on one's car. First off, why the fish? I mean, I know it's an ancient Christian symbol, but hey, guess what, so is the cross. Everybody knows what the cross means. So why the fish?

Historically the fish was used as a secret sign by Christians to identify themselves to each other, back when being a Christian meant persecution and possibly execution. The last time I checked the local paper, though, Christians weren't being rounded up and burned alive by the authorities in California. So to me, using the fish symbol smacks of a persecution complex. Twenty or thirty years ago, whenever this trend started, not many people would have known what the fish meant. So it was a way for Christians to nudge-nudge-wink-wink make contact with other Christians without the heathens being any the wiser. Isn't it in Luke where Christ commands his disciples to "go and form secret societies within secular culture and communicate in code so that no one can identify you as one of my followers"?

At this point, of course, the cat is out of the bag. The fish is no longer a secret symbol. And yet, it's not universally recognizable either. The fish is like the Chad Michael Murray of religious symbols. Who? half of you say. Exactly.

It also confuses me when the fish symbol has to share real estate on the back of the car with other symbols. What does it mean when you have the fish insignia along with an "I'd rather be golfing" license plate frame and a bumper sticker that says "I (heart) my Labrador"? What's the order of precedence there? Golf, Jesus, Labrador? Is it significant that directly across from the fish symbol there's a Toyota symbol? And has anyone else noticed how satanic the Toyota logo looks in that context?

Just once I'd like to see a car covered entirely with a gigantic fish logo, because that's just how strongly the owner feels about his faith. I laugh at your tiny emblems! Screw resale value! I love Jesus, dammit!

The other day I saw a car that had two big fish and three little fish. The meaning of this was instantly clear to me: The people in this car worshiped two big Jesuses and three little Jesuses. I began to wonder if my lone Jesus was going to be sufficient.

Look, here's how the symbol works: It stands for Jesus, not you and your Subaru Legacy-driving family. Depeche Mode lyrics notwithstanding, we don't each get our own personal Jesus.

In any case, isn't it a little creepy to advertise the supposed religious affiliation of your dependent children? I mean, I'm unabashedly raising my children in the Christian faith, but if you asked me whether my six year old is a Christian, I couldn't give you an intelligent answer. Does Jesus give Nemo and Spongebob some serious competition for coolest guy ever? Oh yeah. But you're going to ask her in a few years if she's a Christian or a Nemoist.

And don't get me started on the whole Jesus vs. Darwin thing. The fish with legs was funny for about the first six or seven hundred times I saw it, but then the Christians, demonstrating both their over-sensitivity and underdeveloped sense of humor, retaliated with a bigger fish eating the Darwin fish. Because, friends, that's really what the Gospel is all about: the ultimate devouring of science by the giant, horrific Jesus-Fish.

Whatever. I don't really mind if you stick a fish on the back of your car. Hell, duct tape an octopus to your tailgate if you want. All I ask is that you put some thought into what your chosen marine animal signifies to the drivers around you. Personally, I'm sticking with the hermit crab.

Congratulating Himself

2008-06-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

Well, this is unexpected. Last time I checked, Sarah was running away with this contest. Hmmm.

But the caption with the most votes this week came from McCafferty Himself. Mr. Himself, you get to display the coveted In Your Face Award.

You'll also receive a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary. Just email me your address.

Sarah came in second, with:

The girls were shocked to meet a man that even Samantha wouldn't sleep with.

And in third was Shelley, with:

"Hey! Is that an original Thomas Kinkade? I'm so bidding on that."

Finally, here's the much-anticipated picture of my car's newly labeled mystery switch:

I've flipped the switch up and down a bunch of times, but I still haven't been able to get the light to go on. Practice, practice, practice!

Thanks for your contribution, Deb. I've added you to the caption contest winners over to the right.

Have a swell weekend. See you on Monday.

Thursday Shout-out

2008-06-26T04:23:00.000-07:00

Some good stuff that I've run across recently in my traverses through the blogosphere:

First up, John Q. Casual presents Twist and Shout: The M. Night Shyamalan Story. An excerpt:

M. Night: See? The ink is running! It's ruined! Water destroyed my report!

Teacher: Well that's stupid. You should have bought some better paper, or some less runny ink or something. You'd think if you went through all of this trouble, you'd make a report that wouldn't be destroyed by something as simple as water.

M. Night: Shut up. Just shut up.

Teacher: Roooooaaaaaar!!

M. Night: What the--!?? Teacher!? You're a bear!!!

Teacher: I have been a bear all along! Roaaarrr!

Read the rest here.

*****

Rickey Henderson also offers his review of Shyamalan's latest movie:

As people begin killing themselves en masse, the movie quickly shifts from Shyamalan’s all too familiar stomping grounds of Philadelphia to the all too familiar Pennsylvania countryside setting that we’ve seen a bazillion times before in his movies. We wonder, does this guy ever leave the state? Is this a Roman Polanski type of situation where he’ll be arrested on sight for making shitty narcissistic movies if he travels outside the state of Pennsylvania?

Read the rest here.

*****

Mike from See Mike Draw has started a new project, a series of comic strips about the strange planet known as Urf. Check it out.

*****

Johnny Virgil from 15 Minute Lunch (yeah, like he needs me sending him traffic) has a funny story about a childhood trip to the zoo.

*****

And finally, some of your favorite members of Humor-Blogs.com have shown up over at Predator Press.

*****

That's it for today. Come back tomorrow for the caption contest results.

Diesel out.

Hip To Be Square

2008-06-25T10:40:00.000-07:00

My fourth grade teacher, prompted by some juvenile witticism of mine, once said to me, "If you ever write a book, I want the first copy." I think it had occurred to me even before that time that I would probably write a book some day, but that incident gelled the notion in my mind.*

I never considered the possibility that someone else in my class might beat me to the punch. My friend Glacial Spain (not his real name) recently gave me a copy of a book titled Perfect From Now On by one John Sellers.

The book, subtitled "How indie rock saved my life" is a breezy memoir of the author's belated discovery and eventual headlong plunge into the world of independent rock music. It's an enjoyable read, made more so for me because I recognize Sellers' Midwestern hometown, repressive middle school and dorky classmates -- because, well, I was one of those dorky classmates.

If you pick up Perfect From Now On expecting -- as I suspect many of you will -- some hidden insights into my own origins, however, you will be disappointed. Although he mentions several of his schoolmates by name, I am not one of them. My exposure in the book is limited to two tangential references: On page 60, the author compares listening to New Order's Substance to getting drunk for the first time, elaborating in a footnote:

Natural Light, with two geeky friends, in early 1987. In involved drunkenly making snow angels.

I was one of the geeky friends. This happened at my house while my parents were out of town.

The other reference is more telling: On page 19 Sellers notes, "Examining my current preferences, I can scarcely believe that my second concert was Huey Lewis and the News." Then, in another footnote (Sellers loves footnotes):

My two friends and I sat in the sixth row, mere feet away from a drunk pip-squeak in a jean jacket who hurled halfway through "Hip to Be Square." A reaction to the music?

I was one of the two geeky friends again (Sellers mercifully left out the adjective this time). What he neglected to mention is that we had wheedled our way into the sixth row because our assigned seats sucked. Thanks to people like us, the sixth row was so crammed with unwelcome immigrants that security came through checking tickets. Sellers was so convincing in his indignity at the people who had illegitimately snuck into the sixth row ("We're supposed to be here!") that the security guard didn't even bother to check our tickets.

The interesting thing to me is that Sellers' jumping off point in his musical odyssey is something that still defines me as a person today. For Sellers, Huey Lewis was part of a corporate pop culture to be rebelled against, but for me, Huey was -- and remains -- the quintessential rebel and a personal hero.

Sellers and I (I'm not being formal; even as kids we just called him "Sellers") were similar in a lot of ways. Quirky and bright, we were bored with school and spent a lot of our time reading comic books and writing bizarre stories.

The difference between Sellers and me was that Sellers was what I call a "crossover dork." That is, although he was a dork at heart, he was capable of faking normalcy well enough to fit in with the cool kids most of the time. Sellers was a good student, reasonably athletic, and could speak intelligently about professional sports teams.

By contrast, I was small and uncoordinated, couldn't force myself to fake an interest in spectator sports, and wore thick, fantastically uncool glasses. But as Matthew Broderick says in The Freshman, "There's a kind of freedom in being completely screwed." I never bothered to try to fit in because I knew it was hopeless. This wasn't much fun for me -- if it weren't for crossover dorks like Sellers and Glacial Spain, I would have been completely ostracized. But at least I was free to be who I was.

Sellers, on the other hand, lived in constant fear that he would be exposed. In the book he paints this fear mostly as a result of circumstances:

Any antisocial or disturbingly eccentric behavior would have got you singled out as a mutant by the kids you had to see in class every day, year after year, and, considering how pious the school administrators were trying to appear, it might even have got you expelled. Why make your time there even worse than it already was?

This is essentially true; I've written about our ass-hat junior high teachers myself. But he goes on to say:

There were no rebels at [our elementary school].

This is a backhanded defense of Sellers' own lack of rebelliousness, but I would argue that it's not true. Bill V., who once broke into and vandalized the school, was surely a rebel. Kyle D., who used to jump from desk to desk when the teachers weren't in the room (and who was eventually held back because of his failure to complete assignments) was a rebel. And then there was the kid who studied D&D rulebooks during class, called out the creepy math teacher for tickling the male students, and skated by with C's and D's despite his obvious intelligence. That was me.

Sellers' fear of standing out intensified as we grew older. In high school he used to play dumb when the topic of Dungeons & Dragons came up, as if he had no recollection of the many Saturdays we spent in my parents' basement killing goblins and drinking Towne Club soda. To his credit, though, he never dumped me as a friend -- which is somewhat remarkable considering that I was pretty much uncool incarnate at that point.

At the same time Sellers would make absurd and arbitrary claims, as if setting up straw man personalities to see who would knock them down. It was impossible to tell which of his obsessions were real and which were fabricated: He was the first person I knew who embraced rap music, but I also clearly remember him telling me that Oliver North was an "American hero." Meanwhile, I did my best to reserve judgment on both fronts.

I don't say any of this to denigrate Sellers; I'm quite certain that the social pressures he felt were very real, and his journey out of the wilderness of Huey Lewis and Duran Duran to indie bands like the Smiths and Guided By Voices is genuine as well. There's also no doubt that Sellers has a deeper knowledge of music and appreciation of the indie music scene than I have.

On the other hand, I wonder if Sellers' current musical tastes are still dictated to some degree by what the cool people are doing. Sellers' complex, obsessive and (I suspect) only partially tongue-in-cheek formula for rating the greatness of a band smacks of someone who still has never quite learned to listen to music purely for the joy of music.

In 1987 I listened to Huey Lewis because I related to a guy who didn't feel the need to wear leather pants or trash hotel rooms to prove his coolness. A rock star who could sing unabashedly about how uncool he was ("Now I'm playing it real straight/and yes I cut my hair/you might think I'm crazy/but I don't even care/There is no denying that/It's hip to be square") was validation of my own square rebellion. Today I still howl along with that song while barreling down I-580 on my way to work. There's simply no explanation for this behavior other than the fact that I love the song, and that it takes me back to a day when I too suspected, despite the crushing pressures of adolescence, that it was okay to be a dork.

Now Sellers writes entertainment articles for Spin and GQ, and I have the ultimate dork job: writing computer software. So I suppose Sellers is still cooler than I, but there's a lot of pressure that goes along with being cool. As for me, I've come to the conclusion that Huey was right all along: It really is hip to be square.

*Not long after this, that teacher made me cough up $12 for my share of a car window that Greg K. broke when he inadvisedly threw a rock near another teacher's car. A group of us had been playing in an off-limits area behind the school, so we were all held equally responsible. Always one for semantic exactitude, I pleaded not guilty on the grounds that we had been told "not to play tag behind the school." We were not, in fact, playing tag, and therefore not in violation of the rule. So my 4th grade teacher can take that $12 and buy her own damn copy.

Vote!

2008-06-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, folks, time to vote for your favorite caption. I'll post the winner on Friday.

Thanks to all of those who let me know that I left you off my caption contest standings. I'm obviously not so good with details. I'll correct the standings shortly.

And yes, I'm still planning on posting a pic of my car's clitoris. Hell, I might even wash the car. Patience, people.

Here are your caption finalists:

Brad "Wombat" Randall said...

The women are surprised to learn that the producers have added the character of "Mr. Tiny" to the movie.

scottsunderwater said...

Suddenly Cynthia Nixon's cast-mates understood her sexual preference

Brad said...

Specs and the City

Fold My Laundry Please said...

Finally! A room with enough lighting that my lenses don't look perpetually dark!

sage said...

Hollywood has just announced a sequel to Sex in the City, staring Diesel, making his début, in “A New Found Celibacy for the City”

Shelley said...

"Hey! Is that an original Thomas Kinkade? I'm so bidding on that."

McCafferty Himself said...

John McCain agrees to be Diesel’s friend on MySpace.

toadroller said...

In a unique and serendipitous moment in their long and diverse friendship, all four of the girls had the very same thought at the very same time but for vastly different reasons: "Who's the stiff?"

Deb on the Rocks said...

It was clear that Sex and the City had jumped the shark when they introduced country-bumpkin -with-a-heart-of-gold character "Ugly Cousin Heather."

sarah said...

The girls were shocked to meet a man that even Samantha wouldn't sleep with.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

No (Pointing Out) Fat Chicks

2008-06-23T09:40:00.000-07:00

My six year old daughter once said of one of the teachers at her school, "Mrs. _____ is really strong." She added, by way of clarification, "Because we can't say fat."

I'm not sure where my daughter got the idea that strong is an appropriate euphemism for fat, but I'm sure I had something to do with teaching her that calling someone fat is not socially acceptable. Once, for example, when my kids were younger, I took them to Sears. While I was browsing the hardware section, they were playing I-Spy, pointing out various items in the store. "I spy something red," or "I spy something that you could use to mow your lawn," that sort of thing.

I remember watching in dream-like slow motion as the escalator deposited a fantastically large woman directly in front of my children. I saw the scenario playing out in my mind before it happened, but there was nothing I could do to prevent it. I didn't even have time to run away and leave my children to be Sears orphans.

"I spy a big fat lady!" my daughter squealed joyfully. My son, slightly older and more reserved, just giggled to himself.

The woman wobbled past, shooting me a look that seemed to say, "Thanks for bringing two more horrid children into the world and making my life just that much more miserable!" I smiled sheepishly, realizing there was absolutely nothing I could say or do to improve the situation. Sure, I could make a show of scolding them, but for what? Pointing out that someone is fat? That would imply that there's something wrong with being fat, making the situation worse.

The problem is that society hasn't decided what it's going to do about fat people. We haven't decided if being fat is a disability, like not having any legs; whether it's a personal choice to be frowned upon, like smoking; or something that we can talk openly about, but only if the person admits to their condition or is a celebrity, like being gay.

I've read enough Parade magazine to know it's supposedly okay for children to point out disabled people and ask questions about them. (And still, I'm always afraid that my children are going to encounter the one legless guy who didn't get the memo). But what do you do with fat people?

Daughter: "Daddy, why is that lady so fat?"
Daddy: "That's a good question, honey. Why don't we ask her? I'm sure she'll appreciate your child-like honesty and curiosity."
Daughter: "Hey fat lady, why are you so fat?"
Fat Lady: "What a darling little child! I appreciate your child-like honesty and curiosity. To answer your question, I eat far too much and get very little exercise. Also, I tend to eat processed foods that are high in sugar and saturated fat. If I keep it up, there's a good chance I'll be dead by the time I'm 40. Does that answer your question, sweetie?"

For some reason, I don't see the exchange going that smoothly. So now I have to explain to my children that it's okay to ask why someone has no arms, but not okay to ask why someone has eight chins. Can somebody please explain the rule of thumb here, preferably in language a six year old can understand?

Recently I skimmed through a special "obesity issue" of Time magazine. Article after article detailed how we are eating too much, eating the wrong kinds of stuff and not exercising enough -- and endangering our health in the process. Then, presumably to lighten the mood, there was an article about a fat woman who had learned to accept herself the way she was, and appreciate the fact that skinny is not synonymous with healthy. Huh?

Wouldn't it be great if life really worked that way? A visit to your doctor might go like this:

Doctor: I'm afraid I have bad news. You're morbidly obese. You need to start eating right, get more exercise and stop smoking, or you're going to have a stroke.
Patient: Doc, I know I'm a little on the heavy side, but I've learned to accept myself. I feel really good about my body. I may not meet society's definition of beautiful, but I feel beautiful inside.
Doctor: Well, why didn't you say so! Modern medical science is rendered completely obsolete by the fact that you feel good about your condition. Why, just the other day I saw a man so euphoric about having his legs amputated that he literally flew out of the intensive care unit!
Patient: So does this mean I can keep smoking?
Doctor: That depends. Does smoking make you feel cool and help you fit in with your friends?
Patient: Absolutely!
Doctor: Then who am I to tell you to stop?
Patient: Wow, that's fantastic. You're a terrific doctor, you know that? Are you always this upbeat?
Doctor: Not always, but today I am. After all, I just found out I have stage four liver cancer!
Patient: Awesome!

Now I'm not a doctor, but in the forties Time magazine was putting the Nazis on its cover. The equivalent threat today is evidently ten-year-olds with ice cream cones. To my knowledge, Time never ran an essay about how the Netherlands was "feeling really good" about being overrun by the German war machine.

As one of America's premier cultural commentators, I feel some obligation to help society come to terms with fat people. And yet, as a relatively thin person, I'm a little reluctant to do so. Last time I weighed in on the issue (ha!), I got a lot of hate mail. (Granted, my advice consisted mostly of telling fat people to cover up so as to not nauseate me). So I'm stuck with leaving the matter in the hands of people like Camryn Manheim, the fat chick from The Practice, who wrote a book called Wake Up, I'm Fat!

I haven't read the book (it's got a fat chick on the cover, for crying out loud!), but presumably it's about how we're supposed to accept Camryn Mahheim's obesity and love her for who she is. And yet, somehow I suspect that she resents being referred to as "the fat chick from The Practice." So we're left to guess what language we are allowed to use to refer to people like Camryn Manheim (the brash, annoying chick from The Practice? The loud, irritating lesbian from The Practice? The chick on The Practice who, when averaged with Lara Flynn Boyle, would make a normal looking woman?)

And I have to continue to try to explain to my children why it's okay to point out some conditions but not others, which can have strange results.

Daughter: "Daddy, why does that man have no legs?"
Daddy: "I don't know, honey. Why don't you ask him?"
Daughter: "Sir, why don't you have any legs?"
Legless Man: "Well, sweetie, I had to have my legs chopped off with a saw."
Daughter: "Why?"
Legless Man: "I had something called diabetes. You see, I used to eat way too much, and then...."
Daddy: "I spy something red!"

Caption Contest: Sex and the City

2008-06-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

You know the rules. Submit your caption in the comments. Mrs. Diesel and I will pick our ten favorites and post them in a poll on Tuesday. The winner gets a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary: From the Secret Files of the Mattress Police.

I've also started listing the current contest standings over on the right (below the Recent Inspectors). My record keeping leaves something to be desired, so let me know if I missed you or got your total number of wins wrong.

See you on Monday!

All In Favor of a Heliocentric Solar System Say "Aye!"

2008-06-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

It always puzzles me when someone talks about the conflict between science and religion. I’m a religious person and I also believe in the value of science, yet I’ve never experienced any conflict. I feel like I must be doing one of them wrong.

