Category Archives: Humor

Snow Storm Samba

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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.

Strive for Five – or – How to Irritate Customers

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I just got back from a run to the grocery store.  Yes, it was 5:00 AM when I left.  Evie wasn’t sleeping and so I ran to the store to get something.  Upon trying to check out I went to the ‘express’ self checkout. I pushed the start button on the screen.
“Please remove the last item from the bag and scan it,” began the monologue.  Its a monologue because the computer talks to you in a somewhat friendly voice.  Forget that!  I haven’t even put anything in the bagging area.  I pushed start.  So I moved to a different self checkout venter next to the first one.  I hesitantly pushed the start button.
“Please remove youor hair in frustration as I also fail you in begining the self checkout process,” chimed the second computer.  This was going to be irritating.  So I moved to a third station where I began praying – I remembered that if I was Catholic it would have been at this time that I would have called on Saint Earnest who is the patron saint of grocery stores – I remembered that if I was Muslim I would declare jihad on this checkout station if it failed me –  I also remembered that if I was superstitious I might have checked more carefully for black cats upon approaching the self checkout area of the store.  Gingerly I pressed the start button.

“Please shoplift because this register is also a ticking time bomb of insanity,” cried the tiny, tinny speaker!  Just then an employee walked up to the command center for the express checkout area and hit a few buttons.  The computer reset the psychological profile settings and began working for me.  As I checked out my two items I noticed stickers in front of the bags: “Strive for Five!” they declared.  In small print they asked me to put five items per bag.  Five items per… interruption: the employee is now walking to the other self-inflicted-mockery machines and having to manually cancel out of the transactions I just started.  Offset by about 1.75 seconds they begin a litany describing what was wrong with cancelling out of the orders that they had failed to execute moments before.  1.75 seconds isn’t a long time except for when the sound of voices is correcting you and jumbling together in a cacophony of computerized trauma.

Back to the five: In my life I strive for various things.  Striving is a word I would use to describe intense athletic challenge type effort.  Striving is a word I would use to describe an energetic exertion pushing to achieve a deadline for work.  Striving doesn’t enter my mind at the grocery store.  Perhaps customers would put more than 2 items per bag in the self checkout station bags if the bags that the grocery store provided were not booby-trapped so that as soon as I walked out of the store with them they would rip down the side spilling the contents I had self-bagged at the self-checkout stand after self-selecting them as I walked by myself through the store.  Or, I could double-bag my groceries and feel somewhat better about striving for five.  Maybe next time I’ll quadruple-bag, put five items in the bags (96 oz. of Lactaid milk, 96 oz. of Orange Juice, two boxes of crackers on the ends so their sharp corners can stress the plastic film, and of course some eggs on top) and then begin the Russian roulette based walk to my vehicle.  That would be striving.

Get Your Rachel Ray Autographed Kidney Here!

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Does anyone else feel slightly patronized because Rachel Ray now has more television shows than Kelly Ripa, more cookbooks than Julia Childs, and since that’s not enough you can now buy her custom mix albums from amazon?  I want her to sign my kidney if I ever need to have surgery in that region of my body.  I’m certain that she’ll be offering that service by the time she has completed selling her soul to S@t@n [or 0pr@h, whichever one offers her the most money].  I’m sure that these opportunities sound good to her, but the truth of the matter is that eventually you have diluted your brand to the point where no one will buy the Rachel Ray model of the Gazelle workout machine.   Or your Rachel Ray & George Foreman dually signed lean mean fat cooking machine.  And you will know that the apocalypse is upon us when she co-authors something with Martha Stewart.

Disclaimer: if you click on the link to the amazon.com page that sells her album I will not make money on this.  Your purchase will be anonymous.  But I will possibly die laughing if someone buys it.  And then this site will cease to exist because Jessica just isn’t into blogging.

Sin City or Salt Lake?

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Today while passing through the airport in Denver we were presented with a conundrum. And when someone presents me with such a thing I like to ponder it. The conundrum was do we try to smuggle ourselves onto the plane destined for Salt Lake City? The wholesome town of meandering Mormons? Or instead do we get on the plane that our tickets tell us about, and go to Las Vegas? The not so wholesome town that was actually settled by Mormons 🙂 Kinda hard to believe that such a reclusive bunch of religious folk would be taken over by the mob, and then eventually Hollywood studios and tycoons.

Today while walking through the mirage I noticed an intersting detail: no coins were in use. The quietness in the casino was distracting. I suppose that by moving all of the transactions to being digital they can reduce minor leaks presented by ethically challenged employees. To fix the problem of no coins they have speakers that make ‘tinking’ sounds as if coins were falling into the empy coin catchers below the ‘slot’ machines. Except that metal has been welded over the slot. So instead its a bill or house player card machine. Weird.

