Category Archives: Funny

Goofy, off-the-wall or silly things I might find or think.

Much Better

Yesterday I posted that I wasn’t feeling all that well. Today Jessica, Abby, and Evie are all not feeling 100%. Go figure. I am feeling better, but they are feeling worse. Further, Jessica and I were planning on starting our competition to see who could lose 300 pounds first**. Being sick slows us down a few days but we’ll be back at it once we’re all better. My goals for early 2006 include learning to ride the unicycle (which is rather intense) and to lose some weight so that I can be buff like my brother and brother-in-law Kurt. Or buff like Buffy the vampire slayer. She must be buff with a name like that.

Of course one of the biggest problems with being well built is that everyone asks you to open up stuck pickle jar lids, lift their cars so that they can change their flat tires and bend spoons with your mind. I think I’ll be up to those tasks if I can just learn how to ride that “won wheeled wonder.” Of course the problem with riding a unicycle while buff is that people will think you’re a really, really weird guy to spend so much time working out and then wasting it on a unicycle instead of becoming a super hero. Sometimes its tough to be a super-hero-unicycle rider, but someone’s got to do it. And that someone is not me.

** That’s not a typo, its a joke.

Change Your Underwear… Switch Your Foot

So I was working away on the couch here in WA, Jessica was nursing Evie and watching the TLC show “Yet Another Home Tweaking Show Where We Surprise Someone By Blatantly Lyeing to Them.” A commercial ‘break’ came on and I immediately looked up because I recognized the Switchfoot song “Adding to the Noise.” Ironically the song is about turning off the noise that the culture throws at you (television, radio, and anything else that’s distracting to life). The commercial? Victoria’s Secret! Weird.

Spider

Abby didn’t go to sleep right away for her nap. She came out and said, “I can’t go to sleep, there’s a spider on the paper towel by my bed.” I went to tuck her back in and get rid of the spider. I looked over and failed to see the spider. The problem is that I was looking for the wrong thing. The Spider was the flight options on the Frontier Airlines napkin Jessica had snagged for her bookmark last Wednesday!

Spider

Higglytown Zeros

There is a TV show for children called ‘Higglytown Heroes.’ I just saw them sing a song about how a trucker was a hero. I’m not saying that being a trucker is a pointless job. I am saying that dressing him up in the cartoon wearing a wife beater is probably a bad choice. Singing about how he delivers monsters to rivers, hats for cats and bowling balls for people is also a questionable message. I don’t think of the people who stop at the porn towns [stops on long stretches of road that have an adult store and a gas station only] as heroes. Maybe it is just me.

New Category Inaugurated

The press and researchers have done such a good job at reporting and generating reports on the obviouos that I’ve created such a category.

Our first post under this category takes us to CNN where you can read that the number of people driving while talking on their cell phones has gone up. That is like saying the number of people on the earth is going up while the population increases. If more people have cell phones more people will be driving while talking on the cell phone. The number has gone up where people who listen to XM satellite radio while driving. That of course is due to the number of people who subscribe to XM satellite going up.

Compromise: Best Buy Shopper

I don’t care for Best Buy. Their policies require employees to lie about their ‘service accounts’ so at to try to manipulate into buying extended warranties. However, they had the absolute best price on a wireless router that I needed while here in Washington State. When I was paying for the router the gal who was checking me out (taking my money, not looking me over, in case you thought I was getting into trouble) asked me if I was going to have someone else install it. This Netgear router is so easy to install that people who know nothing about routers can plug it into their broadband modem and install it with great ease. I told her that I was going to install it and she stopped there. I could tell the question was priming me to see if I wanted to fall under their FUD attack. One thing I hate about companies now is that they’re trying to milk you for extended warranties, service plans and blatantly charging exorbitant fees due to potential failure of the components. They advertise, “Buy this Sony product, its the best most reliable product on the market.” And then immediately they come back, smashing you in the face with, “If this product goes out, Sony doesn’t cover X, Y, and Z.”

If I lived my life with that sort of fear I wouldn’t ride in cars, planes, trains, buses or ride bicycles (let alone try to learn how to ride my new Unicycle). I wouldn’t have had children with Jessica. Heck, I wouldn’t have married Jessica due to fear that the relationship would have failed. Can you imagine reaching for a knife to cut up some chicken and then having a FUD attack? I see things playing out like this:

Self, you can’t pick up that knife, if you drop it or slip you could cut your fingers damaging your tendons, nerves and skin. You could be permanently injured due to the knife. Wait! If the chicken is carrying food-borne germs and diseases I could cut myself and infect myself with somem fatal disease and then die due to the chicken in combination with the knife. Worse! I could cut the chicken, then myself, then drop the knife into my foot causing me to be pinned to the floor by my foot and die not being able to reach the phone to call for emergency help. Self, you better cut the chicken with the scissors after sterilizing them with bleach just in case they have other germs on them from cutting the wrapping paper. I don’t know where that’s been to…