As I see it, there are five main systems that shape the Western world. These are: Science, democracy, capitalism, religion, and American Idol. Everybody seems to think that the world is headed toward more of all of these things – all of them, that is, except for religion. Religion, for some reason, is always seen as the runt of the litter, doomed to lose out to its more robust siblings. And yet, if I were to pick the two systems that are most likely to come into conflict (putting aside American Idol), it wouldn’t be science and religion. It would be science and democracy.

Think about it: Science is all about facts. Facts are brutal and unyielding. They are what they are, regardless of how anyone feels about it.

Democracy, on the other hand, is all about opinions. You don’t have to have a shred of evidence to support your choice at the ballot box. And once you vote somebody in, they are in no way bound to act according to reason, facts or logic. They just do whatever feels right to them, based on any number of possibly completely irrelevant factors. It seems inevitable that these two systems will butt heads. The EPA is a case in point.

Where it gets really weird is when people start combining the two systems. For example, when you ask somebody how they know that global warming is a serious problem, they will most likely rattle off some statistic about how many scientists agree that it’s a serious problem. Huh? I thought science was about presenting facts and testing hypotheses. Now we’re favoring scientific theories based on sheer numbers?

It reminds me of the old joke about the kindergartener who brought a puppy to school for show and tell. The class couldn’t decide whether the puppy was a boy or a girl, so they voted on it.

The problem, of course, is that voting doesn’t do a damn thing to change the facts of the situation. If the people voting don’t have any basis for voting one way or another, all you’re getting is a collective guess. Well, hell, I can do that. Who needs scientists?

Remember those Trident commercials about how “four out of five dentists we surveyed recommended Trident for their patients who chew gum”? What a ringing endorsement that was, huh? They preselected a bunch of dentists and basically said to them, “Well, yes, we know gum is bad for you, but if one of your patients insisted on chewing gum, would you recommend chewing sugarless gum, such as, say, Trident?” And they still couldn’t get the fifth guy to buckle! That dentist had some balls, I tell you. In the seventeenth century, four out of five dentists thought the sun revolved around the earth. Too bad the fifth one was a guy by the name of Galileo, bitches.

If we’re really serious about the science-democracy mashup, we should make it into a reality show like, well, American Idol. You start out with ten thousand scientists from across the country, each with competing views on global warming, and gradually eliminate them by, um, denying them tenure or something. We can work out the details later. But the important thing is that the winner will get to determine our policy on global warming. Hopefully it will be someone with a good head on his or her shoulders, who is also cute as a button, much like Kelly Clarkson. But if the winner is the scientific equivalent of William Hung, then we’ll just have to deal with it, even if it means living in aluminum huts and driving coal powered submarines for a year.

Asking ten thousand scientists what to do about global warming is like asking ten thousand lawyers what to do about Roe versus Wade. Where do you even find ten thousand scientists? I think you probably have to lower the bar to anyone who owns a white lab coat to get those kinds of numbers. I mean, there’s no independent qualification of scientists, is there? Anybody who spends their weekends mixing hair gel with silly putty in the garage in an attempt to make Flubber can call themselves a scientist.

Which brings me to my point: These so-called “scientists” have far too much power in our society. We need to level the playing field a bit. To that end, I’m starting a scientific institute called, um, the Mattress Police Institute for the Advancement of Scientific Missions of Awesomeness, also known as MIASMA (the ‘P’ is silent). To work at MIASMA, you must:

1) Own a white lab coat, or intend to buy one when you have the money
2) Believe in the advancement of Science through Scientific Missions of Awesomeness
3) Believe that no list is complete without at least three items

To apply to MIASMA, simply leave a comment below. Once you are accepted into MIASMA, you are considered an official Scientist, and may weigh in on important matters such as global warming, global cooling, and global staying-about-the-same-ing. Together, we can ensure that science gets the injection of pure democracy that it needs in order to keep our interest. I look forward to working with you to make/keep our planet a comfortable temperature.

Long live science! Death to the unbelievers!

(Oh, and I’ve made another banner. You don’t have to use the banner to be a staff scientist at MIASMA, but it will look good on your review. I know, you already have the Huey Lewis banner, the Humor-Blogs banner, the Antisocial Commentary banner and the Grundir banner, but you really need this one too. Because it’s all sciencey and stuff.)

Best of MP: Book 'Em

2008-06-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

It's Tuesday, so it must be time for another Best of Mattress Police post. Today's post comes from August of 2007, back when I had time to troll the interwebs looking for pictures of Tara Reid. Enjoy.

Book 'Em!

I think Barnes and Noble is on to me.

I think they've figured out that I'm one of those people who just browses through books for an hour, leaves them on the wrong shelf, and then walks out without buying anything. How else can you explain the fact that the alarm goes off every time I enter the store?

I've gotten into the habit of holding up my hands and shouting "It's just me!" whenever I walk into the store, which is usually pretty effective at negating suspicions. Except, of course, on those rare occasions when the alarm doesn't go off for some reason, in which case it has precisely the opposite effect. Funny how a preemptive declaration of harmlessness freaks people right out.

One time I carried a book from Barnes and Noble into Starbucks next door, picked up a coffee, then brought the book back into the store, at which point the alarm went off. An employee shot me an accusatory look. I sheepishly held up the book, demonstrating my willingness to cooperate.

"You can't take books out of the store," she said.

"Apparently I can take books out of the store," I replied. "What I can't do, at least without getting a lot of unwanted attention, is to bring books back into the store."

She clearly wanted to punish me in some way, but couldn't settle on her next course of action.

"Do you... want me to take the book back into Starbucks?" I said. "I promise not to bring it back into the store this time."

She grumbled something and walked off. You just can't satisfy some people.

I don't know how Barnes and Noble makes any money. Actually, I have my suspicions. I think they make all their money on those "bargain items" at the front of the store. You know the stuff I'm talking about: those oversized books and boxed "kits" that promise to teach you everything you need to know to get started with Feng Shui or drawing manga characters or mastering the art of the tarot.

I find these displays fascinating, because they're like a smörgåsbord* of lifestyle options. I like how they are always marked down from $19.95 to $14.95 or something. I imagine a young woman walking out of the store with her girlfriend, clutching one of those boxes.

Woman 1: I thought you were going to convert to Buddhism.

Woman 2: I was, but Calligraphy was on sale.

Barnes and Noble has something for everybody, including people who hate to read. The last time I was there I saw an audio book of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Now that's niche marketing. It's the book for people who want to hear someone read a movie to them.

Guy 1: You know what I really loved about Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines?

Guy 2: The hot chick terminator?

Guy 1: No...

Guy 2: Arnold Schwarzenegger kicking ass?

Guy 1: No...

Guy 2: The awesome effects?

Guy 1: No...

Guy 2: The ever perky Claire Daines, in her best role since My So-Called Life?

Guy 1: No...

Guy 2: Okay, I give up. What did you love about Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines?

Guy 1: The lyrical dialogue and rich thematic subtext. It's too bad I never learned how to read.

Guy 2: Ooh, have I got a book for you!

Every time I go to Barnes and Noble I have to spend half an hour browsing through the "humor" section. As a humor writer, this is therapeutic for me. Just when I start to feel a little guilty about shamelessly hawking my own book in every one of my posts, I pick up a book that is made up of 80 pages of "lessons" gleaned from Napoleon Dynamite -- one per page. The book was priced at $9.95, even though it looked like it had been written over a long weekend by a hungover middle schooler. Most of the books in the "humor" section are so painfully unfunny that they made me want to go to the literature section to take in a few pages of The Brothers Karamazov just to lighten my mood a bit. Not that there aren't any funny books there -- This book made me chuckle, and the Deep Thoughts collections are always good for some laughs. And of course there are books by the old pros, like Dave Barry and Woody Allen. But generally speaking, if you want to see something funny, you're better off browsing through some of the books they're trying to pawn off as "serious."

For example, I always find the "...for Dummies" books amusing. Well, mostly what I find amusing is the ambiguity of the titles. Fishing for Dummies, for example, sounds pretty cool. I have to admit that catching a dummy would be more exciting than landing a trout. Plus, dummies are way easier to gut. And when you're done cleaning your dummy, you can rely on your trusty copy of Sewing for Dummies to help you stitch your dummy back up so that it's suitable for hanging in your den.

And if the Dummies books are too advanced for you, there are also books for Complete Idiots. There's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Sex, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Accounting, and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Astrology -- which, now that I think about it, is redundant.

Some day I'm going to launch a line of books for people who are too dumb for the Complete Idiot books. I'm going to call them ________ for Total F---ing Retards Who Can't Even Read So they Don't Know this Book is Filled Entirely With Lyrics from Def Leppard Songs. I'm not even going to bother to fill in the blank in the title, because what difference is it going to make? I'll just change the color of the cover once a month to indicate that a new edition has been released.

I'd love to write more, but I've got to go smuggle some more copies of Antisocial Commentary into the "summer reading" section.

*I'd like to thank the developers of the Firefox web browser for "correcting" my spelling by adding those funky alien symbols to that word.

I’m an Internet Stalker!

2008-06-16T06:33:00.000-07:00

Every week a couple dozen new bloggers sign up to be listed on Humor-Blogs.com. I used to review every site to determine whether it qualified as a humor blog, but it didn’t take me long to realize that this was an impossible task. Sadly, a lot of people are so bad at being funny that it’s almost impossible to determine whether they are even trying. So lately all I do is visit the site to determine (1) whether it is a blog, and (2) whether it has a link to Humor-Blogs.com. Oh, and I also check for nudity (which is only appropriate on a humor blog if the subject is fat) and what I consider “grossly inappropriate content.” I rarely reject someone for content reasons, but it does happen. The other day I rejected a site that had jokes about, among other things, infant sodomy [Shudder]. I have an automated system where I can send a “welcome aboard” email to bloggers whose sites meet those criteria, or a rejection email in case they don’t.

The rejection email explains why the blogger’s site was rejected and what to do about it. Generally that’s the end of it, but occasionally the rejected blogger will email me back. Often this results in an edifying discussion about how Humor-Blogs.com works exactly, after which the blogger either adds a link and joins the site or we part amicably.

Sometimes neither of these happens. Sometimes the exchange goes like this one. (I've changed the blogger's name to avoid further angering her.)

Hi,

Your web site, [Strikingly Original Blog Title], was rejected for inclusion on Humor-Blogs.com because we were unable to find a link to Humor-Blogs.com on your website. If you have added a link to Humor-Blogs.com and we missed it, we apologize. Please make sure that the link is on the main page of your blog (not a separate 'links' page), and that our site's name and url are spelled and formatted correctly, and then RESUBMIT your site to http://humor-blogs.com/JoinLanding.aspx. You can respond to this email if you want, but there's a pretty good chance that will irritate us.

Cheers!
Diesel

Yes well, sorry if this irritates you but when I went over there and saw that the first thing a viewer would see when linking to Humor Blogs' homepage was stuff like "Cock Blocking Since 2004" and "Found Shit" and "Wiping Butts Since 1998" I reconsidered my desire for inclusion in your "community" because I want my blog to be family-friendly.

Plus which, none of that is funny, in my opinion.

Thanks anyway!

Suzy Blogger

Hi Suzy,

I can't control who signs up for the site. I only reject sites that don't link to H-B, or that have grossly inappropriate content. Sorry the site doesn't meet your needs.

Cheers,
Diesel

Clearly we have differing views on what constitutes grossly inappropriate.

Suzy Blogger

All I know is that if wiping butts is inappropriate at your house, I don't want to come over. :)

Diesel

Well, at least YOU attempt to be a comedian.

Suzy Blogger

Always attempting, yes. That's me.

Seriously, this whole Humor-Blogs site has blown way out of my control. I never had any policies in place to say "No, you can't have 'shit' in your blog title," so I just had to kind of let things slide. I'm sure some people are offended, but whatever. Nobody's going to die from seeing the word 'shit' in print.

Are they? (He asked ominously)

Diesel

Well, you know, you said a few minutes ago that you can't control who signs up on the site ... but obviously you can because you denied me that dubious privilege.

And that is perfectly fine. I have no problem with that but don't tell me you can't control it because you are controlling it.

And no, maybe people won't die from reading that word, but it is my firm belief that something does die when people cease to care about the kind of language they use in public [Yes, but maybe it’s something bad that dies, like a ridiculously uptight harpy, or that trend where women wear their pants tucked into brown leather boots? - Diesel]. When I started blogging I decided I wouldn't be part of that.

Suzy Blogger

What I said was:

"I can't control who signs up for the site. I only reject sites that don't link to H-B, or that have grossly inappropriate content."

In other words, I have some very minimal rules that I enforce. I used to go through the sites very carefully and try to determine whether they qualified as "humor blogs." But after a while I realized that I couldn't even tell half the time when somebody is trying to be funny. It's all so subjective. The same thing goes for offensiveness. A site not having a link, however, is very clear cut.

Diesel

You know what? I'd appreciate it if you would leave me alone.

Suzy Blogger

I can’t help but feel that I have been a little part of crushing Suzy’s dream of being the most popular humorless dingbat on the interwebs. Man, you really can’t make this shit up.

He Puts it WHERE?!

2008-06-13T11:32:00.000-07:00

While Diesel is taking a well-deserved break from blogging this week, we present to you a special series of guest posts, lovingly entitled "Meet the Real Diesel."

This post was, believe it or not, written by Diesel's actual mother.

I think Diesel (not his real name) was about four or five at the time. He was cheerfully splashing in the tub when he looked up and said, “Mom, where do babies come from?”

Well, I’d had a long, hard day, and I’d been ready to coast through the evening unchallenged. But, I thought, this is important. Don’t blow it. I considered myself an intelligent, fairly well-educated person, so I knew how I should handle this. Answer the questions honestly, but don’t volunteer information beyond what the kid is asking for. His older brother had never asked me such a question. I took a deep breath and then said (casually, I hoped), “they grow inside the mommy’s tummy.”

“How do they get in there?”

“Well, they grow from an egg.”

“What does the daddy do?”

“Um, let’s be sure we wash behind your ears. The sperm from the daddy gets together with the egg in the mommy, and then the baby starts to grow.”

“How does the sperm get from the daddy into the mommy?”

Will this kid never quit? How much information does a four-year-old need!? I gave it my best shot: “When a man and a woman really love each other they get very close together, and. . ." I heard myself saying it all, as simply and truthfully as I could, no euphemisms, no cute substitutions for the names of body parts. I looked into the water and waited for a response.

Diesel scrunched up his nose in disgust and blurted, “Why would they want to do that?”

Another deep breath. “Oh, someday, when you’re older you’ll understand why.”

Diesel pensively dragged his palms through the tepid water. Had I screwed up the interview after all? Given too much information? Would the rest of this innocent boy’s childhood be devoted to trying to understand the strange passions and messy physical realities that lead to parenthood?

Diesel lifted one hand out of the water and looked at it. “How come my fingers get all wrinkly when I take a bath?”

“I don’t know. Let’s dry you off and get you to bed.”

Diesel Begins

2008-06-12T07:41:00.000-07:00

While Diesel is taking a well-deserved break from blogging this week, we present to you a special series of guest posts, lovingly entitled "Meet the Real Diesel."

Today's guest blogger is Joel from Crummy Church Signs.

Hi, everyone. I thought that since Diesel's away this week, it might be nice if we could take a sneak peek into Diesel's past; perhaps if we could see the formative forces behind our resident comic genius in his early years, we might better understand the insanity behind some of these posts of his.

With that in mind, I recently held an interview with his parents, Mom and Pop Diesel. Well....sort of. The transcript follows.

Joel: Good morning, Mom and Pop Diesel. I'm hoping that this interview will shed some light on our blogging friend Diesel from Mattress Police.

Mom Diesel: Actually, Pop's not here right now. He’s out killing gophers. Or maybe building a fountain. Or taking pictures of his car. I’m never sure what he’s up to.

Joel: Oh...well, I'm really just trying to see if there's anything in Diesel's past that might explain some of his antics on his blog.

Mom Diesel: Sure. Let's see, where can I start? Well, first of all... (huge crashing sound in background).

Joel: What was that?!? Are you OK?

Mom Diesel: Oh...yes. Sorry. That was just a light fixture falling out of the ceiling. Pop Diesel's been in the process of building our home for the past....what, 19 years now? It seems to never end...(long, almost wistful pause)
Anyhow, where were we?

Joel: Anything in Diesel's past that can help explain the Mattress Police?

Mom Diesel: Of course, right. Perhaps...(sound of knocking at the door)...Oh, I'm so sorry. Excuse me while I answer the door.

Mom Diesel: Hello...

Young Man's Voice: I'm here to edge the sidewalk like you asked. Why do I have to do this again?

Mom Diesel: You don't. I can find someone else if you...

Young Man's Voice: And why are you only paying me $8 an hour?

Mom Diesel: Because you've proven your willingness to work for us for $8 an hour previously.

Young Man's Voice: Oh.

Mom Diesel: Look, the edger's in the garage. Watch out for the hobbits. Let me know when you're done.

Mom Diesel: Joel, I'm so sorry.

Joel: No, it's fine.

Mom Diesel: Back to the question: We did move around a lot in Diesel's childhood. Pop Diesel had a lot of different jobs early on. There were too many incompetent bosses to count, and too few jobs that matched Pop's unique skill set. Finally Pop settled on a job with a huge multinational corporation doing something he wasn't even remotely trained to do.

Joel: OK...I dunno if that's the type of information I'm really looking for, though. The readers all want to know: What makes Diesel, Diesel?

Mom Diesel: OK...hold on, I've got a call on another line. Can you wait a second?

Joel: Yeah, sure.

(waits 15 minutes, then hangs up and calls back)

Mom Diesel: Hello?

Joel: This is Joel...from the interview?

Mom Diesel: Oh! Right! Sorry...while we were interviewing I was giving a piano lesson, baking a batch of cookies, vacuuming the living room, and filling out our taxes. I guess sometimes I take on a few too many projects at once! (Sound of smoke alarm in background) ACK! The cookies!

Joel: That's OK. Look, I'm running out of time and was just wondering if there was anything else you could think of that might have made Diesel the mad genius he is today.

Mom Diesel: I just don't know, Joel. We were a pretty normal All-American family. We lived in a partially built house with Thomas Kinkade paintings on the walls. We spent our weekends at the Home Depot or shooting clay pigeons at the range. We let him read comic books and watch science fiction. We always had good, wholesome music playing on the hi-fi, like that wonderful Huey Lewis. The only thing that stands out from his childhood is how unorganized and dysfunctional his sock drawer was.

Joel: Well, Mom Diesel, I guess that just shows that comic genius can arise out of the most unexpected circumstances. Have a nice day.

Mom Diesel: Goodbye, Joel.

Well, there you have it. Our friend Diesel's current state of comic genius is simply unexplainable. Clearly neither genetic nor a product of environment, let us just remain thankful that we have been blessed by his presence. We are fortunate enough to live in the era of Diesel, so let's not question his origins any longer. Clearly, he is an enigma beyond our meager understanding.

Mr. Sunshine

2008-06-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

While Diesel is taking a well-deserved break from blogging this week, we present to you a special series of guest posts, lovingly entitled "Meet the Real Diesel."

Today's guest blogger is a man known only as Glacial Spain. Rumor has it that Glacial Spain has been friends with Diesel for nearly 30 years, so presumably he has some serious mental deficiency and should not be trusted.

Oh. Hi!

I, uh, wasn't expecting anyone to show up. Diesel asked me to look after the place while he was out, so here I am, just having a look around.