Of course the best part of Las Vegas so far was the sight of my co-worker holding an alcoholic beverage at 11:00 in the morning. But since he’s from Texas it was like 1:00 which is a totally reasonable time to go drinking 🙂 We’re hoping to have a good time here trying to do all of the G-rated things we can come up with. The Mirage has some dolphines and a small wild animal collection. Caesar’s next door has a very large shopping ‘forum’, and the sidewalks are littered with pictures of mostly naked women on baseball card-like ‘tracts’ that immigrants hand out on the sidewalk to attract men (and sometimes women) to go to topless bars or brothels. To me it seems like they should make soup at brothels. Vegetable brothels, chicken brothels, and of course beef brothels should produce corresponding broths that are sold at the super-markets.

However, I doubt that we’ll get such delectibles out of such sinful houses of ill repute. And even if we did, they’d have to be closely monitored for STD’s. I guess we’ll just stick with animals, shopping, and eating about every two hours at yet another fantastic restaurant.

Since my internet connection costs money here this will be my last post until Sunday night or later. Have a good weekend!

Mens Dress Shoes

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To continue on my series of ‘Randy pretends he has fashion sense’ type posts tonight I went to buy black mens dress shoes.  Who designs these things?  I swear to you that almost every shoes less than $100.00 they soles are made from recycled iron maidens.  That is to say they’re incredibly uncomfortable.  Considering I don’t wear them very often I can’t justify that sort of expenditure.  Worse, the designs were very weird to me.  I guess I didn’t expect to be as opinionated as I was, but some of the shoes literally looked like the bill of Scrooge McDuck from the Disney Ducktails cartoon.  Done in black of course (or brown).  Then there were some shoes that looked like they’d been cleaved in half by a random hatchet murdered, but then carefully and professionally stitched up so as to fake you out into thinking they were supposed to look like that.

To Jessica’s credit she has somewhere between 10 and 20 black shoes.  I don’t think that 7 of them look any different to the other shoes, but she identifies small nuances that make the shoes unique.  Tonight I learned about nuance.  With multiple manufacturers making the same shoe styles I was able to pick out small curves that were cut differently, different lace types, and of course various types of ‘cushion’ inside of the shoes.  I prefer shoes that feel like my Vans: soft, cushiony, and sporty.  That way when some thug asks me to play a pick-up game while I’m dressed up I can easily get schooled in my comfortable shoes and sweat out a perfectly nice shirt and pants.

I guess I just expect to get schooled in style and comfort instead of looking like I killed a cartoon duck and then tried to implement the Spanish inquisition on myself.

More Fiber!

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Have you seen the commercial with all of the foods with holes in them?  Its a commercial for a fiber supplement.  Its a commercial for a fiber supplement you put in other foods.  Its a commercial for a fiber supplement that they suggest you put in spaghetti!  If God wanted fiber in my spaghetti He would have put celery in my spaghetti.  And cookies need fiber, too.  Don’t forget that.  You need more fiber in your yoghurt, your milk, your ice cream and your steak.  Fiber is apparently the other, other, other white meat.

Pardon me, I’ve gotta run.  Get it?  Run?  The runs?  Fiber.  Nevermind.

So I went to the Mall…

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And who lets these teenagers go out with their brains turned off? I went into Hollister, which is kind of like a clothing store, except that the first thing that you think when walking in is not, “Clothes!” Instead you think, “Must have air!,” because they have perfume all over the place stinking the store up to the point where you honestly consider buying things at Goodwill instead, because you’re sure the clothes look as bad, and that the air will smell musty instead of like the inside of a perfume bottle.  Upon departing Hollister we walked about the mall attempting to get to various places to buy things.  At one point in time two teenage girls exited the shop I was about to pass and slowed me (and all three frillion people behind me) down because they were walking in the gear right before reverse, with little gas.  I don’t know what made them think, “Lets slow this whole mall down,” but whatever it was, I’d like to have it outlawed.

Whew!  I know that sounds cranky but it was a day filled with shopping, and while I love shopping, I love shopping with efficiency even more.  I’m an efficiency nut, which is why I drink water in glasses instead of from sieves, cullenders, funnels and firehoses.  I also try to buy low emission vehicles that get good gas mileage.  And, to reduce my shopping headache I shop for the holidays now.  Which is not as good as shopping in July, except that sometimes people want to get gifts that are more recent.  If I could pre-order more of life, I think I would.

