Author Archives: Randy Peterman

Illegal Information That Should Not Be Posted to the Internet

Illegal information such as my sister’s recipe for peppermint marshmallows.  I don’t know where she keeps it stashed, but just like the Colonel’s chicken recipe it should be locked up and forever banned from being published.  Unless of course the military made it in large batches and delivered it to the middle east.  I’m pretty sure it would take care of most of the problems there because people would be stuffing their faces with peppermint marshmallows instead of planning taliban terrorist things.

They’re great, but I think you just need to register with the state if you carry them on your person.  And maybe you need a prescription to acquire them.  Thanks, Becky 🙂

The Collective Buttocks of the Music Industry Have Spoken

In what can only be described as either insane or completely normal for insane people the Major music labels of America, AKA:” The people who would sue your grandma if they found out she had MP3’s on her computer – even if she didn’t know how they got on there,” are suing the Russian MP3 sharing site AllOfMP3.com for 1.65 trillion dollars. In case that sounds like a lot of money, you’d be wrong. Because in Russian Rubles it would be 43.378995 trillion rubles. OK, that’s the same amount of a lot of money.

Yearly music sales for the major labels is only $40 billion worldwide or roughly one fortieth of the sought reimbursement. Granted that the attorneys in this case, if their pipe dreams come true, will get a large chunk of that. So maybe a handful of attorneys join the world’s wealthiest billionaires, displacing Bill Gates as most hated human being because everyone else is jealous, or maybe this silly site is going to disappear, the Russians will not pay a ruble, and the RIAA will go about suing grandmas, teenagers, and complaining that music sales keep dropping because of the Internet. Surely no one could possibly be buying less music because they don’t want another Britney Spears album, they never wanted a Paris Hilton album, and they also did not want another new album for the asking price of $18.00 a disc. Oh, and nobody even whispered in dark rooms or in back alleys that they wanted a Kevin Federline album.

I of course keep knocking out number one hits like there’s no tomorrow. Like this.

Snow Storm Samba

Do you ever watch the news?  Why?  Woops, that was a bit negative 🙂  We’re having a snow storm here in Denver, you may know this.  Its not a big surprise, it happens a couple times a winter and yet every time it happens the local news goes into full coverage.  Full coverage goes like this:

Anchor: “Well, [insert weather person’s name here], what’s it look like out there?”

Weather Entity: “Its a blizzard out there!  Snow is falling fast and hard.”

Anchor: “I hope we can get home!”

Weather being: “Lets check-in with one of the poor saps that we sent out there to stand in the snow so you can feel like you’re getting live coverage as a viewer.  Leslanda, can you hear us?”

Leslanda: “Weather Person, I’m getting blown around here, there’s lots of frozen water that is forming puddles of frozen snow mass.”

Weather entity: “Leslanda, how are the roads?  Are they clear?”

Leslanda: “There are many accidents because pretty much everyone around here forgets that snow is slick.”

And so they go forth with this nonsense like a scripted replay.  Its like Dancing With the Stars only its a newscast.

It happens over and over every year.  Because weather is news.  And news sells commercials.  And commercials sell sex.  And sex sells pretty much everything – which means storms are good for business – if you can get out of your driveway.

Easy Pickin’s

OK, so commentary on CNN articles is not as uncommon on this blog as I’d have thought it would be.  But when they write articles like this one talking about bad statistical analysis, its hard not to say something.  I quote, “More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study.”  You do the math: someone’s leg is engaging in premarital sex without the rest of their body.  Either that or their over-simplification of the percentage means that they stink at evaluating the quality of the statement.  One more than nine is ten [if you didn’t know that before, I doubt you’re reading this].   Therefore saying more than nine out of ten would be like saying more than  zero out of one.  If you use a whole number ratio make sure that the whole numbers add up.  The reason that the report later says 95% is because 95% works in a 100% scenario.  If the number had been ninety percent, then I’d be OK with things, or maybe even 80%, but no, they had to involve appendages and non-whole bodies engaging in sex.

And I think that’s just wrong 😉

I Think I Really Screwed Up

We took Abby to go see the ‘Nutcracker’.  It was Jessica’s idea, but I consented.  I think I’ve violated my girl’s sense of decency.  The moral failure I have now committed is something I apologize for.  Some of you may be thinking about men dancing in tights as being the problem.  And you’d be right.  But I’m not upset about their fronts, they wore cups or some sort of male-front-part-ambiguizer.  But their bums were totally and completely emphasized by the tights.  One dancer’s bum was so completely overly-emphasized that I thought it was possible that the crack of his mass went all the way to the other side.  Fortunately it did not because I would have had difficulty explaining that to Abby.  “Daddy, why does his bottom go all the way through to his front?”  They could have called it, “The Buttcracker.”  It was wrong.

However, Abby was amazed by some non-anatomical things (and actually didn’t mention the tights) like the Christmas tree growing.  She loved the mice dancing around.  She liked some of the dances a lot.  I just hope that she doesn’t want to go again with me.  I can’t watch another round of men in tights.  I just can’t.

WWJD? VCR is Bustinated

So our VCR is officially borked.  Evelyn worked her little one year old magic and the tape is destroyed as well as the VCR being confused as to what its job in the universe is (it won’t even boot up to show us the time).  We have some VHS tapes that we don’t watch with any regularity but that Jessica and I have collected.  Jessica brought to our marriage a whole slew of Disney kids tapes (Cinderella, Winnie the Pooh, Dancing with the Stars, etc.)  but we don’t watch those and neither do the kids.  Do we buy a new VCR (Sony only, I’m going to keep a unified branding for my electronics) for the few VHS tapes we own or not?  What Would’Jou Do? [sorry for the bad play on words – sort of]

Whipped Up to a Froth

If you go into a service oriented food supplier (AKA Starbucks) and you order something should the employees question you on your order?  If I went into Burger King and ordered a squirt of chocolate milkshake on top of my fries and was fully willing to pay for a small milkshake to achieve the nasty sugar-salty-soggy conglomeration I’m after… then squirt the stinking milkshake on top of a basket of fries and send me to my grave.  Quietly.  Once I leave your whole store can roll on the floor laughing at the weirdo.  But wait until I’m gone.

This morning as a treat to my bride I went to Starbucks and called her from there to ask what she wanted.  She told me that she wanted a Pumpkin Spice Mocha.  Which, as you may know, involves a large quantity of chocolate syrup, and a smaller quantity of  Pumplin Spice syrup followed by a smaller quantity of coffee.  Its kind of like a coffee beverage, but more like a sugar beverage.  This is the drink my wife requested and so with confidence and certainty I ordered one.  And the gal who took my order was shocked.  How dare I order my wife a booger and scotch coffee drink.  Was I sure?  Yes, I did want a pumpkin spice mocha.  But what she heard sounded like the worst coffee choice possible.  Begrudgingly she wrote on the side of the cup the order.

So I’m pouring in heart stopping amounts of half & half into my large plain coffee and hear, “Mocha… pumpkin spice?!”  As if someone had ordered that the froth be generated by beating the dairy with a used rag.  For goodness sakes, this is Starbucks.   The place took off as a national chain because consumers discovered that they could have what felt like infinite customization over something as simple as a coffee.  And they coudl feel snobby and proud of it.  They liked their fat-free-decaf-sugar-free-vanilla-latte and Starbucks was proud to charge them $4.53 for it.  But I guess that’s changing now.  Soon I will have to go in with a bag over my head, and once the employees calm down from thinking its a robbery and realize that I’m embarrassed by their conjectures and so I hide my face like the Phantom of the Coffra.