So... Do you want some raisins? There's plenty to go around. Help yourself. D won't mind. Before he left he said, “Yo G! Help yourself to the raisins.” So it's all cool.

Apparently I'm supposed to provide you with a window into the “real” Diesel. In case you haven't figured it out already, I haven't quite gotten around to doing that yet. “Mostly I expect people to just make stuff up, but in your case you don't have to,” was the way he put it.

I did write this whole big long testament of My Life with Diesel, which was maybe funny if you had been there, but it read like an encyclopedia. If I could sum it up with a simple illustration, this is what it would look like:

That wasn't the 1,000 words I was hoping for. I'd better explain.

One day back in fifth grade, during lunch recess, I was trying to impress a girl who liked horses. I tried to draw a horse on the chalkboard for her, but she wasn't impressed. That's when Diesel stepped in. Much to my chagrin, he picked up the chalk and added that dude up there on the left, smoking a cigarette, sitting on my horse.

As for the guy on the right, that's Mr. Sunshine. Diesel drew him in an art class. The actual size is about 18” x 24.” One night in college I was roused from my sleep by a tap at my second floor bedroom window. When I turned the light on, Mr. Sunshine was there, looking back at me through the glass.

We spent an inordinate amount of time in fifth grade drawing pictures like that one on the left. Then we drew pictures of torture chambers, and of Death decapitating people. We wrote goofy stories, played Dungeons & Dragons (R.I.P. Gary Gygax), teased his little brother and played Asteroids on his Atari 2600 until the score flipped back to zero, at about 4 a.m. You get the idea.

We hung around together in high school, and Diesel developed an unnatural affinity for Huey Lewis' music. Whatever you've read here in the past about Huey is all real. Maybe. Honestly, I'm not in a position to judge because I spent those years being haunted by U2's Bad.*

We lived together for a few years in college. We never shared a room, though. I don't know about Diesel, but for me the reason was that he's messy as hell and I'm obsessively tidy. I'm one of those “a place for everything and everything in its place” types, and a good part of my brain is dedicated to knowing where my shit is. Diesel, on the other hand, is always looking for his shit. “Where did I put that? I just had it in my hand a second ago!” I do that too sometimes, but for Diesel I'm guessing it's an hourly occurrence. He probably even dreams about misplacing things.

In Diesel's case the tradeoff for such inefficiency with tangible, real world objects is heightened powers of creativity, an efficiency with abstract concepts, if you will. It was always Diesel who took the lead in our imaginative pursuits.** He'd invent a story and I'd follow. I got pretty good at rewording things.

I'll leave you with one more anecdote. When we were kids, Diesel's dad decided to paint the bathroom in their house. He took the mirror above the sink down and set it aside while he worked. That three foot diameter mirror was an opportunity just waiting, waiting for its moment of glory. Diesel and I found the mirror sitting there and carried it outside. Diesel lived in a house at the top of a high, steep hill. A busy, four lane road ran past his house at the bottom of the hill. Across the street, about a hundred yards away, a guy was pushing a lawnmower around his oversized lawn. In school, catching the sun's rays on one's wristwatch and aiming them at the teacher's forehead is fun enough, but with a three foot mirror... This poor guy was pushing his mower with one hand and shielding his eyes with the other. And what could he do? Nuthin'. He gestured at us, and even started across the street once. There was no way he could have caught us, though, because by the time he had crossed the street and climbed the hill, we'd have been long gone. Poor guy. We had a blast.

Well, I hope this has been real enough for you. Which reminds me: before I leave I should scatter some raisins around the floor, make it look like the cat got into them.

Ciao,

GS

* "Do you mean Michael Jackson's Bad? Or U2's Boy?" "No, U2 had a song called 'Bad.'" "Oh, ok. Then it should be in quotes, not italicized." "That's your job." "Ok, I'll be sure to change it."
**But not in a queer way. - Diesel

Diesel's Summer Vacation

2008-06-09T08:34:00.000-07:00

While Diesel is taking a well-deserved break from blogging this week, we present to you a special series of guest posts, lovingly entitled "Meet the Real Diesel."

Today's guest blogger is Snuppy, aka "Crazy Aunt Bea," formerly of Central Snark, whose special bond with Diesel has transcended time, space and several restraining orders. Enjoy.

Diesel's Summer Vacation

Diesel was the prettiest little girl I ever did see. Despite her dirty face, impossibly short hair, and the fact she wore dingy dungarees over a torn tee shirt, I could tell from the moment I shoved her inside my car that she was a child worth investing time, money, and bath salts on. And believe you me, I went about doing just that during the summer young Diesel spent with me on the ancestral family farm, located on the outskirts of Pixley, California.

Like all children in new surroundings, Diesel -- or Dee Dee, as I preferred to call her -- was initially timid, and just a tad terrified. Truth be told, I was a little surprised by all the fuss she made when I picked her up at the bus stop, but knew she’d settle down once she got used to the smell in the back of my station wagon. Still, the drive home wasn’t without drama, and more than a few tears. Dee Dee claimed she was in the wrong place. She also claimed – and this part tickled me to no end – that she wasn’t a girl at all, but a little boy! What an imagination, that kid. I never ceased to delight in the stories she made up about robots, wizards, and men dressed up like bats, and had high hopes she’d one day become a librarian. Sadly, thanks to something called “new math” and her inability to grasp the nuances of Dodge Ball, Dee Dee never made it past the 3rd grade. But, as I so often do when thinking of clumsy, stupid children and/or things that get my panties get in a wad, I digress. This story is about someone named Dee Dee, the prettiest little girl I ever did see, and how she and I spent one hot summer bonding over bundt cake, burlap, and bug spray.

As one might expect, Dee Dee fell into a deep slumber her first night on the farm. I knew she was tuckered out after her long trip, and figured it wouldn’t hurt to give her a sip or two of my sherry just to help the sleeping process along. I’ll never forget the look on her face when I poked her with the sharp end of my cane at 4:30 the next morning. Dee Dee stretched out in her tiny bed looking just like our lazy barn cat, Faleero, following a night of drunk monkey loving with a tomcat named Turd. Of course, Turd is beside the point. The point is Dee Dee, also known as Diane, who was the prettiest little girl I ever did see, and how she came to embrace pink bonnets and Barbie dolls, despite her penchant for blue jeans and habit of standing up whenever she had to pee.

What a joy to see Dina's bright-yet-squinty eyes as she rubbed them in disbelief when I showed her how to slop the pigs. She let out a horrific screech I suspect folks could hear all the way down in Bakersfield! Oh, she was a feisty one, that child, but I didn’t care because I knew as soon as I saw her sink into the mud and/or a deep depression that she’d settle into life on the farm soon enough. I also thought she’d feel better once she got herself cleaned up and properly dressed – two things I expected to happen as soon as her chores were done and she’d polished off a hearty meal of loquats, gruel sandwiches and unsweetened lemonade.

Being modest in nature, precious little Dina -- or was it Dana? -- insisted upon bathing in private. This was, of course, out of the question, and not only because the bath tub was in the middle of the kitchen floor. I patiently explained to Dana that I’d learned early on that I could save all kinds of time and energy if I cleaned the vegetables and/or slaughtered poultry while taking my bath. I also attempted to impress upon Daisy what a big mistake it was for nosy little girls to ask so many annoying questions.

As she leaned over to pull off her pants, I couldn’t help but notice a teensy piece of flesh hanging down between her two rosy cheeks. Upon further examination, I was shocked right out of my hairnet to discover a large-yet-unassuming wart positioned directly atop ‘o her privates. “Where’s my paring knife?” was all I had time to mutter before sprinting out the back door in order to wrestle Debbie to the ground. I may have been past my prime, but trust me, I was spry. Spry like a 3-legged dog chasing after a 2-legged rabbit, and that’s saying a lot. But what 5-legged animal chases have to do with a child whose name I can't quite recall but was the prettiest little girl I ever did see, will become clear to me after my nap and/or I finish telling this story, whichever comes first.

For the sake of argument and/or the aforementioned nap, let’s just say I not only caught Dodo, but managed to apply a poultice of poison ivy and dingleberries to the bump on her crotcheral area, only to discover -- much to my horror -- that the more "it" was rubbed, the bigger "it" got. Now I hadn’t just fallen off a turnip truck, so I knew this was the work of the Devil himself, and, as such, would not be easily cast off. I told Denise it would be best for her immortal soul if she took care of the problem herself. And, being the good and God-fearing child she was, she worked long and hard, day in and day out, to do just that. Neither agricultural spraying nor heat wave nor lack of wart-removing ointment could keep that child from the task in hand. Not that her masterful efforts to abate the problem did any good, mind you, but at least she gave it her best shot.

More things happened after that, but perhaps those stories should be saved for another day. Suffice to say that pretty little girl and I shared many laughs throughout the summer, usually at her expense.

Now, I can’t be sure, but I could swear I heard Dorothy tell the sheriff – who’d mysteriously appeared on my front porch in the middle of the night to collect my beloved niece – that the days she’d spent on my humble farm had been among the happiest of her life. Then, being the big whiny baby she was at any given moment of any given rescue, she started to cry and said, “There’s no place like home. There's NO place like home.” -- which, when you think about it, makes no sense at all.

The End.

The Mystery Switch Climax!

2008-06-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

I suppose it was inevitable that my car would have a clitoris.

Wow, there's a sentence I never thought I'd write.

My own suggestion, "MORE COWBELL", gave it a run for its money, but in the end there was no denying the appeal of "CLITORIS." So that's the label that will go on the Mystery Switch. Thanks, Deb! I'll get the label made up and post it when I get back.

In case you missed yesterday's post, I'm going to be taking a hiatus for a week or so. I've got some great guest bloggers lined up who have promised to expose The Real Diesel. This ought to be interesting.

While you're here, please weigh in on:

(1) Whether you would be interested in buying a discounted copy of my book, so I can order the right amount of copies.
(2) Whether you'd be interested in acquiring Antisocial Commentary Volume 2, so I know whether I should write it or not.

See you in a week or so.

Diesel out.

Two Questions and an Announcement

2008-06-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

I'm preempting the Thursday Shout-Out this week for an announcement and a couple of questions. First, the announcement:

I'm going to be taking a little break from blogging next week. I'm in the process of lining up some very special guest posters to keep you entertained while I'm gone. I'll be back tomorrow with the Mystery Switch contest results, but I'll be out all next week.

Now for the questions.

A few of you may have heard that I wrote a book - a little volume called Antisocial Commentary: From the Secret Files of the Mattress Police. It's a collection some of my best writing from the first year of this blog, plus some original stuff. It retails for $11.95 plus shipping, but occasionally I have offered copies for $9.95 with free shipping. I can do this because (1) I don't really care about making any money on the book; and (2) If I buy a bunch of copies, I can get them at enough of a discount that I'm not losing (much) money by selling them for that amount. Since a lot of you are new readers (that is, new to this blog, not new to reading -- although how could would it be if someone was using this blog to learn how to read?), I thought I would ask how many of you would like to buy a copy at $9.95 with free shipping (that's a savings of $5.00 over the Lulu price). If there are enough of you to make it worthwhile, I'll put in another order. I was just browsing through the book the other day, and while it's true that I may be a little biased, I have to say that it's a pretty damn funny book. Definitely worth $9.95. If you don't believe me, read some of these reviews. Anyway, if you're interested, leave a comment below or send me an email at diesel -at- mattresspolice.com.

The second question is related to the first: As it's been nearly a year (and over a hundred posts) since the book came out, I'm wondering if it's time to start assembling Antisocial Commentary Volume 2. If I do publish a second volume, it will probably take a while, because I've got a lot of other stuff going on right now. I need to finish the manuscript for my novel, for one thing. But it's something that's been bouncing around my brain for a while, and was wondering how much interest there was.

Ok, that's it for today. Come back tomorrow to find out what label is going to be for the mystery switch!

Paying the Piper

2008-06-04T11:56:00.000-07:00

You want to know how square I am? A few days ago I was downloading songs from iTunes. Yeah, I know, there are all kinds of places you can go online to download songs for free. But here’s the thing.

Back in 1999, when Napster was at its peak of popularity, I used to spend all my free time at work downloading MP3s. And having spent most of 1998 automating all of my job responsibilities, I had a lot of free time. I downloaded every song I could think of. It’s a good thing that nobody was paying attention to how much time I was actually spending at the office, because my musical tastes weren’t broad enough to justify more than eight hours a week of downloading. If my boss had actually been paying attention to when I was arriving and leaving, I’d probably have 80 gigs of polka clogging up my hard drive.

I justified my theft of copyrighted songs by blaming the greedy record companies. It irritated me that they expected me to pay eighteen bucks for a CD when I only wanted a single song on it. I mean, who the hell wants an entire album by A-Ha? My thinking was, I can go to the grocery store and pick up a single 3 Musketeers bar for a dollar. If the candy industry worked like the music industry, I’d either have to pay $4.99 for a 3 Musketeers with some inedible detritus taped to the other side, or shell out $18 for a pretty package filled with barely palatable machine scrapings just so I could get that one 3 Musketeers.

I’d have felt a little more inclined to fork over that kind of money if I thought that any of it was actually tricking down to the artists. I suppose I could have just downloaded the songs illegally and then sent checks directly to the artists, but I’m not sure they’d want my charity. Besides, I think I’m already giving to the members of A-Ha through the United Way or something.

“If only the record companies would offer individual songs for, like, a dollar, I’d be willing, nay, glad to pay for them,” I said to myself.

And then they called my bluff. Now that you can get most songs for 99 cents, I feel obligated to pay for all the music I download. Bastards.

So I stopped downloading songs illegally. But then the question arose of what to do with my existing collection. There was a surprising amount of gray area here, as with songs that were on an album that I once had, but then lost. Should I have to pay for another copy of a song, just because I can’t find my copy? Surely not. And what about a CD that I had loaned to a friend, but never got back? I still owned it, didn’t I?

And what about the CDs that I had borrowed from friends, never gave back, and then lost? I didn’t intend to steal them; I just, you know, forgot to return them. Besides, the people I borrowed these CDs from had certainly given up on getting them ever back, which is to say that they had ceded any claim of ownership to me. Or to look at it another way, maybe I did steal them, but wasn’t that all in the past now? If I was going to be blamed for having stolen something years earlier, then shouldn’t I at least have a copy of it?

In the end, it was decided to form a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to consider these issues. The Committee spent many hours deliberating, eventually coming to the conclusion that “mistakes were made,” and that it was in everyone’s best interest to put the whole sordid mess behind us. Thus it was that my entire pre-Reconciliation music library was grandfathered in. A blanket amnesty was declared.

Today my undocumented recordings live in harmony with my legally acquired songs. I try to get all my new music from legitimate sources like iTunes, but man, they don’t make it easy. I just bought a little 2 gig MP3 player a few weeks ago, and I immediately set about copying over a big chunk of my music library. After a few hours of listening, however, I noticed that a lot of my songs weren’t playing. This was, of course, because my Philips MP3 player won’t play Apple’s music format. Apple, you see, has their own proprietary format that allows them to keep you from making unlimited copies of the file.

This is a brilliant move on Apple’s part, except for the fact that if I were the kind of person who was going to make a hundred copies of my music files and give them all to my friends, I wouldn’t have paid Apple for the song in the first place. I would have just used Limewire to download it for free.

The other problem with Apple’s protection racket is that in order to play a song, your computer has to be able to decode it. And if your computer can decode it, it can copy it. Which is why there are a hundred free applications out there that will convert Apple’s proprietary format to MP3 or some other unprotected format. So basically Apple’s scheme only works on two groups of people: people who have no interest in stealing from them, and people who are too dumb to figure out how to steal from them.

I downloaded one of these converters and converted all of my songs. Now I can copy them as many times as I want without having to worry that the song is going to suddenly stop working. And as a bonus, the songs will actually play on my MP3 player.

So now I’m looking to acquire some new songs, and I’m debating what to do. I have no problem paying a buck per song, but I don’t really want to worry about keeping track of licenses or screw around with converter programs. I just want to listen to my friggin’ music.

Between you and me, the Limewire option is sounding pretty good. Besides, who wants to give more money to Metallica so that tool Lars Ulrich can keep whining about how his fans are ripping him off?

I think I’m going to have a 3 Musketeers and write a check to the United Way.

Switch Hitting

2008-06-03T09:55:00.000-07:00

I received a lot of good explanations for my mystery switch, along with many snide comments about how dirty my car is. Look, I've been working on my landscaping, ok? So it's hella dusty outside, and I haven't had time to keep my car clean. I promise that I'll clean my car out good so I can get a nice picture of the switch with its new label.

Some of my favorite comments are below:

Deb on the Rocks said...

Sugar, that mystery button is called the "clitoris." Don't feel bad, many men have to be taught these things. Just give it a few rapid toggles after the engine is warmed up to keep your Nissan happy and performing like a kitten.

Brad said...

Paper shredder for sensitive and confidential car floor documents.

Mother Theresa said...

This switch is to raise the glass partition that separates the front from the back, for those times when you're really sick of hearing "Are we there yet?"

That Zero Guy said...

Well, obviously, it has to have a purpose. I mean, even if some children from a third world country made your car, it doesn't mean they're stupid enough to put a switch without a purpose. This switch obviously activates Thermonuclear War between the United States and some poor guy named John.

The reason it doesn't work is because you didn't make it breakfast when he said 'hey lets go to arbies' and you said 'naw dawg i wanna eat home' and he said 'come on' and you said 'nawww' and he cried himself to sleep.

You sick sick man.

wyo said...

This button moves you from the universe you currently inhabit into an alternate, so that you switch places with Alternate Diesels. Because the universes are layered, with the nearest ones obviously being very similar to each other, the only sign of the transition is minor oddities, like your keys not being where you left them. Although, if you flip the switch while driving, it won't be your keys that go missing, because they would have to be in the ignition.

Jay said...

It's just an extra switch. After the designed and built the car, somebody said "Boy, it sure does look funny having that big empty spot right there." And then he filled out one of those suggestion forms that were created back in the "employee empowerment" days and next thing you know they put freaking non-functioning switch and red light in that spot. That's how corporations work.

Bunk Strutts said...

It controls the lamp on my nightstand. Quit messing with it.

Liz C said...

Silly rabbit! It turns on your 'straight-ahead' signal at 4-way intersections. The red light goes on when it's your turn to proceed through the intersection.

Leeuna said...

That little button opens your parachute after you plunge off a cliff. Geezz! You should always know where your parachute button-opener-thingy is. Mine's under the back seat.

leighonline said...

silly. it releases the trunk monkey.

suburbancorrespondent said...

I believe it's the ejector switch if the person in the passenger seat attempts to mess with the presets.

elizadoohicky said...

Pretty sure its to release the sharks with frickin laser beams on their heads. Unfortunately, your idiot Number Two installed it in your Evil CAR and not your Evil Yacht...damn lackeys...

Mark Jabo said...

Lucky you. Flip it an have your delegate from Michigan counted!

I even got one actual realistic suggestion of what the switch might have done at one point:

WCD said...

I have the same car and it's a defrosting switch for either side mirrors or the back window. Mine stopped working a year after I got my car.

The car is a 1992 Nissan 300ZX, and I used to have a 1984 model that had a switch for mirror defrosters. So that could very well be it.

For the poll, I picked suggestions that I thought would make a good label for the switch. I also added one of my own, which I'm surprised nobody thought of (you'll have to figure out which one it is).

The suggestion with the most votes will be made into a label and stuck to my dashboard for all to see.