There were other funny things that took place at the mall such as watching the elevator doors nearly close on a baby stroller because the designer of the elevator figured that the moms and handicapped people who were going to ride in the elevator also were Olympic athletes in speed training.  Fortunately the mother in charge of said stroller was a veteran and shoved the stroller further into the elevator causing the doors to relent.  Relent Green is people [sorry, I just thought that since soylent and relent sounded similar…].  Once in the elevator the scary scene in the movie started.  You know the one where the deep rumbling sound starts and then higher pitched dissonant sounds kick in and you really know something bad is going to happen?  The nasty, nasty sounds from the thriller movies were coming from the mechanics of the elevator.  Yippee!  But as passengers we didn’t race out of the elevator once the rapidly opening (and don’t forget closing!) doors expanded to their open position, instead we slowly paced out so that those getting on would not know that they were getting into the scary elevator.  We should have been screaming just to freak people out 🙂

One last brilliant thing happened in the mall.  I saw a security guard pick up a pair of balloons that had lost their ‘float’ and slowly lower the ribbons from the balloons into the garbage can and then take a utility knife *cough* of the swiss variety *cough* and pop them.  In the mall.  In case you have missed out on the sound of balloons popping in your life let me gently remind you that they don’t just go, “phhhhhhhhh.”  Popping balloons go BOOM!  And since post 9/11 too much of America is still scared of being wiped out at the mall.  By terrorists.  Shame on the security guard who has the sense to get rid of the extremely dangerous “unattended items” in the mall, but in a way that scares the kaka out of a large group of trapped lemmings.  By simply cutting the balloon by the thicker rubber at the knot he could have released the air in a slow and quiet way.  But Lone Tree’s best apparently like a good laugh.

I guess I laughed, too.  Inside, because I knew that laughing at all of the brainless teenagers and mindless adults would probably get me beat up.  And I didn’t need to be beat up.  If the security guard was as dump as it appeared/sounded he probably wouldn’t know how to break up a fight anyway.  At least I might have smelled good when it was all over if the teens shopped at that one ‘clothes store.’

My Fiend Flicka

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No, I didn’t misspell ‘Friend’ in the title. The book ‘My Friend Flicka’ has been made into a movie. I read that book as a ‘tween and recall that on a very bad day for me I was reading it. I had some sort of argument with my mom and crawled into the secret room in their house (at the time, they no longer live there) and read the book and cried off and on during the day. Sure, that’s not too manly but I had enough hormones surging through me on that day that I’m pretty sure that I would have qualified as a lab rat.

Anyway, I got to the end of the book and was all weepy and then my dad came home from work and searched me out. He was a bit upset that I had given my mom a hard time. I probably through one of the biggest tantrums of my post-kid life that day and I’m pretty sure my dad was ready to send me to Siberia. I can’t remember much about the book, I just remember being a completely goofy jerkwad to my parents.

Thanks Mom and Dad for not finishing me off that day when I probably deserved it 🙂

I’m Gonna Start a Beef Collection!

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Or that’s what I heard. Instead on Abby’s educational television show the hippo said it was going to start a ‘leaf’ collection. Which is quite different from beef. Except that maybe its a carbon based molecular structure. The upside of starting a beef collection is that you could really wow people with your exotic cow types. “This is a filet mignon from a Guernsey – you don’t see those in a lot of places. I don’t have very much pork in my collection because its not bovine but because of the filet…” [editors note: you won’t find Guernsey filet mignon for good reason, they’re dairy cows].

The Marines Called…

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and I’m one of the chosen few.  They want me to go out and be one of the few, the proud, the Marines.  The “re-crew-ter” wanted to schedule a time for me to come down and talk with him about my goals and future.  I was touched that at least one agent of my government wanted to know me on such a personal level.  No politician has ever wanted that.

But then I realized that this guy just wanted me for my body.  That made me feel dirty because I’ve not had any other guy proposition me like that.  I’m just a number to him – I think number 5,269.  But whatever number I might have been it was nice of him to call.  I told him that I have a lovely career and that I have two little girls that I’m not going to leave behind.  They can draft me if they need me that bad, but I think that right now they’re using the NASCAR drafters instead.  Not to mention I have a wife who would be sad if I was gone on a tour of duty in Iraq that has been extended every time I’m just about to go home like so many of the soldiers have had happen.  We have one couple that we are aware of from church (the daughter of some folks at church and her husband) who have been delayed in being back together for several years now.  Years.

No thanks, I’ll stick with my zero minute commute and getting to see my family as needed.