And the lunacy goes on and on! The government, and even your own parents, probably, wanted to protect you with warnings of caution, but instead of mildly presenting warnings they told you things like, “Never run with scissors. Always pay your taxes. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t run with your shoes untied. Don’t drink out of the milk carton. Don’t masticate, you’ll go blind. Don’t chase your brother with a hatchet ever again or we’ll permanently remove your hatchet privileges.” All of these have a bit of wisdom in them, but they’re just rules instead of principles which are applicable to broader ranges in life. Wow, I’m way off from where I started…

To put it simply: I love the router but I wouldn’t get an extended warranty plan on it because I’m buying it because its a good router. I wouldn’t buy a Honda if I didn’t think it was going to be a good car for my money. I wouldn’t buy a Kitchen-aid mixer if I didn’t think it was the best mixer on the market. I wouldn’t buy an Apple if I thought it was going to up and crash on me and give me a blue screen of death like some warmed over Windows 95 box. When companies try to hit you with a FUD, hit them back with some diatribe about how you’re afraid to touch anything on their shelves because what if someone didn’t wash their hands in the bathroom after making a messy situation of their hygiene, or sneezed or maybe accidentally drooled on the shelf. Further, you want them to sign a contract stating that they will take care of any medical attention that you might need do to getting sick within the next 48 hours from being in their germ infested store. See if they like being FUDed themselves. Oh, and make sure the manager is there to be embarrassed in front of other customers… it’ll be more fun that way.

Oregon Entrails

We had lunch at a local chain called “Shari’s.” It was not a tasty treat, though the service was good. It was strange to have so many people happy to serve while the food was a low quality fare.

“That’s what the guy who invented underwear said.” That’s a line from Jimmy Neutron that I just overheard. Sorry, it was funny so I had to report it. It is much like the whiteboard quote of the week, only different.

Food History

I don’t know a lot about food history in the grand scheme of things, but I have one question: who decided that it would be a fantastic idea to eat ginger root? Who was digging in the dirt and said, “I’m going to stick that in my mouth. It looks just like an internal organ from a cancer infested critter. Tasty.” I enjoy the ginger root, really, but that’s not something that I would look at and say, “This looks like it should be eaten.” It’s sure no apple.

Hockey Boots

Abby has Hockey boots. Not really, but she has boots that she calls hockey boots. Why? I blame Julia Roberts. She was in that one movie with some guy who had problems with gerbils… Richard something or other. She played a prostitute who had a thing for very tall boots. So… in my family tall boots (unfortunately) were called ‘hooker boots.’ So, Abby, not having a clue what hooker boots are has hockey boots. And let me tell you: she can play all of the hockey in boots she wants, as soon as she takes up fishing, its over.

One of My Worster Mistakes Ever

Last night, in what is possibly one of the sins in life that could be compared to say, murder, being discovered to not be wearing clean underpants when you get in an accident or not flossing daily: I went into Wal-Mart for a quick pickup of a few items Jess had put on my shopping list that were not at Whole Foods Market. Woops! I said ‘Quick’ and ‘Wal-Mart’ in the same sentence. However, this is not about sins or quick, or a quick sin for that matter (see: teaching a 3 year old potty words).

What amazed me was that a 2 liter bottle of Fresca no calory fruit soft-drink was 88 cents. A 20 ounce bottle was $1.20. If you do the math I could dump what I didn’t need down the drain and come out ahead just for buying 2 liters. I don’t think Coke is making its $100 billion on 2 liter bottles, but instead from those smaller bottles that people buy for convenience.

But enough about convenience. I think the Wal-Mart employees are working so slowly at the checkout lines because the ‘Wal-Mart Channel’ speakers are blaring Wal-Mart propaganda at them and their customers for hours on end. You can’t listen to, “We care about you and your family at Wal-Mart,” while making a $5.34 an hour as a cash register clerk and think, “Heck, yeah! Wal-Mart cares about me!” In fact if anything you can only think, “Turn this freaking thing off before somebody gets a load of damaged groceries for free!”

I especially liked that the Wal-Mart channel had a suggestion that people bring in photos and have Christmas cards made. One happy customer on the commercial said (and I’m not making this up) that people called her to tell her how professional they looked. Do you call people up and say, “Dang, Lucy, that’s the most unprofessional Christmas Card I’ve ever seen. If you send something like that out again, I’m never going to talk to you again!” I didn’t think so.

So, I learned a valuable lesson: buy cheap soda at Wal-Mart. But I learned a more valuable lesson: don’t shop at Wal-Mart period.