Oh, and by the way, the "180 MINUTES" caption is supposed to be "108 MINUTES," a la Lost. Vizu won't let me correct it for some reason. At first I thought it was because I used the word "clitoris," but I changed it to "cl1toris" and it still didn't work. Whatever.

Anyway, vote for your favorite. I'll announce the winner on Friday.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Down in the Trenches

2008-06-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

Hail, soul-husks!

I am Grûndir the Implacable, Nazgûl and meme wraith. You may know me as one of the nine dark riders who once served the Dark Lord Sauron. Since my beloved homeland of Mordor was overrun by hobbits, I have served as the chief meme-dispatcher at the Mattress Police headquarters.

The premises have been quiet of late, as few dare risk my wrath. Recently, however, this blog was tagged by both Claire and Pope Terry with the Six Word Memoir meme. By my accounting, this allots me twelve words with which to pen a memoir covering my nine hundred year existence. That is just over one word per century. It will be difficult to sum up such an eventful and tragic life in only a dozen words, but I shall do my best:

To know the true price of bling
Just give me a ring

You see, I have used the word ‘ring’ to denote two distinct concepts, thereby compressing a greater volume of ideas into fewer words. Also, it rhymes. Fear my poetic virtuosity!

I apologize if I have failed to dispatch any other memes recently. I’m afraid my master Diesel has had me on hobbit detail, so I am not always aware when a meme rears its ugly head.

Truth be told, I have not seen any hobbits for some time, so I am a bit puzzled as to why my master has me patrolling the grounds with my Morgul blade at the ready. I am under order to slay any small, hairy mammals that I come across, but so far I have encountered only gophers – and on one occasion, a confused and frightened teenager digging crooked trenches near my master’s abode. I held high my blade and put forth a challenge.

“Why, oh benighted youth, dost thou dig such crooked trenches?”
“Please, dark one,” responded the youth, “I have been instructed to dig trenches here by Lord Diesel.”
“Surely Lord Diesel instructed you to dig straight trenches?”
“No, your wraithfulness, he did not. He instructed me only to dig a trench from this point here, to that point, over there.”
“I see. So it was of your own volition that you decided to incorporate seventy three other points that the master did not specify?”
“My own vol-what?”
“Hark! A balrog doth approach from the east!”
“A what does what from where?”
“Just look over there.”

At this point a smote the youth on the base of his skull with the pommel of my blade. My expert blow caused him to slump perfectly into the meandering trench. I would have covered him with earth, but oh! how I detest digging. Generally I employee cave trolls or dwarves for such labor.

Having dispatched the callow youth, I noticed a foul stench emanating from a deeper section of the trench. It appeared that the young man had, in the course of his aimless digging, unearthed some ancient and unspeakable evil! It was this:

Sadly, since the fall of Mordor I am unable to access the funds in my Bank of Mordor account, so providing this information to you would be of little use. It occurs to me, however, that... no, I shall not entertain such foolish vanities.

Ah, but now I have piqued your curiosity, and I would be remiss if I did not complete the thought. You see, because of the political situation in Mordor, I am unable to claim the vast treasures stored up in the vaults of Minas Morgul. If, however, (and understand that I am by no means asking for you to do this!), someone outside of Mordor were to request that the treasures be transported to their own account... well, you see where I'm going with this. It's a foolish notion, although I would of course allow anyone assisting me in this manner to keep a large portion of the treasure. I would only need your bank account number, and I would take care of the rest.

While I am on the subject, I am also in possession of a large cache of herbal remedies which are guaranteed to help you maximize the reach of your Morgul blade, if you get my meaning. Email me at Grundir -at- mattresspolice.com if you're interested. If you doubt the efficacy of these remedies, note that I am also the recipient of the Perfect Post Award from Magneto Bold Too!

In addition, the Republic of Iceland has honored me by naming one of their cities after me!

I assume that this is a misguided effort to lure me to Iceland to assist the government with their Hobbit Abatement Program. Still, the gesture is appreciated. Therefore, for all of these memes I tag the Ice Queen, who, judging from her last posting date, may have been trampled by a glacier.

That is all, mortals!

What does this switch do?

2008-05-30T13:03:00.000-07:00

I decided to do a different kind of contest today. Inspired by your comments on my big knob post, I'm holding a contest for the best guess as to what the mystery switch in my car is for.

I will select my ten favorite guesses and post them in a poll for you to vote on. When the winner is selected, I will have a label created for the switch that reflects the winning caption. Your prize will be the knowledge that I am driving around with your label on that switch.

I will also award a special prize to the first person to offer documented proof of what the switch really does (or is supposed to do).

And just to get this out of the way:
1. No, the red light next to the switch does not go on when you click it. I don't know if it's supposed to.
2. I'm not going to tell you what kind of car it is. It shouldn't be hard to figure out.
3. If you've already submitted a guess/theory on my previous post, you don't have to re-submit it. I'll consider all of them.

Have fun!

Thursday Shout-Out

2008-05-29T16:19:00.000-07:00

Here's something new: I've actually put some effort into today's shout-out. These are some posts that I ran across recently I thought would be worth your time.

Want to say thanks to those serving overseas? Join Claudia in the Gratitude Campaign.
Jeff gives a chilling example of how Google is reading your mind.
Mr. Fabulous demonstrates why people generally avoid using sour cream for shaving.
Get your comment in for the Crummy Church Signs commentary contest.
Read Courtney's rebuttal to my anti-vegan tirade. (Who knew that vegans aren't from Vegas?)
Brent has a Short Conversation with God.

That's it for now. I'm going to mix things up a little with tomorrow's contest. Check back here bright and early (maybe noonish) for details.

Just Give Me a Nice Big Knob and I'll Be Happy

2008-05-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

One of the inevitable side effects of technology is that people try to improve things that are already working perfectly well.

A prime example is the ventilation controls in automobiles. Remember when your car had one big lever for hot and cold and another one for the fan? Blue = cold. Red = hot. In some cars there was even a snowflake and little heat waves in case you didn’t understand colors. That design was simple, intuitive and functional. So of course carmakers have abandoned it in favor of something much more complicated.

When I get into my car, I am greeted with this:

The first time I got into my car when it was a hundred degrees out, I couldn’t even figure out how to turn the A/C on. I kept looking for a button that said, you know, “A/C.” Or maybe “ON.” There's an “OFF” button, but no “ON.” How is that possible? I saw the button labeled “AUTO,” and thought, “Well, I know it’s not that one.” Because I already had an AUTO. I just wanted to make it colder.

After pressing every other button on the dash about six times (including a mysterious toggle switch with a red light next to it that activates Hugh Hefner’s defibrillator for all I know), I finally gave the AUTO button a try. It turns out, of course, that the AUTO button is the only one that actually does anything.

When I press the AUTO button, my car immediately goes into a panic, convinced that it needs to instantly lower the temperature to whatever number I happened to have left the thermostat set to. The fan kicks on at full blast, exorcising the inferno into my face while trying to scrape up some cool air. Meanwhile, I frantically claw at buttons on the dash, trying to reassure the car that it doesn’t need to kill itself in a misguided attempt to make me comfortable. Listen to him, R2! He’s dying! Curse my metal body, I wasn’t fast enough!

ECON? REC? As far as I can tell, neither of these buttons do anything. Finally my fingers find their way through the fiery blast to a couple of chiclet-sized sideways buttons hidden behind the steering wheel that control the air volume and direction. I usually hit the wrong one first, and then I hit the right one, but too many times, so that it cycles past the option I want and I have to go through them all again. I often manage to turn on the rear wipers and defrost while I’m at it. How is this better than the system of two big levers again?

Does anybody use the ECON button? What does it even do? Does it make my A/C run more economically? Is it like buying the “economy pack” of toilet paper, so that the ventilation system delivers massive amounts of cold air at a deep discount? Or is it simply a way to tell the car that sure, I want to be comfortable, but part of being comfortable is being secure in the knowledge that I’m not burning unreasonable amounts of unrenewable resources? Is there some kind of complex comfort-to-economy algorithm that it uses to determine how cool I can reasonably expect to be given the circumstances?

It doesn’t seem like I should have to tell my car to be economical. It seems like that should be the default setting. Just give me a special WASTEFUL button that I can use when I feel the need.

And REC. What is that about? I guess it stands for “recirculate,” meaning that the A/C will reuse the air inside the car rather than sucking in new air from outside. Again, why not make this the default setting, and then have a FART button that you can press when you really need some outside air?

Between you and me, I’m scared to press the REC button because I’m afraid that I’ll forget to turn it off and pass out from a lack of oxygen. “Poor bastard,” the paramedics will say as they pick through the wreckage of my car, “He forgot to turn off the REC button and asphyxiated on his own emissions.”

The ventilation controls in Mrs. Diesel’s car are similarly over-engineered. It has a highly advanced climate control system that would presumably settle on a comfortable temperature eventually if I didn’t immediately hit COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD COLD every time I got in the car.

I have the same problem with my microwave. I just want to make a cold thing hot. Why do I have fifty-eight different buttons on my microwave, but not a single button labeled “Make a cold thing hot”? The closest thing is a button labeled “Plate of Food.” “Hey, ‘Plate of Food,’” I thought, when I noticed that button. “That’s exactly what I have! I have a plate of food!” What do I need all those other buttons for? Sometimes it’s a bowl of food or cup of food, but I make sure to put it on a plate so there won’t be an explosion or anything.

These things seem to go in cycles. Sometimes I drive my father-in-law's truck, and its ventilation controls are about as complicated as those spinny wheels and things that they put on those activity walls for toddlers:

Super-easy, right? Throw in a fake plastic phone and a big red button for making honking noises and I'm sold.

And yet, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to set his radio presets. I know, you're thinking, "Why would you set somebody else's radio presets?" Well, because every time I drive that truck, I think, "Why doesn't he have any presets set? I might as well set them to the stations I like, if he's not going to use them. And then I spend five minutes swerving wildly between lanes while I hit buttons with labels like PROG and SET before finally giving up.

By contrast, to set the presets on my car, you turn the radio to the station you want and then press and hold the desired preset button for three seconds. It's the simplest thing in the world. Why would anyone make a radio work any other way, especially once you've demonstrated that you understand the Two Big Knobs principle of ventilation control? It's like the engineers have meetings where they decide that they have to make the radio presets ridiculously complicated, because they made the ventilation system way too easy to figure out.

Or did somebody patent the easy preset function, so every other company is stuck with outdated system unless they pony up for the coveted press-and-hold technology? And while I'm on the subject, what is the deal with some beer companies not using screw-off caps? I mean, seriously, we have the technology, right? Is there some advantage to using non-screw-off caps that I don't know about? Just fork over the money to the screw-off guy already, would you?

So if you're one of the guys designing these controls, here's the deal: Just make it simple. I'm not a stupid person, but there are certain basic things in life that I don't want to have to think about. Think of me as a caveman. "Grog cold! Push button make Grog warm! Grog's food cold! Push button make Grog's food warm!"

I trust that I have made myself clear. Don't make me use that switch in my car again.

Best of MP: Doctor Pepper Proves Book Larnin' is No Substitute for Common Sense

2008-05-27T12:33:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about doing this for a while, and since I've got a lot of new readers, I figure this is probably a good time. Every other Tuesday until you get sick of it, I'm going to do a "best of the Mattress Police" post. You'll recognize some of them from my book (What? You haven't bought my book? What the hell are you waiting for? Buy it! All the proceeds go to helping a poor ditch digging kid buy an iPod!), but I'm going to throw some surprises in as well. Today's post comes to us from way back in February of aught seven. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed copying and pasting it for you.

Dr Pepper Proves Book Larnin' is No Substitute for Common Sense

As you know, Dr Pepper is my muse. I therefore took it particularly hard when the marketing wizards at the Dr Pepper company turned out to be no more wizards than, well, than Dr Pepper is a real doctor. From the Buffalo News:

Less than a month after Boston's highways and bridges were shut down during a bomb scare touched off by an advertising stunt, a new marketing scheme has led angry city officials to shut down a historic site.
A clue in a Dr Pepper promotion suggested a coin that might be worth as much as $1 million was buried in the 347-year-old Granary Burying Ground, the final resting place of John Hancock, Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and other historic figures.
After contestants showed up at the cemetery gates early Tuesday, the city closed it, concerned that it would be damaged by treasure hunters.

Read the rest of the story here.

I did some digging (ha!) and found out that, astonishingly, this wasn't even the worst marketing gimmick the Dr Pepper people came up with. I present to you...

Ten Rejected Dr Pepper Marketing Gimmicks

10. Mysterious packages are left unattended at airports all over the U.S. If you find one of the packages and bring it on a plane, it will automatically open at 20,000 feet, revealing twelve glass bottles of Dr Pepper and a solid gold bottle opener shaped like a hand grenade.

9. Win a million dollars by finding the Diet Dr Pepper can buried under a mountain of ten thousand dead lab rats.

8. The "Forrest Gump" promotion: Get a picture taken of you drinking Dr Pepper within ten feet of the President and win ten thousand dollars!

7. One of the paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been replaced by a fake hiding a hundred one thousand dollar bills. The false veneer can only be dissolved by a spraying it with a fine mist of Dr Pepper.

6. The "Movie Lover" promotion: 10 Dr Pepper cans in the U.S. are filled with highly corrosive acetic acid used for developing film, instead of Dr Pepper. Find one and win a trip to the Cannes Film Festival!

5. T.V. Commercial: A man lies on his death bed, unconscious. Close-up of a doctor's hands hooking up an IV, as a voice says, "There's only one thing we can do for him now." Zoom out: We see that the IV tube is connected to a can of Dr Pepper. Cut to a concerned nurse who says, "Are you sure that will cure him, doctor?" Cut to the doctor: "Cure him? I just figured if he's going to be a vegetable, he might as well be a Pepper!"

4. Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper -- now with a hint of nutmeg!

3. Free Dr Pepper for life for all type II diabetes sufferers.

2. A new beverage specifically designed to make people crave Dr Pepper: Dr Salt!

1. Picture this: Race car driver Jeff Gordon is at a gas station, refueling his car. Next to him is his 5 year old son. "Now for the secret ingredient," Gordon says to his son, with the air of someone imparting fatherly wisdom. He opens a can of Dr Pepper and pours it into the gas tank. When he's finished, he says, "And that's the secret of great performance, son." Gordon looks around, but his son is nowhere to be found. Finally Jeff sees him: His son is guzzling gasoline directly from the pump! They share a good laugh.

In doing research for this post, I came across this. I'd thank the person who put this together, but I'm guessing he's dead.

Sock Drawer

2008-05-26T11:23:00.000-07:00

It's probably a good thing that Santa Claus isn't a Muslim, because when you live at the North Pole, it's really hard to face east five times a day.

*****

I hate Vegans. I don't mind regular vegetarians so much, but there is a certain smugness about vegans that irritates me. Like, "All I ate today was peat moss and tree bark. I'm saving the planet and my colon smells like a pine forest. I hope you enjoyed your bacon double cheeseburger." I already have a plan for getting revenge. I'm going to start a farm that grows organic vegetables that are fertilized with ground up baby seals.

*****

Sometimes when I'm at an intersection with a four way stop, I wish that cars had a blinker for going straight. I mean, you can assume that the guy across from you is going to go straight if he isn't signaling that he's going to turn, but occasionally somebody will forget to signal and then they'll suddenly turn left in front of you. It would be nice if there was a signal for "Yes, I'm definitely going straight here." On the downside, you'd have old people taking all the freeway exits with their straight blinker on.

*****

I'm not a gambler, but somebody told me that they now have ATM machines integrated into slot machines in Las Vegas. So if you lose all your money, you can just push a few buttons and get more. It seems to me that the next step would be to add an element of gambling to using an ATM machine. You'd hit the button to withdraw $40, and $40 would get deducted from your account, but maybe you'd get $400 instead. Or maybe you'd get $5. Or nothing. Sure, it's stupid. But also exciting!

*****

A few weeks ago a movie called Next came out on DVD. It stars Nicolas Cage, Jessica Biel and Julianne Moore. I want to know what producer greenlit that project. Who sees that cast list and thinks, "With the stars of Wicker Man, Stealth, and, um, whatever big movie Julianne Moore has been in, we can't miss!" Even the title sounds like they gave up halfway through.

*****

The other day I saw a car with one of those "In memory of ..." decals on the back window. This is the new big thing in California: being commemorated with a cheesy sticker on the back of somebody's crappy old car. In case this wasn't tasteless enough, this car also sported a pair of those novelty testicles hanging from the trailer hitch. I wanted to ask the driver if he had the rest of the body in the trunk.

*****

My kids always like it when I drive really fast up our driveway. "Go fast! Go fast!" they yell, and I pound the accelerator -- to Mrs. Diesel's chagrin. A few days ago, after one of these episodes, my 6 year old daughter handed me a scrap of paper with some scribbles on it. "It's a speed ticket," she said.

"What?!" I exclaimed. "I went fast like you told me, and this is the thanks I get?"

"No," she said. "It's the good kind of speed ticket. It lets you go as fast as you want."

Now wouldn't that be sweet?

Congrats to Stushie!

2008-05-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

Repeat winners Brad and Joel were both denied satisfaction this round, with Stushie taking the prize.

Joel came in second with:

All together now, kids: "Shot through the heart! And you're to blame..."

And Brad landed in third with:

Due to the inevitable lawsuit, Diesel Day Camp was a short lived endeavor.

Congrats, guys. Stushie, send me your address and I'll get your book in the mail. Email me at diesel [at] mattresspolice.com.

See you back here for a post that will unite the world in their collective hatred for me.

Thursday Shout-out

2008-05-22T13:16:00.000-07:00

I haven't done one of these for a while, but I figured it was time, considering all the people linking to me and leaving supportive comments lately. Yeah, there were some haters too, but I don't take comments too seriously when the commenter can't spell three words in a row correctly, and the best insult they can come up with is "your an asshole" [sic]. I'm tempted to set up a PayPal donation fund for my ditch digger, so that all of these commenters who are so concerned about the welfare of the kid I'm exploiting can donate to his college (or iPod) fund. I'm guessing that if I required a $1.00 donation for every time somebody calls me an asshole, they would take their lofty principles elsewhere.

But the real point of this post is to thank all of you who have been so supportive of me and this blog. It's pretty cool to know that y'all have my back.

So thanks first of all to Glacial Spain and everybody who Stumbled/Dugg/Reddited/whatever my post. In case you don't know what any of these things are, they are basically sites where you can recommend and review blog posts and websites. That's why I have those Stumble It! and Digg It! links at the bottom of every post. If you enjoy a post, you can use those links to recommend the post to other readers.

Thanks to Charlie Sykes from WTMJ in Milwaukee, who linked to me from his blog, Ernie's House of Whoop Ass (Warning: NSFW), and everybody else who has linked to me recently.

Thanks to all the commenters who left supportive, insightful and/or humorous comments. My favorite is this one from newcomer the inscrutable chicken:

$8 an hour x 10 hours a day x 250 days a year (5 days a week and a couple of weeks holiday) = $20,000 a year.

This puts you in the top 11.2% richest people in the world (source: http://www.globalrichlist.com/)

Who needs college?

And since Joel from Crummy Church Signs gave me a shout-out the last time he had a big traffic surge, I figured I should return the favor. Seriously, visit his site. It's hilarious. One visit and you'll be hooked.

Finally, thanks to everybody who keeps clicking on this link. I'm back in the top five! Click! Click like the wind!

