Just so I could participate in local culture there. Local culture romance that is. Sweet googly-moogly, why don’t they have a restaurant in Colorado? Whitecastle is having a reservation only Valentines Dinner (details here). Of course you’ll still have to put up with the jerks honking at the drive-through, but its still an interesting concept.
You can read why I’m so fascinated by Whitecastle here, here, here and here.
I just accidentally typed Libraries and instead typed librariers. Librariers are clearly the things preventing me from getting my books back on time. To put this in perspective last year I spent more money on late book fees at the library than I did video rental fees. Scary. I think that the Librarians see me coming and fear for their books and other patrons because they know that my family returns books so slowly that some authors have probably written and published new children’s books in between our picking up their previous 16 page special and when we’ll eventually return it. Librariers exist because goofy patrons like us forget that we can renew the books online… if we remembered we had them.
And that’s why we can’t have nice things.
And boy are we sad. We were really hoping to catch the sappy intro wherein the Hair Flair Scare gets greeted by his super-model wife and child who has more hair than him and then he tells us about how the apprentice is going to finally be selected from a group of cannibals who have no qualms eating their opponents for breakfast, lunch and dinner [and if Taco Bell sponsors it again, “fourth meal”]. Can you believe we missed that?
I would have loved to have seen the opponents get briefly introed as successful business people, brilliant students and quadrillionaires. Which leads me to my next point: why doesn’t Donald Trumpt do an ‘Apprentless’ show where people compete to work in the mail room. Normal people. People like you and I? What? You don’t want to filter through Donald Trump’s email? Me neither, but it would be a good candidate for the Discover channel’s Dirty Jobs show 🙂
So the New York Times headline declared that after the private family funeral a memorial for Ford would be “in Rotunda” (of course the online edition has different text so I can’t link to it). Of course I can only wonder how different the foreign policy would be between the Ford administration and the nation of Rotunda and the Bush administration and the nation of Rotunda. I hadn’t even heard of that country before. I’d heard of Rwanda, but since some of those African countries come and go like satellites in the night sky, why should I worry about them other than they’re obviously kind enough to host a funeral for one of our nation’s presidents. Some might even call him our best president – but I don’t know those people and President Ford unfortunately didn’t influence my life as much as Regan or the Bushes or Clinton because he was president while I was an infant. But don’t get me wrong, it was a lovely infancy as far as I can remember.
President Bush might be more inclined to seek incredible influence on Rotunda because I think he believes that countries we dont’ influence are influencing other countries we don’t influence with iPods and other such nonsense. Its probably for the best because given that more and more of the American population is becoming rotund, controlling a puppet government in Rotunda only makes sense. Of course the biggest problem with the name Rotunda is that if its anywhere near Ethiopia it won’t fit in with all of the Ethiopian jokes I learned as a kid. Speaking of which… what’s the fastest thing in the African desert? An Ethiopian with a meal voucher. What’s the slowest thing in the African desert? A Rotund person doing anything.
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.
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.
I know I said that the last blog post was the last for this weekend, but I had to tell you that around here the employees expect a tip for pretty much every service they provide. If you walk into the casino employees attract to you like little gimpy Mexican children with chicklets in Cabo San Lucas (which isn’t intended to be racist about all Mexican children, it was supposed to remind you of those needy eyes that say, “Please, if you buy these chicklets I will stay out of school and the maimed arm will have continued to serve me well in this endeavor to be a needy person in need of your money). Jessica has now gotten up from her short nap and is ready to go see all that is the glory of the Caesar Forums [insert sythesized recording of fanfare here].
I received an invitation to a ‘party’ via the postal service requesting I come. They even wanted me to RSVP, but threatened I could only declined once, and if I did I’d have to come the next time they invited me – no matter what. Well, I took the Arapahoe County Jury Duty Computer Selection System up on its invite. Except that today when I was ready to go I followed some of the instructions they sent me (I actually followed all of them, but some of them were pertinent) and called a phone number. To my joy the number didn’t get typed in incorrectly so that I’d discover some adult hotline being run by the county. Instead it told me I didn’t have to come in. Therefore my civic duties had been completed but I never left my house. Drat.
The upside is that someone is probably in court without me on their jury. That’s good because the lawyers don’t like it when the jurors shout out, “All trafic violations should lead to capital punishment!” Especially when its a small claimes case about shoes that didn’t hold up five minutes out of the store.
There is a problem in our modern culture something that needs to be addressed: Stupid Picture Face Disorder (SPFD). If you’re not sure what I’m talking about I suggest that you take out some sort of picture taking device at the next social function you find yourself at, and you’ll learn what I’m talking about. Someone who looks perfectly normal will begin moving ten times more than they have the rest of the night. Or they might stick their tongues out. or they might make some other goofy face. These are examples of SPFD. This problem is probably bigger than America realizes. Just search Google for Stupid Face. At parties cameras come out and SPFD strikes the degreed astrophysicist so that he looks to have arrived on the short bus.
Imagine, if you will, the groom up at the altar. His bride walks down the aisle, the very picture of beauty and grace. The pastor has them facing him and begins, “Dearly beloved, we’re gathered here today to join these two…,” and it is at this moment that the pastor sees that the groom has SPFD due to the wedding photographer and is beggining to stick out his tongue, and it is also at this moment that the pastor involuntarily spits out the word, “Freaks!” instead of the normal, “people.” SPFD can strike anywhere and it needs to be stopped.
Fortunately there are some solutions to SPFD. It should be noted that the usual person strikes into SPFD as a deterrent. You see at some point in time, often in the teenage years, their mothers drag out pictures of them naked at two years of age in front of their girlfriends, or maybe someone takes a picture of them dancing at a party and instead of it looking like the super smooth moves of a brilliant dancer it looks like a poster for seizure awareness. Instead, when cameras come out people should stop doing goofy things like putting carrots in their nose (see exhibit a)
Or maybe sticking their tongues out (see exhibit b)
And definitely not trying to avoid the picture by moving out of the way (see exhibit c)
Instead people with SPFD should hold still and act normal. That way they can avoid the goofy pictures being pulled out by parents, weird relatives, or displayed on the Internet. Once you’ve seen that you can look normal in a picture, and by normal I don’t mean like the models who are photoshopped to death on magazine covers, you will discover that SPFD can be a thing of the past. Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.
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.’