See you back here tomorrow for the caption contest results.

Jobs I Have Sucked At

2008-05-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

As of this moment, my trench digging post has gotten over 70,000 hits. This is a new experience for me, and I'm not quite sure how to feel about it. It's like the carnival is in town or something. I've been linked to by EHOWA (warning: adult content) and Curmudgeonly Skeptical. I'm still getting a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, and there's a whole mini-controversy happening over at Reddit about how big of an a$$hole I am exactly. (Ironically, the one social networking site where the post hasn't made an impact is Digg.)

I still can't figure out what all the fuss is about. That post was just my attempt to make light of what was becoming a rather frustrating situation: I had hired a neighbor kid to dig a trench from Point A to Point B, and somehow I found myself not only having to micromanage the digging process, but also acting as the kid's career counselor. The exchange struck me as funny, so I decided to write it up as a sort of mock ditch-digger's handbook. I wasn't trying to say anything about capitalism or the minimum wage. I didn't write the post out of malice. I just thought it was funny.

"Sure," you say, "It's easy to laugh when the other guy is the one having to dig trenches in the hot sun."

That's a fair point. So maybe this would be a good time for me to let you have a laugh at my expense. I give you, therefore:

The complete list of every job I've ever sucked at and/or been fired from

My first job, when I was 14, was delivering newspapers. I was terrible at it. Somehow I always managed to miss at least one house. How do you ride your bike past a house that you've delivered a newspaper to dozens of times in the past, with a bag full of newspapers around your neck, and not think, "I should deliver a paper to this house"? I don't know, but I did it. Just about every day, for three months, when I finally quit in frustration.

My second job was bagging groceries. It's hard to screw up bagging groceries (put the bananas on top), but I was terrible at customer relations. I would bag the customer's items in silence, and then glumly follow them to their car, not saying a word. I think the customers used to draw straws to see who would get stuck with me. A lot of people went into that store looking for bread and milk and left wanting to hang themselves.

I was also excruciatingly bad at locating items in the store. A customer would make the mistake of asking me where the spaghetti sauce was, and I would run up and down the store in a panic, trying to remember where I had seen it. Oh, and sometimes I would work at the customer service desk, where you got to do fun things like make keys. Well, until you put the original key in the wrong slot one time, and grind it down so that the customer can't get home. They don't let you make any more keys after that.

We moved when I was 17, and I got another job at a grocery store. I was supposed to re-stock items that would run low during the day, like milk and soda. I was terrible at this. I couldn't ever remember how many I needed of what item, so I had to run back and forth a bunch of times. It took me like twice as long as a normal person to fill up the soda aisle. I think they thought I was retarded or something.

My first job in college was in a Christian book store. I sucked at that too. One time a guy came in looking to buy a Bible. I asked him what kind of cover he wanted. Which is, it turns out, exactly the question not to ask someone looking for a Bible.

After that I worked in a store in the mall that sold luggage and things like those metal balls that go click-clack on your desk. Another disaster. I couldn't make myself be interested in luggage or metal balls that go click-clack. I only had one tie, and I didn't like wearing it. I tended to hide in the back of the store until customers left. They didn't put me on the schedule after Christmas.

By some miracle of divine irony I managed to get a job at the on-campus job service desk, helping other college students find employment. I was marginally competent at that, although I came in late so often that I was nearly fired several times. After graduation, to the relief of my managers, I was no longer eligible to work there.

Did a bunch of odd jobs after that. One time I painted an apartment. I accidentally painted all of the ceilings with the paint that was intended for the bathroom. It was high-gloss paint. When you walked inside, it looked like the ceiling was wet, and it was going to drip some kind of horrible ooze on you. It felt like being in a cave. They let me go after that.

Got a job cataloging legal documents for class-action lawsuits. Was pretty terrible at it, but through some fluke was promoted to quality assurance, where there was nobody to see all the mistakes I was making. I found that if I arrived five minutes after the previous shift left, I could get a great parking spot. I was fired after being five minutes late every day for several weeks.

Got a job as a pizza delivery guy. Got lost a lot. Delivered a lot of cold pizzas. Didn't like being yelled at to sweep the floors when there weren't any customers, so I walked out.

Worked loading trucks at the Amway warehouse. It was like playing Tetris in 3D. I'm terrible with spatial relations. My line kept backing up and other workers had to keep coming to help me. Got yelled at a lot. Decided to quit before I had a nervous breakdown.

Worked at Blockbuster. I was actually okay at this job. I like movies.

Moved to California. Got a job with Mrs. Diesel's cousin, doing construction. I was bad at this as well, but not bad enough to be fired, considering I was only making $6 an hour. Mainly we worked at dairies. Sometimes I got to glue PVC water lines together. The neat thing about doing this at a dairy is that cow shit is everywhere, so you end up accidentally gluing big clumps of shit to your pants. Good times.

After several months of doing construction, I managed to B.S. my way into a job doing technical support for a company that sold software to auto body shops. I wasn't particularly good at this, but I found a niche writing up troubleshooting guides and other documentation for our department. The documentation grew into a website. I proved so good at building websites that eventually they created a full time position for me to maintain the site.

I quit that job after five years to do some "real software development." Spent 4 months doing "real software development" at a small consulting company before the dot com bubble burst. Seeing the writing on the wall, I left to start my own web development company.

I was, not surprisingly, bad at that too. I'm not a salesperson. I made a gradual transition over several months from self-employed to unemployed. Ran out of money. Had to sell our house to get the equity out.

Finagled a deal to buy 10 acres of farmland outside of Ripon, California, thinking that I could occupy myself while unemployed by building a house. Managed to get a job as a webmaster for a nearby city. Ended up working for the worst boss ever. Sent an angry email to him about what an ass he was. Got fired.

Spent a lot of time cutting down trees for firewood and trying to stave off depression. Got a call from one of the owners of the consulting firm I had worked at, asking if I was looking for work. Got a job at Galactic Invertebrates. Worked my ass off for three years on a bunch of projects that never saw the light of day, thanks to people like Lord Monkeyhands and Human Inertia. Quit in frustration.

Took a year off to build my house.

Got a call from another former co-worker, asking if I'd like to come do some work for Google.

That's where I work now. Google kicks ass. I build applications for them. I occasionally get lost on my way to work, and I'm late for a lot of meetings, but nobody really minds. It's fun, and I rock at it. I do a lot of my work at home. When I get bored, I go work on my landscaping for a while. Sometimes a neighbor kid helps out.

Vote!

2008-05-20T11:30:00.000-07:00

Alrighty, folks. Here are the captions. Choose wisely. I will post the results on Friday. Remember, the winner gets a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary: From the Secret Files of the Mattress Police. And yes, Brad, one of these days I will mail your copy out as well.

Joel Bezaire said...

All together now, kids: "Shot through the heart! And you're to blame..."

Brad said...

Due to the inevitable lawsuit, Diesel Day Camp was a short lived endeavor.

Poke said...

In Narnia, no one can hear Diesel scream.

Dave said...

Hey, didn't I make that quiver last night?

stushie said...

The first time that you see a hobbit in Narnia, shoot to kill, Susan.

y not i said...

Your bow and arrow doesn't scare me. Look behind you. There's a giant version of myself with a gun. HA!

Brad "Wombat" Randall said...

This was to be the last movie job ever for the assistant who miscast the stand-in for Lucy Pevensie.

Barry Nong said...

Hey! Can you play the theme from Deliverance on that?

Candace said...

Diesel: Now this is a longbow, not a crossbow, so you're going to get 2 shots off every round. Right, now does everyone remember their initiative numbers?

zcreep said...

Bow and Arrow Technical Support recommends pointing the sharp end towards the men dressed in period attire.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Why I Am What's Wrong with the World

2008-05-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

Since I started this blog about a year and a half ago, I've written a lot of absurd and offensive things. For example, I've suggested the Al Gore is the world's worst dictator. I've argued that the best way to avoid drowning when traveling with a Kennedy is to travel by boat. I've conjectured that the last item on the gay agenda is probably "drinks with Steve."

The funny thing is that nobody seems to get offended by these posts. The posts that people decide to get pissed off about are the ones where I say something that seems to me to be completely uncontroversial.

For example, one time I mentioned that I don't like being around ugly people. That post, as you may recall, earned me the name "f--ktard dingleberry."

Now am I wrong here, or is it a basic fact of nature that nobody likes being around ugly people? Saying that you don't like being around ugly people is about as controversial as saying that you don't like food that tastes bad, or that you don't enjoy Rob Schneider films. Before you scold me for disliking ugly people, try this little experiment: Go stand in the checkout lane at your local grocery store for five minutes. Imagine that you're throwing a pool party and you can invite one of two groups of people: the chubby troglodytes buying Alphabits and Doritos at the register in front of you, or the lovely folks staring warmly out at you from the covers of the 56 different womens' magazines that ensconce you in a cocoon of pouty lips and cleavage. Funny how your egalitarian principles suddenly take a back seat to aesthetics, isn't it?

I'm not saying this is an admirable trait, mind you. I'm not proud of the fact that I prefer beautiful people over ugly people. I think that it would be great if we lived in a society where magazines could put Nobel laureates and special ed teachers on the covers of magazines, no matter what they look like. Or, failing that, if we could somehow transplant the brains of the Nobel laureates and special ed teachers into the bodies of supermodels. Now that would be hot.

Another time I made the mistake of casting myself as a sympathetic figure in a disagreement that I had with Mrs. Diesel. The post was about the typical female trait of alternating between wanting their mates to talk to them for long periods of time about absolutely nothing and wanting their mates to know exactly what they are thinking without them having to say it. This is hardly a groundbreaking observation: Every married man has noticed that women love to talk pretty much all the time except for when they actually have something to say. I gave this as an example of male/female communications:

Woman: Hey, can you hand me that pencil?
Man: (Hands pencil to woman) Sure.
Woman: (Bursts into tears).
Man: Pretty disappointing pencil, huh?

That post got me called a misogynist and a sociopath, if you can believe it. Actually, I can kind of see the sociopath part, but misogynist? If it weren't for women, I wouldn't be able to tolerate people at all.

More recently, I wrote about the 19 year old neighbor kid who is digging trenches for my sprinkler system. Now if you can set aside my hyperbole about not wanting him to use the rototiller because he might eviscerate himself, forcing me to bury him in a shallow grave in the orchard, this post amounted to me explaining to this kid why I was paying him $8 an hour to dig trenches.

I don't want to get scolded by Suzy for explaining the joke, but to me the humor of that post arises from the fact that the answers to all of his questions would be crushingly obvious to anyone who has ever held any kind of job. Why do I have to dig trenches? You don't. Why don't you dig them yourself? Because I don't want to, and I have the money to pay somebody else to do it. Why are you only paying me $8 an hour? Because I can.

This post got a huge reaction. My good friend Glacial Spain Stumbled it, which led to several other people stumbling it. As of this morning, over 20,000 people have visited that post. That's TWENTY THOUSAND people. By way of comparison, I am one person, so if I visit a post, that's one person visiting a post. That post has gotten TWENTY THOUSAND times that many people visiting it. Crazy, right?

Most of the visitors got the joke, but a few were egregiously offended by the notion of me hiring someone to do something that I didn't feel like doing. One commenter said:

Yeah, digging trenches sucks. But so do you. You've got a kid sweating his ass off @ $8/hr for you, so that you can have a cheep sprinkler system and YOU mock him.... It's people like you, who demean honest working people, who give capitalism a bad name and who need a lesson or two in the art human dignity. But then, I'm sure that the painful experiences of others, is little more than a laughing matter, to the likes of you.

I take issue with this. It is not "little more than a laughing matter" to me. It is a laughing matter plus a cheap sprinkler system. That may not matter to you, but it's important to me. As for people like me giving capitalism a bad name... really? You don't think maybe the Enron debacle and the Bear Stearns bailout have me beat there?

By the way, I wasn't mocking him. He really did ask all of those questions, and most of them I answered to his face, more or less the way I wrote them in the post. He would grumble about how much digging sucks, and I would say, "You got that right. Why do you think I'm not doing it?"

I also took the time to explain to him that everybody has to work shit jobs when they are young. When I was younger, I pulled weeds, mowed lawns, moved furniture, worked on an assembly line, delivered pizzas, hauled lumber... pretty much every kind of crap job you can imagine. You know what I was doing four years ago today? I was unemployed after the dot com bust, so I spent my days cutting down almond trees for firewood in the hopes of making enough money to move my family out of the 900 square foot apartment we were living in. One time a relative needed a fence built in their backyard, so I spent a few days doing that. You know how much that job paid? If you said "$8 an hour," give yourself a gold star. I was 34 years old at the time. So please don't lecture me about exploiting the youth. I work shitty jobs when I need to, and avoid it when I can. Anybody with half a brain does the same.

There is one lesson to be learned from digging trenches, and it's that digging trenches sucks. I think I've done my part to help this kid learn that. Besides giving him lemonade and telling him not to blow his money on a new iPod, there's not much else I can do for him.

What I've learned from these comments is that the thing people are most offended by is reality. Well, not reality so much as someone pointing out the way things are. You breeze through the checkout lane with Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jessica Simpson and every other busty Jessica staring longingly out at you from the covers of magazines (women's magazines, no less!), but you get offended when I tell you that I don't like ugly people. You don't have a problem buying clothes at Wal-Mart that were made by some 12 year old in China making 16 cents an hour, but you bitch and moan about me not adequately mentoring my 19 year old ditch digger. He's old enough to vote, for Pete's sake! He could be drafted and sent to Iraq! And you're mad because I'm paying him to dig trenches? Give me a break.

Ok, this is turning into a bit of a rant, so let me leave you with my all-time favorite comment, also provoked by my trench-digging post:

this is actually very asinine... people like u are the reason why college is necessary, you greedy bastard.

I laugh every time I read that. Can someone explain to me what that means, and how it's an insult? Because I keep trying to figure it out, but I'm not getting anywhere.

I expect you back here bright and early tomorrow morning for the caption contest poll. Bring your shovel.

Caption Contest: Prince Caspian

2008-05-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

You know the rules. Submit your captions in the comments. Mrs. Diesel and I will pick our favorites and I will post the top 10 in a poll on Tuesday. The winner gets a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary: From the Secret Files of the Mattress Police. Have fun!

Can you dig it?

2008-05-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

Dear 19 year old neighbor kid whom I’m paying eight bucks an hour to dig trenches:

You probably won’t read this, but I’ve noticed that you have a lot of questions regarding your position in our organization, and I wanted to write down some answers so that I would have the information you require readily available.

Question 1. Why do I have to dig trenches?

The short answer to this is, “You don’t.” You choose to dig trenches because you have a maxed out credit card and a phone bill that you have no other way of paying off. Not to mention the fact that your phone is broken, so until you buy a new one, you’re paying for a phone you can’t use. These circumstances are the result of choices you made. I’m not sure where your confusion on this issue is coming from.

Question 2. Why don’t you just dig them yourself?

Because digging trenches pretty much blows. Surely you’ve learned that much during your tenure here. If you can pay someone to dig your trenches for you, I highly recommend it.

Question 3. Why do you only pay me $8 an hour?

Because you have demonstrated that you will dig trenches for that amount.

Question 4. What if I quit?

Then I will have to spend ten minutes to find another teenage kid willing to dig trenches for $8 an hour. And you will still have a credit card bill, a phone bill and a broken phone.

Question 5. Where are you going to find somebody else willing to dig trenches for $8 an hour?

Believe it or not, digging trenches is not considered a high-skilled occupation. Anyone with opposable thumbs can dig a trench. An orangutan could dig a trench. The only reason you never see an orangutan digging a trench is that orangutans have an irrational hatred of underground sprinkler systems. Although on second thought, they would probably just hire chimpanzees to dig their trenches anyway, because orangutans are smart that way.

There are actually people risking their lives to sneak across the border into this country to have the opportunity to dig trenches for $8 an hour. And as an added bonus, most of these people speak little or no English.

Question 6. Why don’t you just rent a trencher?

Because renting a trencher would cost me $70 a day. A trencher is loud and unweildy, and I would have to constantly attend to it to make sure that it is going the right direction.

Actually, you make a pretty good point. Let me think about this one.

Question 7. What do I have to do to get a raise?

Generally speaking, to get a raise, you have to do something to increase your value to your employer. One way for you to do this would be to save me money by working harder and/or faster. I am going to assume you are not interested in that option.

Another possibility is to save me time. You could do this by, for example, not making me repeat the instructions for digging a trench three or four times. Another possibility would be for you to dig pretty much right where I tell you to dig, rather than digging holes in random locations throughout the yard. Or, you know, drifting off on non-digging related activities.

Question 8. Am I going to have to dig trenches for the rest of my life?

Probably not. Honestly, I’m not sure digging trenches is your strong suit.

Question 9. Why can’t I do something more interesting, like run the rototiller?

Because if you rototill the way you dig, you will most likely eviscerate yourself in short order. Then I will have to bury your remains in a shallow grave in the orchard to avoid liability for your demise. And as we’ve established, I hate digging.

Question 10. If I work over eight hours in a day, can I get overtime?

Yes. You will be alerted in the event of any trench-digging emergencies that require round-the-clock digging. Keep your phone with you at all times.

Does Not Compute

2008-05-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

At my first “real” job, doing technical support for a software company, I worked with a guy who used to make all sorts of ill-thought-out claims. His claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine even made it into my book.

One time this guy stated – pretty much out of the blue, as I recall – that he thought metaphors were pointless. He didn’t understand why people used metaphors rather than just coming out and saying what they meant.

Now this is a stupid thing for anyone to say, but it’s particularly stupid for someone who works as a computer support technician. As confusing as technology can be, try explaining to someone how to save a document in a folder in Windows without using any metaphors (hint: you can’t use the words ‘document,’ ‘folder,’ or ‘windows.’)

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that my co-worker was on to something. A big part of our job was to explain to people what was wrong with their computers, and this task is made much simpler when one refuses to use any metaphors.

You want to know why your computer isn’t working? I’ll tell you why. First of all, it won’t boot up. ‘Booting’ is short for ‘boot-strapping,’ which refers to the act of ‘pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.’ That’s a metaphor. Computers don’t have boots, much less boot straps, and they certainly can’t pull themselves up by them.

Your computer is not exactly on the cutting edge. It is incapable of understanding any commands you issue to it. It won’t even respond to a ping.

Your computer has no software installed on it. Installing is something you do to sinks and alternators.

Your computer can’t display windows. It has no available memory. It has no free space on its hard drives. None of its devices have drivers.

Your computer can’t talk to your printer, your monitor, your digital camera, or any other devices connected to it. It has no documents, spreadsheets, or any other types of files stored on it, and no folders or directories to put them in. Not even a recycle bin. Your computer might be able to print, but not in landscape or portrait settings. Good luck with that.

Your computer can’t connect to the web or any other networks. You can’t upload or download anything. You can’t visit any sites because you can’t send any data packets over any pipes, no matter what port you specify. Your computer doesn’t recognize any other computers in the domain. It can’t even use dialup. You can’t log in because won’t accept your password. It is incapable of acting as a client, server, or peer. It can’t share data. Your computer has no bandwidth. Not only can you not send any emails with attachments, you can’t send mail at all.

The upside is that your computer has no viruses. Not a single trojan or worm. No spyware has been installed on it. You have received no suspicious cookies. You have received no junk mail or spam.

Your computer’s drives do not need to be defragmented. Its firewall has not been breached, and you do not need a better virus shield. It does not have registry rot. It has no bugs. It is not acting up, it has not gone haywire, and it is not on its last legs.

To be honest, I really can’t tell you what’s wrong with you computer right now. Ping me later and maybe I’ll have the bandwidth to look into it.

Congrats (again), Brad!

2008-05-09T13:35:00.000-07:00

Well, Brad did it again. But if you think I'm making a 4x banner, you're kidding yourself. Maybe I'll start a caption contest hall of fame. Yeah, that sounds easier.

I will send you a copy of my book if you want, Brad, though I think you might already have one. Maybe I'll send you one of Joel's books instead.

Sue Wilkey came in second with:

Now, Hulk, be a good boy and go put Arkansas back.

And Poke came in third with an entry that makes me giggle every time I read it:

I'm just a man, standing in front of a Hulk, asking it to love him.

Thanks for playing, everybody. Have a great weekend. And don't forget to visit Humor-Blogs.com on your way out.

Sock Drawer

2008-05-08T08:57:00.000-07:00

It must be about time for another sock drawer post. This is where I do some housecleaning of all the odd ideas that are cluttering up the corners of my mind. Enjoy.

When I was a kid, there was a thing called "I.Q.", which measured one's intelligence. There was only one kind of intelligence, so everybody only got one number. These days there are a bunch of different kinds of intelligence. For example, there's emotional intelligence, spatial intelligence, musical intelligence, etc. Now I'm sure that this is a big step forward and all, but when is somebody going to get around to cataloging all of the varieties of stupidity? Because I count at least 38.

In a similar vein, someone recently told me that when you get your picture taken for your passport, they ask you not to smile. The rationale is that it's easier to identify someone who isn't smiling, because there are a lot of different ways to smile. I guess that makes sense, but I don't think the bureaucrats counted on the fact that I have 67 different ways of looking surly.

One of these days the ACLU is going to start a campaign to change the name of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Just watch.

I think that each religion should have its own email system, tailored to meet the needs of its adherents. For example, the Jewish email system would keep nagging you to email your mother, and the Agnostic email system would never tell you whether your emails actually got through to anyone. If you wanted to avoid getting viruses, you'd do well to convert to Buddhism: no attachments.

I have this little digital recorder that I keep in my car so that I can record these kinds of thoughts when they pop into my head on the way to work. A few weeks ago I had come up with an idea for Radioactive Liberty's Sunday Retarded Argument, but couldn't remember what it was. Suddenly I remembered, so I grabbed the recorder and babbled just enough to remind myself later. And then I burst into laughter, because I was on a winding 2-lane road in the mountains and I had a sudden flash that if I died in a tragic car crash right then, my last words on this earth would have been "Greg Evigan."

I don't know why they call the lion the "king of the jungle." Lions don't even spend much time in the jungle. They live on the plains, and only venture into the jungle when they are desperate for food. Calling the lion the "king of the jungle" is like calling Hillary Clinton "the senator from New York."

We have a lot of gangs in California, and my wife likes to point out the gang signs that have been spraypainted on the walls of buildings (evidently being a fourth grade teacher requires one to be versed in gang communications). The other day she pointed to something that had been scrawled on the back of a stop sign. "That's the Norteño gang," she said. "That's the Roman numeral for 14, and N is the 14th letter of the alphabet." I couldn't help being impressed. Say what you want about the corrosive effect of gangs on society, but apparently they're teaching kids Roman numerals and cryptography, which is more than I can say for our public schools.

Humor-blogs.com is the king of the interwebs.

Vote!

2008-05-06T17:28:00.000-07:00

Ok, folks, here are the top ten. I forgot to mention it when I posted the pic, but I will be giving away a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary to the winner. Vote wisely!

And while you're in a voting mood, head over to Crummy Church Signs and vote for my comment. I'm not going to win, but if a few of you vote for me I will be spared the humiliation of coming in dead last.

Also, would it kill you to click this link? I've fallen to number ten on my own blog directory. Talk about humiliating. I'm now officially below something called "Foundshit." Come on people, help me out here.

The captions...

Alice said...

Sorry Hulk, but the frozen food gig's been filled.

Brad said...

Another eHarmony.com success story...

Glacial Spain said...

Big Green Guy - or Tiny Diesel? You be the judge

Lonie Polony said...

"Okay, I'll give you ten bucks for it, but that's my final offer. We're a scrap metal yard, not a charity."

y not i said...

Yes, yes. It's impressive that you can make a tank into the shape of a donkey's head. But my daughter wanted someone who could do BALLOON animals at her birthday party.

Kelley said...

As the Hulk disrobed for his love scene with Diesel, Ang Lee got the inspiration for the title of next movie - Broken Back Mounting.

Sparrow said...

Diesel realized that getting the Hulk to become a Scientologist was not going to be as easy as Travolta claimed.

Poke said...

I'm just a man, standing in front of a Hulk, asking it to love him.

Bex said...

Hulk: I wish I knew how to quit you.

Sue Wilkey said...

Now, Hulk, be a good boy and go put Arkansas back.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Saturday Morning in the Bedroom of Good and Evil

2008-05-05T07:48:00.000-07:00

ow the Red Vine was more tempting than any of the other candies which the parents had bought. And the Red Vine said to the girl, Yea, hath your parents said, Ye shall not eat of any candy in the pantry? And the girl said unto the Red Vine, We may eat of the candy in the pantry, but only after a healthy dinner and with parental approval. The parents have said, Ye shall not eat candy, neither shall ye touch it, before your mother and father get up on Saturday morning, lest ye die. And the Red Vine said unto the girl, Ye shall not surely die: For your parents know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the girl saw that the Red Vine was sugary and laced with artificial flavors and colors that were pleasant to the eyes and nose, and a candy to be desired to make one wise, she took of the Red Vine, and did eat, and gave also unto her brother with her; and he did eat. And they gorged themselves on Red Vines, but learned nothing to speak of, for the Red Vine lied to them about that part.

And they heard their mother making coffee: and the boy and the girl hid themselves from the presence of their mother amongst the toys in their room. And their mother opened the door to the children’s room and saw that the boy’s face was smudged in red, for verily he is the messiest eater of all God’s creatures. And she said, Child, what have you been eating? And the boy said, Maybe a Red Vine. And she said, How many did you eat? And he said, Maybe three. And the boy said, The sister whom thou gavest to me, she gave me of the candy, and I did eat. And the mother said unto the girl, What is this that thou hast done? And the girl said, The Red Vine beguiled me, and I did eat.

And the mother said unto the Red Vine, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all candies, and above every snack item and munchie; in the garbage shalt thou go. But then she hid the Red Vines in the back of the pantry, for the mother had nothing against the Red Vines, and was looking forward to having some later.

Unto the children she said, Wait until your father gets up. And then the children’s father got up, and he too was displeased. He looked upon the boy’s face and said, Really? You expected us not to notice this? And then he cast the children out of their room. But then he sent them back to their room and said, Before I cast you out, I want you to clean your room, for your room is a pig sty. After they had cleaned their room, he cast them out again, and made them work outside, moving rocks and doing all sorts of unpleasant tasks that he didn’t feel like doing.

At the end of the day, the children went to bed without dessert. And the mother said, Behold, your children are very naughty. And the father said, My children? The girl started it, and she takes after you. And the mother said, Whatever. Let us forbid them from having any candy or dessert for the next week. And the father agreed.

And once the children were in bed, the parents discussed amongst themselves what candy they would eat that evening.

Caption Contest: The Hulk

2008-05-02T10:37:00.000-07:00

You have to feel a little bad for Ang Lee. He's a respected director who did his best to make a decent superhero movie. Sadly, no one told him that when you're making a movie called The Hulk, you shouldn't make the audience wait 40 minutes before they see the Hulk. Mrs. Diesel and I made the mistake of seeing The Hulk at a matinee; by the time the Hulk started doing interesting stuff like bounding through the desert and biting the heads off missiles and spitting them at helicopters, the theater had been overrun by middle-schoolers who were bored out of their minds after the seventeenth lingering shot of moss on a rock.

So now they're pulling a Batman Begins and making another Hulk movie, pretending that the last one never happened. How do you think that makes Ang Lee feel? (And don't say, "anglee," because you wouldn't like him when he's anglee.) Even I Know What You Did Last Summer evidently warrants two sequels (the last one being called -- no joke -- I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer). But The Hulk was such a mess that they're calling a do-over, only five years after the first one came out. At least Ang Lee was smart enough to make his next movie about gay cowboys, so that there would be absolutely no chance of any audience overlap.

Anyway, you know where this is going. That's me with the big green guy. Submit your captions in the comments. The lovely and pensive Mrs. Diesel and I will pick our favorites and I'll post a poll on Tuesday. Have fun!

I'll be back on Monday with a brand new post that's so awesome that you'll forget all about how lame this blog has been lately.

Four Months in Pictures

2008-04-30T13:20:00.000-07:00

I haven’t posted any pics of my house or family lately, mostly because, well, I lost the little cable thingy that connects the camera to my computer. I still haven’t found it, but I bought a card reader from Best Buy, so now I can finally post some pics. I’ve got quite a backlog, so I thought I’d do a quick photo pictorial, catching you up on what’s been going on over the past few months.

We went to Seaworld for Christmas. That’s a story in itself, but for now I’ll just post this pic that demonstrates once again that I have the most beautiful children on the planet. I know, you think your kids are cute, but my kids are like BAM! PYCHOW! They’re all up in your grill with their cuteness.

We also went up into the mountains to play in the snow. This is what Mrs. Diesel and I look like a few minutes before I’m going to slam into her on a sled at thirty miles an hour and she doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the day.

These photos prove nothing except that I’m the BEST UNCLE EVER.

One time we went to the beach. I always get pensive at the beach. Here I’m thinking, “God must have a HUGE salt shaker.”

Here’s Mrs. Diesel looking sultry at the beach. Here she’s thinking, “I can’t believe you used that picture. I look so ugly in that picture.”

One time I took a bunch of meth and stayed up all night building the Sydney Opera House out of Legos™.

And Mount Rushmore.

And this walrus. I only had enough Legos™ for one tusk.

Our house progressed, largely due to the fact that rather than trying to help with the construction over the past few months, I stuck to my strengths: writing insanely large checks.

And that’s all I have for now.

See you on Friday for the caption contest.

Finally, a Post You Can Sink Your Teeth Into!

2008-04-28T12:09:00.000-07:00

One can learn a lot of interesting things working at Google.

I was surprised to learn, for example, how easy it is to be turned into a werewolf.

I am not at liberty to disclose the exact nature of the project I’m working on, but I don’t think that I’m spilling any state secrets by revealing to you that it’s related to lycanthropy. You might have guessed as much, yes?

During the course of this project I’ve done a fair amount of research on werewolves. Most of the information I’ve come across is fairly banal: the werewolf’s vulnerability to silver, his aversion to bright light, his susceptibility to wolfsbane due to that plant’s origin as a weed that sprouted from a puddle of drool of the the demon dog Cerberus, etc.

Now I know I've been a little out of touch lately, but I think I still know my readership well enough to place all of you into one of two classes: (1) Those of you who are interested in becoming a werewolf, and (2) Those of you who are interested in avoiding becoming a werewolf.

To those ends, I have put together a brief, categorized list of Ways of Becoming (or Avoiding Becoming) a Werewolf. Those of you who are completely indifferent to the prospect of becoming a werewolf may skip this section.

Category 1: Congratulations / Condolences! You’re Already a Werewolf!
Lycanthropy is often an accident of birth. As such, there is a chance that you are already a werewolf. You are most likely a werewolf if:

1. You are the seventh-born son. (France, Portugal and Brazil only. Sorry, Argentina!) Sadly, lycanthropy is still a male-dominated profession, although in Brazil the seventh daughter has the opportunity to become a mule with fire in place of its head, known as “Mula-sem-cabeça" (Headless Mule). I swear I am not making this up.

2. You are the child of two warewolf parents. It’s not clear what happens if only one of your parents is a warewolf, but I bet it would make a good sitcom.

3. You were born on December 24 (Russia only). The upside to being a Christmas Eve baby in Russia is that people actually remember your birthday. The downside is that they celebrate it by chasing you through the village with torches.

Category 2: Curses and Enchantments
Many people become werewolves through some sort of magic. Usually an enchanted salve, potion or special beer is involved. Most experts agree that it was some combination of these elements that turned Billy Bob Thornton into a werewolf.

Wikipedia quotes one medieval authority who argued in a book he wrote that werewolves were actually sorcerers who voluntarily transformed themselves into wolves. The book’s diabolical nature is evident when one copies and pastes a passage into Microsoft Word, causing it to light up like a Christmas Tree of spelling and grammar errors:

The werewolves are certayne sorcerers, who having annoynted their bodies with an ointment which they make by the instinct of the devil, and putting on a certayne inchaunted girdle, does not only unto the view of others seem as wolves, but to their own thinking have both the shape and nature of wolves, so long as they wear the said girdle. And they do dispose themselves as very wolves, in worrying and killing, and most of humane creatures.

I can’t quite parse that last sentence, but I think it’s safe to say that those certayne sorcerers were mostly worrying about whether they look silly wearing an "inchaunted girdle."

Category 3: Lycanthropy for the Rest of Us
“But wait,” you say. “I wasn’t born a werewolf and I hardly know any sorcerers. Does that mean I’m safe?” Or alternately, “But wait, I wasn’t born a werewolf and I don’t know any sorcerers who are worth a damn. Does that mean I have no hope of ever becoming a werewolf?” The answer to both of those questions is an unqualified no. After all, if you wanted qualified advice, you wouldn’t be here, would you?

The fact is that there are still several ways in which you could accidentally or intentionally become a werewolf. For example, let’s suppose that you were walking through the woods one night, and you became extremely thirsty. You kneel down, as any normal person would, and drink some water from a shallow impression in the ground. Then you go home, thinking that you are still not a werewolf.

Wrong! You are a werewolf! That impression in the ground was actually the footprint of a wolf, and drinking water from it has transformed you into a werewolf. I know, right? That will make you think twice before drinking water from a puddle that strange animals have been tramping through.

Even if you want to become a werewolf, you should still be careful. I mean, imagine if that puddle wasn’t water. Now not only are you not a werewolf, but you’re still really thirsty, because wolf urine is not nearly as refreshing as you might think.

The point is that it behooves you to take proper precautions, whether your goal is to become a werewolf or to avoid becoming a werewolf. Above all, avoid taking the ‘easy route’ to becoming a werewolf.

According to Wikipedia, you can become a werewolf through “the removal of clothing and putting on a belt made of wolfskin.”

I know, it sounds great: Just put on your wolf-belt and you’re a werewolf. Take it off, and you’re human again. Win-win, right?

Wrong. How do you think the other werewolves, who became accursed creatures of the night by virtue of dark sorcery or some freak accident of birth are going to react when they find out that you’re a skin-wearer? Hardcore lycanthropes don’t take kindly to the “weekend werewolf” sort. You’ll be lucky if they don’t rip off your wolf-belt and leave you naked in the woods, with werewolf gang signs written on your chest in blood. They will probably give you a wolf-belt wedgie, too.

I hope this post was useful to you, whether you are interested in becoming a werewolf, or intent on remaining a non-werewolf. Lycanthropy is a personal matter, and we should be respectful of one another's lifestyle choices.

Watch for my next post, in which I will explain the best way to torture and kill werewolves for amusement.

Congrats, Joel!

2008-04-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

Crummy Joel took top honors this week. I think this is his third win, which ties him with Brad for most wins. Joel already has my book because he's a smart guy who know quality humor writing when he sees it, but maybe I'll send him another t-shirt. What? You didn't know there were Mattress Police t-shirts? I guess I should add that link back to my template.

Here's your award, Joel.

McCafferty Himself took second with:

Diesel is crushed that Travolta avoids making eye contact the morning after their special night together.

And newcomer EZ came in third:

Double forehead and bad hair? With a package like that, she won't even notice!!

Thanks for playing, everybody.

I should have some time this weekend to fix all the crap that's been breaking around here and Humor-Blogs.com. And maybe, just maybe, even write an actual post or two.

Have a great weekend.

Another lame post

2008-04-24T11:17:00.000-07:00

Sorry for being so lame this week. Between hackers, work and killing gophers, I haven't had much time to blog. I promise to do better next week.

In the mean time, make sure you vote in the caption contest. Remember, the winner gets a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary: From the Secret Files of the Mattress Police.

Check back tomorrow for the winners.

Diesel out.

Vote!

2008-04-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

Ok, folks, here are the finalists. I just got home and I'm pretty freaking exhausted, so hopefully I don't wake up tomorrow morning and realize I picked 10 lame-ass captions.

Although if the other choice is not waking up, then I guess I'd go with the first option.

Did I mention I'm really tired?

Saint Schizophrenia said...

Diesel finds out exactly how seriously Scientologists take their zero-tolerance stance on anti-depressants.

Jay said...

"Hey guys! Heading to the Bob Marley concert?"

stushie said...

Twenty five years later, Travolta's Saturday Night Fever had mutated into an interplanetary epidemic.

CrummyJoel said...

Diesel would later realize that this was the least weird part of the Scientology recruitment tour.

Brad said...

"Tom! Kirstie! We got another one!"

Pablo said...

The aliens from the planet Lasiks made all who wear glasses into second class citizens. Diesel just liked the attention.

McCafferty Himself said...

Diesel is crushed that Travolta avoids making eye contact the morning after their special night together.

Mark Jabo said...

Diesel: I'm just saying...these hairstyles aren't going to help Scientology shed its image as a bat-sh*t crazy cult.

EZ said...

Double forehead and bad hair? With a package like that, she won't even notice!!

Bunk said...

"C'mon! Sing with me! 'OOgachaca! OOga OOga OOga OOgachaca!' C'mon guys, you know the words..."

Opinion Polls & Market Research

...and we're back

2008-04-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

Well, looks like things are working again. Never did get around to posting anything today. Things have been crazy.

Since we had some technical difficulties, I'll give you until noon Pacific time tomorrow (Tuesday) to get your captions in. I'll post the poll some time after that.

Diesel out.

Grrr...

2008-04-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

Sorry, folks. I thought I had fixed the problem, but the malicious frame code is still coming up. I had to take down the Humor-Blogs.com site and disable comments on this site.

The problem isn't actually with my sites; it's with the servers my sites are hosted on. Evidently my hosting company forgot to install a few patches. They aren't telling me much, except that "this is a major issue that is a top priority" for them. Super.

You can read more about the iFrame attack here.

Rest assure that all the Humor-Blogs.com data is still there; nothing has been deleted. I've only taken the site down as a safeguard against infecting anybody with a virus. Hopefully it will be back up soon.

If you have a caption for the caption contest, feel free to email it to me at diesel -at- mattresspolice.com.

Caption Contest: Battlefield Earth

2008-04-18T14:13:00.000-07:00

Ok, I think I've gotten a handle on my recent technical difficulties. Apparently the Humor-Blogs.com site and this one were both hacked. The hacker put a bit of code in a hidden frame on the site that would make a call to another website, prompting you to download some sort of executable file, which was probably a virus.

I have removed the malicious code on both sites and alerted my hosting company who, 5+ hours after my initial email this morning, still have not responded. Good show, guys!

I will be posting a more detailed message on Humor-Blogs.com later today.

So, with that out of the way, we can get on to the caption contest for this week. Since I've already done Iron Man and Batman Begins, I was a little short on material this week. Once again, I had to go back to one of the classics. This time I picked Battlefield Earth, the 2000 sci-fi epic starring John Travolta and Forrest Whitaker. That's me with them in the pic.

You know how this works. Submit your captions in the comments. Mrs. Diesel and I will pick our favorites and I'll post the top 10 in a poll on Tuesday. The winner will be announced next Friday. As always, the winner will receive the coveted In Your Face Award, as well as a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary.

Have fun, and good luck!

Technical Difficulties

2008-04-18T09:04:00.000-07:00

I'm having some issues this morning.

First, if you're using Internet Explorer, you may get a prompt on this site or on Humor-Blogs.com asking you if you want to install some Remote Data Services Data Control plug-in. Do NOT say yes. I don't know what that is or why it's trying to install itself. I'm looking into it and will give you more information when I can.

Second, if you're using Firefox, you may notice that the background turns black partway down the page, making it difficult to read the black text. Not sure why this is happening either, or if it's related to the other issue. It looks fine when I preview the template in Blogger, but when I publish it, it goes all funky.

I hope to be back in a few hours with an update. I've got a caption contest pic ready to go as soon as I get all this crap worked out.

38? But You Seem So Immature!

2008-04-16T11:03:00.000-07:00

In two weeks I’ll be thirty-eight years old.

I like this age. You know what’s great about being almost thirty-eight? People stop expecting you to grow up. And you can stop pretending that you’re going to some day.

When you’re thirty-eight and you interrupt a meeting at work with a five minute puppet show starring a Cat5 cable and a laptop power cable, people don’t shake their heads and mutter something to each other about how immature you are. They still think you’re immature, but they accept it. They look at your receding hairline and salt-and-pepper beard and realize that this isn’t the first impromptu puppet show you’ve put on starring office equipment – and it most likely won’t be the last. They assume you know how inappropriate you’re being, and that bringing it to your attention isn’t going to change anything. In fact, now that I think about it, being in your late thirties is a lot like being retarded.

In a sense, I’ve been waiting to be thirty-eight all my life. I’ve always felt about thirty-eight. Even when I was in elementary school, I felt about thirty-eight. When the other kids were worried about getting picked last in softball, I was worried about what I was going to do with my life. I was a lot like Woody Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, in Annie Hall:

Alvy’s mother: He’s been depressed. All of a sudden, he can’t do anything.
Doctor: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Alvy’s mother: Tell Dr. Flicker. (To the doctor) It’s something he read.
Doctor: Something he read, huh?
Alvy: The universe is expanding...Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, some day it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.
Alvy’s mother: What is that your business?

Grade school is a terrible place for a thirty-eight year old.

There were times in school when I was literally bored to tears. I used to fake illnesses so I could get out of doing math drills. School just dragged on, and on, and on, and there seemed to be no point to it. It was all just one colossal waste of time, and nobody felt the need to explain why I needed to be there. It was, in fact, solid real-world training for the quarterly all hands meetings at Galactic Invertebrates.

My strategy for dealing with this sort of tedium hasn’t changed much over thirty-eight years. It’s a two pronged strategy, consisting of (1) doodling pictures of Spider-Man in the margins of my “notes,” and (2) cracking inappropriate jokes.

At one of the first of the pointless all-day meetings at Galactic Invertebrates, the human resources director spent an hour explaining the organizational structure of the company. Which was amusing in itself, because G.I. had no organizational structure. She explained, to a room of blank faces, that G.I. was what was known as a “matrix organization.” She asked if any of us knew what a “matrix organization was.”

Up to this point I had been content with my drawing of Spidey dodging the many arms of Doctor Octopus, but when somebody feeds me a line like that, I can’t resist.

“Well,” I said. “I know that nobody can be told what the matrix is.”

The human resources director looked at me with the look that my mom has on her face while she’s reading this, but everybody else had a good laugh.

It’s not just business meetings where my involuntary boredom defense mechanism kicks in. The other day I was in a finance committee meeting at my church, where we were going over the budget for next year. As I am only the church’s treasurer because of some kind of divine joke, I never have anything useful to contribute at these meetings. I mean, unless you consider drawings of your friendly neighborhood web-slinger to be useful.

Eventually we got to the pastor’s salary, and someone was going through a book that listed the average salaries for employees in various church-related jobs.

“Hey,” I said. “Does that book break it down by denomination?”
“Yes,” he said. “Why?”
“I was wondering how much a couple of Baptists would run us.”

This little remark had the effect of completely derailing the meeting for ten minutes while we tried to ascertain what flavor of minister would give us the most bang for the buck. Very productive.

Just out of college I worked at a company that cataloged legal documents for class action lawsuits. It was the sort of mind-numbing job that computers do these days. A coworker and I used to amuse ourselves by making little adjustments to the letters on the outside of the bottles of Liquid Paper, so that the labels read “Squid Paint” or “Liquid Baby.” I even made one that read “Quid Pro Quo.”

When we ran out of unmolested bottles of Liquid Paper, I turned to writing lengthy missives for the company’s suggestion box. I once wrote a 500 word essay explaining why the company should get a trained monkey to go around the office refilling our coffee cups. I included a detailed cost-benefit analysis, in which I explained how much money the company would be saving through increased productivity. Then, at the very bottom I wrote in small letters:

P.S.: Please disregard my earlier request for a soda badger.

Paperwork bores me as well. I’m terrible at anything that requires attention to detail, and I suspect that only about 3% of the thousands of forms that I’ve filled out in my life have ever been read by anyone. Lately I’ve taken to hiding bizarre comments on any forms I have to fill out, in an effort to determine whether anyone is reading them. For example, on the application for my current job, this question appeared: “What was your reason for leaving your last job?”

They gave me a full line to respond, but I didn’t need it. I wrote a single word: RABIES.

Clearly it wasn’t a dealbreaker, as I got the job, and was never even asked to get any shots.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a little more tolerance for tedium, but my patience for people who deliberately waste my time has eroded at about the same rate. The net effect is that I’m at least as big a smartass as I was in fifth grade, but I’m much more confident about it now.

Well, I’d better get going. I think I’ve got a meeting to get to.

Why Do You Do It?

2008-04-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

It is understandable that many of you regard me with apprehension bordering on fear.

My threatening countenance over there to the right, my merciless rants against the likes of Thomas Kinkade and my position as unquestioned despot of Humor-Blogs.com -- all of these factors contribute to the perception that I am a man not to be trifled with. Or with which not to trifle, if you prefer.

Be assured, however, that I am not in fact a very intimidating person. I'm tall, yes, but I also have very slender wrists. That photo of me to the right may resemble Will Smith in Bad Boys 2, but that's mostly because, well, from the neck down it's Will Smith in Bad Boys 2. Truth be told, I'm not even really black.

My rants are mostly for effect. I generally can't sustain that level of anger for more than about a minute and a half. I just don't have that kind of attention span. So while I've settled on Thomas Kinkade as a nemesis, he has little to fear from me. Remember when I was running for president? Or when I picked up the cause of getting Huey Lewis played on classic rock stations? Yeah.

Occasionally I'll get an email from the Humor-Blogs.com contact form that reads something like this:

Oh kind and benevolent sir,

I am a mere worm who is not worthy to waste a moment of your time, but when I try to [do some simple task] on the Humor-Blogs.com website, I get a message that says [some horrible looking incomprehensible ASP.Net error]. I'm sure it's something that I'm doing wrong, but if you have a moment I would greatly appreciate it if you could find it in your heart to assist me with this problem.

Here's the deal. It's not you. It's me. Well, it's the Humor-Blogs.com site. See, I work on it for about 45 minutes every other week, usually for just long enough to break something that was working the week before. The site is kind of hacked together, and I don't have time to test my changes adequately before rolling them out. That's what users are for, right?

So you don't have to feel bad about informing me of some screwy error message or other weird behavior on the site. It's possible I already know about the problem, but there's a good chance I don't. In fact, sometimes I'll get an email alerting me to some problem, and I'll take a look at it and think, "Holy crap, how long has that been broken?" If nobody tells me about it, it doesn't get fixed.

Ok, so now we've established that I'm a nice, non-threatening guy (think James Spader in Stargate), and that I genuinely do appreciate your feedback about the Humor-Blogs.com site. Given these facts, it is all the more surprising that some of you manage to bug the crap out of me and make me want to beat you severely about the head and neck with a large metal stapler.

Here, specifically, is a list of stuff that you should feel bad about doing, and that will cause me to turn into the Hulk:

1. Failing to follow directions that are clear enough for your cat to understand.

You know how the join form says:

Step 1: Link to Humor-Blogs.com

...and then there's a checkbox that you have to check that says:

I have read and complied with step 1

Why do roughly a third of you check that box without linking to Humor-Blogs.com? Was it the 18 point bold font or the intricate binary mechanics of the checkbox control that confused you?

And then you get an automated email saying you've been rejected because you haven't linked to Humor-Blogs.com, which specifically says:

We were unable to find a link to Humor-Blogs.com on your website. Please make sure that the link is on your blog...and then RESUBMIT your site.

And yet, rather than simply adding the link and then re-submitting your site, you send me an email telling me that you've added the link. After all, why should you have to resubmit your site just because you did it wrong the first time?

After getting a few dozen of these emails, I added this line to the bottom of the auto-rejection:

You can respond to this email if you want, but there's a pretty good chance that will irritate us.

Which causes people to respond with:

Sorry if I'm irritating you, but I have added the link now.

Sigh.

2. Using the "contact" form to join Humor-Blogs.com.

Occasionally I will get an email from somebody who has filled out the contact form on the Humor-Blogs.com site, requesting to join. Why do you do this? Here's a simple mnemonic device that you can use to remember which form to fill out:

If you want to join, fill out the join form.
If you want to contact me, fill out the contact form.

See how it rhymes?

There is one question on the form that people occasionally have trouble with. To join, you have to enter the name of one of the Marx brothers. A few days ago I got an email from someone that read:

marx brothers - who the hell are they?

Bad news, friend. Not knowing who the Marx brothers are disqualifies you from having a humor blog. And not knowing how to do a Google search disqualifies you from being on the Internet.

Earlier today I got a message from the contact form that reads simply:

CheddarTed.com
it's the best

"CheddarTed" either does not understand what a "join" form is, or is not interested in joining. But none of that matters now that I know that "it's the best." Upon receiving this email I immediately crossed off "cinnamon raisin bagels lightly toasted and slathered with butter" and penciled in "it." Because now I know. Thank you, CheddarTed.

3. Doing absolutely nothing original ever.

You know what the world needs? Another blogger who scours Youtube looking for funny clips. And maybe a crazy cat lady, who is SO crazy that she calls herself the Crazy Cat Lady. And, um, like a bazillion more mommy bloggers. But not just bloggers who happen to be mommies. I mean bloggers who blog about poo-poo because poo-poo is funny. And make sure you use one of these words in your blog title: Rant, musings, random, ponderings, ramblings, stuff, nonsense, meanderings, observations, etc.

It's blogs like these that make me feel like I'm performing a service for humanity. Or servicing humanity, if you will.

Look, I'm sorry if you started your blog in 1998, back when Random Ponderings from a Crazy Mom (with Eight Cats) was an original-sounding title. But you have no idea how many of these blogs I have to slog through for eight seconds a week looking for a link to Humor-Blogs.com. At least TRY to come up with something interesting-sounding.

In fact, here are ten blog names, off the top of my head, that you can use. First come, first serve:

1. Three Men and a Goat
2. That Ain't Chili, Pedro!
3. I'm the Reason It's Called a 'Wife Beater'
4. My Monkey is Watching You
5. YouTube-Tied
6. My Inner Demons Are Watching Cinemax
7. Mainlining Gravy
8. Eighty-six Billion Miles (is Still too Close to You) -- This one is actually a country song for a space Western I'm working on, but it works.
9. Funny Jokes from the BOWELS OF HELL
10. I'm not a MILF because that's physically impossible

Look, I'm not saying they're all grand slams, but a blog with one of those titles would make me think, "Ok, I have to know what this is all about." Got it?

In the meantime, I'll keep adding your Mommy Cat Joke Youtube blogs. Because I'm a nice guy.

Congrats, Kadi!

2008-04-11T11:42:00.000-07:00

There was a firestorm of controversy regarding this week's caption contest. Why does controversy always come in firestorms? Has there ever been a thunderstorm of controversy? A sandstorm of controversy?

The controversy revolved, tornado-like, around the question of how much shameless self-promotion is appropriate when competing in this little contest. So let me clear this up, once and for all: If you win, you've done about the right amount.

Kadi did about the right amount this week. Actually, she was fairly restrained this time around, which evidently got her the self-deprecation vote. Nicely played, Kadi! You win a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary. Send me your address and I'll get it in the mail to you.

You also get the coveted In Your Face Award. Again.

Bee took second place, with:

Trimming my fingernails with your teeth shows your loyalty to the family.

And the bitterest of good sports, stushie, took third:

Your first task, Luigi, will be to shoot the James Caan dwarf that's clinging to my right shoulder.

Have a great weekend, everybody. Especially those of you meeting Bossy in San Francisco tonight. It looks like I won't make it, what with work and a bad cold kicking my ass this week, but I'm sure you'll carry on without me.

I'll be back on Monday with a post in which the author of that "Footprints" poem gets buried alive under a mountain of Precious Moments figurines.

But not really.

But maybe.

Blogger of Light(R)

2008-04-09T18:52:00.000-07:00

I’ve decided that I need a nemesis.

A commenter recently suggested that His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands could be my nemesis, but I don’t know. It feels like settling to me. Monkeyhands isn’t up to being my Joker or Lex Luthor. Maybe if he, Human Inertia, Stoner, and three of my other worst bosses got together, they could be my Sinister Six, but that’s about as much credit as I’m willing to give them.

A great nemesis can’t be an idiot; he has to be brilliant but twisted – someone who has the power to accomplish great things, but uses that power only for his own demented ends. Someone like Darth Vader or Hans Gruber from Die Hard. Or Thomas Kinkade.

Yes, you heard me right. I have selected as my nemesis Thomas Kinkade, the Painter of Light®.

If you’re not familiar with this “artist,” he’s best known as the man who has produced essentially the same painting 8,436 times over the past 20 years. Kinkade-land is a place filled with cottages almost militantly cozy, a place where it has always just rained, but it never rains. There is no sun in Kinkade-land – only an endless panorama of supernaturally illuminated clouds. It is a place where human beings, if they are seen at all, are represented only in the distance as Ice-Skating Boy or Man on Horse, never as individuals with names or identities. Judging from the freakish glow emanating from the cottages, the people in Kinkade's paintings are probably too busy stoking their fireplaces and lighting the drapes on fire to be seen outdoors.

Let me be clear: Kinkade’s talent is undeniable. If you’re looking for someone to paint a rain-slicked street, he’s your man. But somewhere along the line Kinkade went from competent landscape painter to billion dollar bullshit artist.

Saying that Kinkade has sold out is like saying that the Nazis lost track of what National Socialism was all about. First of all, any artist who comes up with his own trademarked tagline has preemptively surrendered any claim at creative integrity. What kind of artist devises a particular style and then essentially announces that he’s never going to progress beyond that style for the rest of his life? It’s a sort of deliberate artistic retardation, like if the Beatles had decided in 1964 to be the She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah Group®. Although maybe Van Gogh would have had better luck if he had marketed himself as Painter of Swirls®.

Kinkade found something that works, and is sticking with it. I’ve never seen a Kinkade painting of a bowl of fruit or Madonna with child. I’m not sure he could paint a portrait of a human being if he had a gun to his head. Can you have no desire to push yourself, to learn or produce anything new, and still call yourself an artist? I don’t know, but you can make a hell of a lot of money.

At this point Kinkade is a cottage industry (ha!) that is almost entirely independent of the creation of original paintings. Kinkade “originals” are turned out at a rate of nearly 500 a day at a factory in California. His paintings are digitally photographed, transferred onto a plastic-like surface and glued onto canvas. Each print features a nominal contribution by “highlight artists,” assembly-line workers who add a dash of color here and there. This unique touch allows Kinkade to charge up to $10,000 for what are essentially Xerox copies of original paintings. Prints that have had Kinkade’s signature mechanically etched into them – complete with DNA sample – go for quite a bit more.

I frankly don’t begrudge his selling insanely overpriced carbon copies of mediocre paintings by the horse-drawn buggy-load. If I could take a dump in a paper bag and sell it to morons for $10,000, I have to admit I’d be sorely tempted.

What galls me about Kinkade is the way he equates his greeting card sentimentality with Christianity – thereby elevating his cynical, manipulative, greed-driven business practices to the level of “evangelism.” God knows what luminescent cottages and glittering cobblestones have to do with the gospel, but to Kinkade it’s all one big fuzzy package. Go to the Lighthouses wing of Kinkade’s online gallery and you’ll be greeted with the message:

The power of a towering lighthouse, the unforgiving force of the storming sea, and the bravery of a sailor’s perseverance, all remind us of God’s strength.

If you’re like me, you vomited a little in your mouth when you read that. For starters, it reads like it was written by a fifth grade girl. The first sentence, if you remove the modifiers, reads “power…reminds us… of strength.” Yeah, I wonder why that is. Maybe because they’re synonyms? “Bravery of… perseverance” is a phrase devoid of any meaning. And then there’s the intellectual laziness of postulating that every element of the painting symbolizes the exact same thing:

“Jimmy, can you tell me what the lighthouse signifies in this painting?”
“Ummm... God’s strength?”
“Very good! And the storming sea?”
“Errrr... God’s strength?”
“Excellent! And how about the –”
“God’s strength?”

Way to go, Jimmy. You could write copy for the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light® website, telling the adoring public exactly what each of Kinkade’s paintings make us feel. So far I’ve learned that God is brave, powerful, stormy and unforgiving. Man, who needs the New Testament when you’ve got the gospel according to greeting card art?

The best art, in my opinion, is the kind that asks no questions and creates no uncertainty. True art is about creating graphical representations of objects calculated to provoke a specific, predetermined response.

Wait, did I say ‘art’? I meant ‘pornography.’

Thomas Kinkade isn’t an artist. He’s a purveyor of pornography. And the worst kind of pornography, at that: the kind without any naked people doing it.

Thomas Kinkade and Michael Bay have each had exactly one original idea – and it’s the same idea: to make a billion dollars off the way light refracts off pavement. But at least there’s no Michael Bay gallery at the local megachurch, and at the end of a Michael Bay show a lot of shit blows up.

I won’t even bother to go into what a complete ass-hat Kincade is on a personal level. You can research that yourself. Suffice it to say that Kinkade once said that Picasso “had a talent but didn't use it in any significant way.” Presumably Picasso wasted too much time trying out new things, and never bothered to come up with a catchy tagline, like “Painter of Cubes®.”

Painter of Light®, my ass. Thom, you’re the Painter of Light Porn®. Hell, you don’t even rise to the level of Michael Bay. You’re the Shannon Tweed of oil painters.

F--- you, Thomas Kinkade.

Vote!

2008-04-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the delay in getting this posted. Minor annoyances like work continue to get in the way of my all-important blogging duties. Remember, the winner gets a copy of Antisocial Commentary, so vote wisely!

Bee said...

Trimming my fingernails with your teeth shows your loyalty to the family.

Jami said...

"You're soaking in it."

Avitable said...

Unfortunately, Diesel misunderstood and made the man an auger he couldn't refuse.

Wendy said...

With the fifth goon that week stuck to his ring, Don Diesel reconsiders his choice of bling.

Sparrow said...

Don Diesel took great pleasure in this final humiliation of his arch-enemy, Lord Monkeyhands.

Mark said...

"No," said the Don. "That's not the ring I wanted you to kiss."

renalfailure said...

Your lips say "yes" but your scalp says "let's just be friends."

Kadi said...

No disrespect, Don, but if I am to be your right hand man... perhaps you should start wiping with your left.

stushie said...

Your first task, Luigi, will be to shoot the James Caan dwarf that's clinging to my right shoulder.

Annie said...

Yeah, the second hand is just jumping in place. I think you're right, your battery's shot.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Your Brain (for Dummies)

2008-04-07T06:31:00.000-07:00

Congratulations on your selection of the Cerebronix Diesel 1000 Carbon-Based Brain!

The Diesel 1000 is a state of the art cerebral engine that takes advantage of the latest in organic brain technology. We think you’ll be glad you chose the Diesel 1000.

Note that the Diesel 1000 is a high performance machine designed for a wide range of abstract thinking purposes. We do not recommend the Diesel 1000 for casual brain users. If you plan to use your brain primarily for mundane tasks such as doing geometry homework and remembering dentist appointments, we recommend exchanging your Diesel 1000 for something from our PracticalBrain line. You may also be interested in our Cerebroutine module, which allows your brain to easily focus on repetitive activities for hours at a time. The Diesel 1000 is not designed for such tasks, and using it in this way may void your warranty.

Features

The Diesel 1000 is designed for abstract thinking. Your brain can be used for all sorts of tasks, from making up absurd lies to designing database schemas. The analytical engine used by the Diesel 1000 is very powerful, and features an onboard counterfactual processor, which allows your brain to devise absurd hypothetical scenarios and discount empirical reality. The Diesel 1000’s analytical engine should be used with care. If proper precautions are not taken to keep the analytical engine in check, serious problems can result. (See Troubleshooting below).

The primary memory module of the Diesel 1000 has been optimized for storing abstract concepts and vast amounts of trivial information, such as the names of sitcom characters and the planet that the aliens were from in Highlander 2. It is not designed for storing addresses, appointment times, the names of people you may actually meet in real life, etc. Diesel 1000 users are encouraged to obtain an external storage/reminder device for remembering such items.

New in this model

The Diesel 1000 now comes equipped with Cerebronix’s high-performance H42 humor module. Users of previous Cerebronix models often expressed frustration at their inability to get their brain to function as expected while performing various mundane tasks such as trying to get to a job interview or perform simple repetitive manual labor. While the humor module does not actually facilitate these tasks, it creates an existential buffer between the Diesel 1000’s core processor and the reality of the situation. This helps keep your brain from becoming unstable. Note that you should only rely on the humor module to protect your brain until you can get out of the situation that is causing the existential threat. Failure to do so may void your warranty. (See Troubleshooting below).

Troubleshooting

This section outlines some common problems users may experience when operating the Diesel 1000.

Recently I followed another driver to a party in a strange part of town. I tried to get the Diesel 1000 to memorize the route, but it insisted on imagining a hypothetical scenario in which KITT’s voice in Knight Rider was provided by Charles Nelson Reilly.

This is normal operation for the Diesel 1000. The Diesel 1000 is a highly imaginative machine that needs constant mental stimulation. If it is in a situation where the available input is not sufficiently interesting, the counterfactual processor will automatically activate, providing amusement for the Diesel 1000.

After the party, I asked for directions back to the freeway. I tried to get the Diesel 1000 to pay attention to what the person was saying, but as soon as they mentioned turning on ‘Elm Street,’ it became fixated on devising a Nightmare on Elm Street joke that it could work into conversation at the next available opportunity.

This is also normal operation for the Diesel 1000. The Diesel 1000 is not designed for retaining detailed instructions. If the directions are very important to you, we suggest singing them to the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song.

I think I’m lost. I have no idea how to get back to the freeway. Does this thing have any kind of guidance system?

No.

Ok, I’m definitely lost. Seriously. Help me out here. I’m in a really bad part of town and I don’t even know what direction I’m going.

We recommend activating your Diesel 1000’s humor module until the threat has passed.

Why does the Diesel 1000 refuse to stop and ask someone for directions?

The Diesel 1000 is an XY-series brain, and is therefore incapable of asking a stranger for directions. Also, what’s the point? Remember the Charles Nelson Reilly thing?

Yeah, that was pretty funny.

Exactly.

Sometimes I catch the Diesel 1000 wondering if life has any purpose. It gets stuck making the simplest decisions, constantly wondering “What’s the point?”

Your brain is in an infinitely recursive “why” loop. This can happen if the Diesel 1000 is not given enough abstract problems to solve. In such a case, the Diesel 1000’s counterfactual processor kicks in, developing new problems for the analytical engine to solve. When the counterfactual processor runs out of problems, it posits the Diesel 1000’s own existence as a problem to be solved by the analytical engine. The analytical engine is unable to solve this problem, and the inability to solve this problem becomes another problem for it to solve. The analytical engine is also unable to solve that problem. And so it goes, until your Diesel 1000’s resources are being consumed entirely by an infinite number of unsolvable problems.

The H42 humor module is designed to recognize the absurdity of this situation and take enjoyment from it. At some point, however, the humor module is likely to be overwhelmed. In this case, we recommend having your brain serviced by a professional.

About this documentation

The Diesel 1000 is designed to be self documenting. If you are reading this documentation, congratulations! Your brain has reached a rudimentary understanding of its own mental processes, and has taken it upon itself to explain its basic inner workings to you. Although this will likely produce a feeling of relief and perhaps even happiness, you should be aware that this documentation is by no means complete, and may contain errata.

You can expect an update to this document in another 38 years. Good luck and have fun with your brain!

Humor-blogs.com has half a mind not to list this post.

Caption Contest: The Godfather

2008-04-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Finding little inspiration in the current crop of movies and TV shows, I have once again gone back to the classics for the caption contest.

You know the rules. Submit your captions in the comments. Mrs. Diesel and I will pick our favorites, and I'll post the top ten in a poll on Tuesday. Since I still have a few copies of my book lying around, I will give a free copy of Antisocial Commentary: From the Secret Files of the Mattress Police to the winner.

Have fun!

Tag at Your Peril!

2008-04-02T07:43:00.000-07:00

Hail, carrion-in-waiting!

I am Grûndir the Implacable, Nazgûl and Meme-Wraith. I serve the dark lord Diesel in the capacity of dispatching troublesome memes from these premises.

It has come to my attention that there has been some scurrilous talk since my last appearance on this blog. Rumor would have it that I have been 'sulking' in Diesel's barn, scrap-booking and listening to Foghat, afraid to show my face because of the lukewarm reception to my last post. Allow me to put these baseless lies to rest.

Imagine, Grûndir the Implacable craving the affirmation of faceless blog readers! The notion is laughable. Mark this, blood-bags: Long after you have withered, fig-like in your graves, I will roam the land in my ceaseless quest to wipe memes and hobbits from the face of the earth.

Yes, thousands of years from now the sages of a future age will pore over records of this era, tracing the origins of the great meme-slaughter, saying to one another, "Truly, Grûndir the Implacable was one bad motherf***er. Does this comprehensive and nicely annotated scrapbook not attest to this fact?"

And I shall sit on my throne, an unquestioned despot, ruling over a golden age free of both memes and unnaturally abbreviated mammals, surveying what I have wrought. Throngs of creatures, both living and undead, shall assemble before me to gaze upon my ominous visage and hear my flawless rendition of "Slow Ride" on Guitar Hero 3.

Anyway, that is the plan. I think those are reasonable goals, but I do not want to over-commit, you know? Maybe I shall decide to raise alpacas instead.

But enough of this talk! On to the matter at hand.

This blog has become a veritable breeding ground for memes of late. Take, for example, the "Excellent Blog Award," granted by both Jeffrey Ellis and Daisy. Tracing the genealogy of this meme, I have determined that it is over ten weeks old. Now if each recipient of this award followed the instructions and tagged ten more blogs, and if each generation in the propagation of this meme takes a week, then after seven weeks this meme will have been awarded to ten billion blogs. And as there are only about 100 million blogs at present, this means that every single blog in existence should have received this award 100 times. I therefore castigate the readers of this blog for your failure to deliver the other 98 Excellent Blog Awards that are due. Your insolence will not be tolerated!

Daisy has also tagged this blog with the most vile meme that I have yet encountered: the innocent-sounding "book meme." One might expect this meme to give one the opportunity to list the six most recent books one has read, but this meme has no such lofty ambitions. It expects us to:

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people & post a comment here once you post it to your blog, so I can come see.

The purpose of this meme is, in other words, to propagate complete gibberish across the Internet. I cannot express to you how thankful I am that someone has finally taken on that task.

It so happens that the nearest book to me is the scrapbook I have been working on, so here are my sentences:

"Vigorous flailing, while inconvenient, is a sign that you have picked a particularly robust hobbit to torture -- weak, sickly hobbits are easier to manage, but do not provide as much amusement over the long term. Note that if the creature flails wildly and screams for its mother when you pierce its flesh with a sharpened stake, you may have accidentally bagged a boy scout. Look for the telltale kerchief and hairless feet."

Quilly has pawned off the "Message in a Bottle" meme. I am supposed to put a message that means something to me in the bottle. This one is actually hits rather close to home.

I do not expect you to understand.

Kev tagged this blog for the "To Do List" meme, which requires that I list five things on my “to do” list for the week that are not related to work. This one is easy:

1. Set hobbit traps.
2. Check hobbit traps.
3. Torture hobbits.
4. Scrap!
5. Bury hobbits.

For all of these memes, I tag the Rosicrucians, Melanie Griffith, anyone who has seen the Virgin of Guadalupe, Randall "Tex" Cobb, Edith Wharton, Oscar Goldman, Gwen Stacy's clone, the last three people to die in Reservoir Dogs, the man from U.N.C.L.E., Jello Biafra, Wampy, Warren G. Harding, the guy who played Doogie Howser's best friend, and Glacial Spain.

The memes in these parts are getting so out of hand that I have decided to take offensive action against them. I am offering my meme-dispatching services to anyone who requests my assistance. Simply post my meme-protection badge on your blog and I shall take care of any memes that come your way. When someone tags you, let me know (by posting on your blog, submitting a comment here, or sending me electronic mail) and I will dispatch the meme either with a guest post on your blog or a post here. You can contact me via electronic mail at grundir[at]mattresspolice.com.

My lord Diesel has provided the code for the badge here:

If his duties for the kingdom of Googul permit, my master shall return on Friday for another round of the caption contest. Be here, and have your wits about you!

Morty, the Undead Lobster

2008-03-31T12:27:00.000-07:00

I'm still pretty busy with work, so all I can offer you today is this little anecdote from my youth. On the plus side, I think I've convinced Grundir to come out of hiding and fill in for me on Wednesday. I think he's up to something. Anyway, here's the story of Morty the undead lobster. Enjoy.

For simple cheap entertainment, few activities can top messing with drunk people.

I’ve never been a big drinker, and in college my smartass friends and I used to amuse ourselves by going to parties and talking over the heads of our inebriated fellows. I guess it made us feel superior, making fun of people to their faces without them realizing what we were doing. Kind of a stupid way to entertain yourself when it comes down to it, but at least you don’t end the evening puking in some stranger’s wastebasket.

My all time favorite experience of garnering amusement at the expense of drunken partiers happened a few years back, when I went on a snorkeling trip with a college friend in Florida. After a few days of swimming and snorkeling, we drove down to Key West on Labor Day weekend.

Key West is a strange place any day of the year, and on Labor Day it’s like a miniature Mardi Gras. Throngs of drunks fill the streets, drinking and smoking God-knows-what and generally wreaking havoc. My friend and I found a nice restaurant where we could get some steak and lobster and enjoy a few beers. We were seated in a crowded patio area, right up against a picket fence that ran along the sidewalk of the main avenue through town. The drunken throngs milled past only inches from our table, which was a cheap plastic thing with a half-dollar-sized hole in the middle where an umbrella could be placed.

My friend, whom I’ll call X, ordered the lobster. Part of the fun of getting a lobster is, of course, moving its little claws and antennae about and pretending to make it talk. Hi there, I’m Morty the Lobster! How you doin’? That sort of thing.

X discovered that if he put his fork under the table and stuck it up through the umbrella hole, he could, with just a slight movement of his wrist, make the lobster’s antenna wave wildly. Seeing the potential for entertainment in the situation, he situated Morty so that from the street it was impossible to see the hole in the table.

We sat there, sipping our beers and chatting as people milled past. Suddenly the dead lobster’s antenna jerked spastically to life.

Two young women, having seen the antenna twitch, stopped abruptly at our table. “Oh my god, did you see that?” One of them said. “Your lobster moved!”

By this time X had gracefully pulled his hand out from under the table, and sat there with both hands in view, regarding the women skeptically. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“Seriously, I saw it move.”

X poked at the lobster, which had clearly been boiled and mostly eaten. It didn’t move.

“You ladies been drinking?” I asked.

They erupted in nervous giggles.

“You must have imagined it,” X said.

They kept eyeing poor dead Morty, expecting at any moment that he would spring to life, but he never did. He just lay there, lifeless, in a pool of butter. Eventually they gave up, shaking their heads. “I could have sworn….”

After a few minutes we tried it again, hooking another victim. And another. And another. We must have sat there for close to two hours, messing with the heads of dozens of befuddled partiers. We were merciless, insisting that there was absolutely no way they had seen what they claimed to have seen. We never let on, and nobody ever figured it out.

The funniest thing was how differently men reacted from women. Usually only one person in a group would notice the lobster’s unnatural movement, so the noticer could take the safe option by pretending not to have seen anything, or they could risk being embarrassed in front of the group by claiming to have seen a dead lobster move.

The women, God bless ‘em, generally did a double-take and then stopped dead in their tracks while they tried to sort out the mystery of the undead lobster. I don’t know if they were oblivious to the fact that they were about to be mortified (ha!), or if they just didn’t care as much about being embarrassed, or if they were just naturally more curious than the men.

The men, on the other hand, tended to do a double-take, maybe slow down for a second – and then keep right on walking. Were they less gullible than the women? Did they assume that it was some kind of prank? Maybe, but that’s not the impression I got. To me, it looked like they were just as stunned as the women, but they were damned if they were going to claim to have seen an undead lobster in front of their drinking buddies.

You couldn’t help but admire the women (and occasional man) who stood there insisting in the face of logic and our stubborn and condescending denials that they had seen a dead lobster move. I could tell that some of them walked away still convinced of the reality of what they had seen. Maybe some of them still secretly ponder the day they saw the undead lobster of Key West.

Drunk people are fun.

Congrats to Renal Failure!

2008-03-28T09:05:00.000-07:00

Renal Failure wins this week, taking home the coveted In Your Face award:

Seriously, stop coveting it, people. It's in the Bible.

R.F. also gets a copy of my book, Antisocial Commentary: From the Secret Files of the Mattress Police. R.F., send me an email with your address so's I can ship it to you.

Newcomer Avitable came in second, with:

Diesel slowly works up the nerve to ask for the number of the Boleyn Brother.

And Jay took third, with:

Diesel: "Wait... Let me try one more time. Spock makes this look so easy."

Good job, people. Take the rest of the week off, starting at 5pm today.

I'll be back on Monday with a brand new post that probably won't be good enough to make up for what a crappy job I've done this week.

Pandora's Box

2008-03-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

As a compromise between listening to the same songs in my iTunes library over and over and hearing the Daughtry song of the moment sixteen times a day on the local radio station, lately I've been spending a lot of time on Pandora.

Pandora is a sort of customizable radio station that plays songs based on your personal preferences. For example, I told it that I like My Chemical Romance and Pearl Jam, so it assumes that I also enjoy Green Day -- a completely understandable, and entirely erroneous assumption.

You tell Pandora what you like with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down control, which isn't the most precise system. You can give a thumbs up to Def Leppard's "Armageddon It" and give a thumbs down to Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll," but there's no way to say, "Yeah, this Counting Crows song is ok, but I don't really need to hear any more in the next 3 hours."

The other problem is that Pandora only allows you to skip so many songs. That means you have to use your skips wisely, because if you skip some dull but tolerable Goo Goo Dolls song, you may end up having to listen to all 4 hours and 26 minutes of John Cougar Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane."

The result of my reluctance to either skip or "thumbs-down" bland, inoffensive songs is that recently I've been listening to an ungodly amount of Genesis. I haven't "thumbs-upped" any Genesis songs, but I can't bring myself to "thumbs-down" them either. I mean, what Genesis song would I give a thumbs down to? How do you pick? It's like having to randomly pick one puppy out of a litter to drown in the river. They're all cute and fuzzy, and equally capable of entertaining me for three minutes.

Because of my failure to take decisive action in this matter, Pandora has decided that I am the biggest closet Genesis fan on the planet. "It's ok," Pandora whispers to me, as the synthesized chords of "Abacab" commence. "I understand. There is no need to speak of your forbidden love."

Compounding the problem, Pandora seems to be programmed to play several songs in a particular genre in a row, so that a Genesis song is often followed up with three or four songs from the combined catalogs of Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins and Mike + the Mechanics. Sometimes I get the impression that Pandora is just showing off. Yes, Pandora, we're all terribly impressed that you know that Mike Rutherford was the bassist for Genesis. Now play some freaking Whitesnake before I slip into a coma, would you?

My suspicion that Pandora is screwing with me is reinforced by the fact that not once has it ever played "In the Air Tonight." I mean, if there's one song that I'm secretly hoping to hear at the end of a Genesis-themed medley, it's "In the Air Tonight." The first thought that pops into anyone's head at the beginning of any Phil Collins song other than "In the Air Tonight," is "Damn, it's too bad they didn't play 'In the Air Tonight.' That song is freaking SWEET.' Plus, I can totally air-drum to it."

But I know the reason why you keep this silence up
No you don't fool me
The hurt doesn't show
but the pain still grows
It's no stranger to you and me
duh-DOO duh-DOO duh-DOO duh-DOO-DOO-DOO!

Nor has it ever played Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer." What is up with that? It's played other songs from So, but never that one. Look, I'm not saying "Sledgehammer" is the best Peter Gabriel song ever.

Actually, yes I am. "Sledgehammer" is the best Peter Gabriel song ever. What do I have to do to get it to play? If I thumbs up other Peter Gabriel songs, it will think it was right all along in spurning "Sledgehammer." If I give them the thumbs down, it might stop playing Peter Gabriel altogether. So I'm stuck paging through the songs it's already played, trying to find something else that sounds like "Sledgehammer" so I can thumbs up it. Or alternately, I need to find a song that's diametrically opposed to "Sledgehammer" and thumbs down it. That's an interesting theoretical question. What's the opposite of "Sledgehammer?" I think it's Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine," but I could be wrong.

I eventually did figure out that you can specify particular songs that you like as well as artists. I put in "Sledgehammer," and the next song that played was "You Can Call Me Al," by Paul Simon. I wouldn't call that a five-point match, but it's in the ballpark. So then I put in "Urgent" by Foreigner, and it came up with the Tubes' "She's a Beauty." I can't argue with that either.

There's still the problem of genre overkill though. For example, I just sat through a 20 minute 80s hair band mix featuring Van Halen, the Scorpions, Poison, Bon Jovi, and then Van Halen again. I love spandex rock as much as the next child of the 80s, but at some point enough is enough. Pandora really needs to have some kind of safe word that you can use to tell it that things have gotten out of hand. Something intuitive and easy to remember, like "Nirvana."

Ah, and now we're back to "Easy Lover," by Phil Collins featuring Phil Bailey.

Pandora knows me so well.