4/26

Shelley had to write a poem for 1 of her classes. She looked for inspiration, & found it close by.

Every day I hate going to work. 
Most of my customers are big jerks. 
They come to the store drunk as a skunk 
And drive cars that are a piece of junk. 
Most of my customers ride a bike 
Walk across town or through snow they hike. 
Stocking up on Bukoff for the storm 
Or buying beer for days which are warm. 
Alot of customers have no teeth. 
They spit and slobber when they do speak. 
"I wanth pinth Bukoffth" is what they say; 
I just want to tell them, "Go Away!" 
I smile politely and say, "What?" 
And I think to myself, "What a nut!" 
You need to get some teeth you big fool 
This way when you speak you do not drool. 
Some customers get as mad as hell 
Because I have to refuse to sell 
To them. If their I.D. just looks fake 
I do not want to make a mistake 
By allowing them to buy. They're dumb 
And I do not like waiting on scum. 
I have some customers that I like. 
They are nice and don't ride an old bike. 
They are polite and don't smell funny. 
And they always have enough money 
To buy what they want. If you are poor 
Do not come buy from the package store. 
I am not a bank who gives out loans. 
I do not care if you moan and groan 
Because you walked out empty handed. 
I will not be taken for granted. 
Be like my customers who are nice 
And wash your hair, get rid of the lice.

This is really the start of a rant that I don't have the time to write, but all day at work I had to listen to an ad for a Fox show called "UFOs: The Best Shit Yet" (or close to that title). The ad started out with "Half of America believes in UFOs."
My reaction: Half of America has below average intelligence, too.
Think about it.

Speaking of stupidity...They had to fund a study to find out that "men seem to be more affected than women by higher beer prices"?

4/28

The guy who ranted about stupidity last night followed it up with screwing up the recipe for dinner. And dinner was Hamburger Helper...I think it was due to the repressed memory of being kidnapped & anally probed with a grapefruit spoon by that evil Alien overlord, Quisp.
I bought cat food & day-old Danish at Stop & Shop today & guess what! They're making QUISP CEREAL AGAIN!! For those of you who weren't kids in the early 70s, it was Quaker Oats' attempt to follow up the success of Cap'n Crunch (trivia: the ads for Cap'n Crunch were done by Jay "Bullwinkle" Ward, & were made before they actually invented the cereal!). Quisp was this little pink alien guy (favored by the nerdy kids like me), & his rival was Quake, a musclebound neckless mesomorph (favored by the kids who beat up the nerdy kids like me). It was the same cereal, just in different shapes (Quisp was flying saucers, Quake was, I dunno, shaped like dead brain cells or something). It's interesting to note that they don't seem to have brought back Quake. Also, that Quisp no longer carries his trademark ray gun. Wouldn't want some kid eating the cereal & trying to raygun his school!

Here are 2 posts I sent to the Psychoceramics mailing list, which I put here for no good reason.

I HAVE ETERNAL LIFE!

It must be true--Alex Chiu says so.

I finally got enough click-thrus on my Win Eternal Life banner (But go get your own! It's fun to win eternal life!!) to get my neodynium rings & foot braces. Lemme tell you, Alex does not skimp on the magnets. I dropped the 1 lb brace a foot away from my monitor, and it severely and instantly warped the screen. The finger rings affect it from 6 inches away--in fact, the tiny magnets on the rings can lift both foot braces! It makes me worry about putting these things in my scanner, so instead, here's a pic from the instructions showing the rings:

It goes without saying that these are very uncomfortable to wear. The instructions recommend keeping the rings away from each other at night. Damn straight! Even held in my hands they take significant effort to seperate when the magnets attract. Yawn the wrong way at 3AM, and your finger could get a nice blood blister. But, Eternal Life never comes cheap.

The foot braces are--well, strap a pound of metal to each foot and you'll get the picture. And that picture is not very comfy. The rings look purpose-built, but the foot braces are clearly handmade (they're "in the developmental stages"). And covered with high-tech, foot-soothing electrical tape!

Most of the instruction manual is straight from alexchiu.com, including the strangely-phrased testimonials.

The part I find most interesting is that the San Francisco PO box on the accompanying literature has been replaced with very carefully hand-cut, hand-written mailing labels. They list the new address as :

Immortality Device.com Inc
8 Rippling Brook Court
Silver Spring, MD 20906

It also was very freaky to realize that my ex-girlfriend lives in Silver Spring, MD.
COINCIDENCE?! If there's one thing I've learned from Psychoceramics, it's that nothing is ever a coincidence! Possibly the rings will implant untraceable MK-ULTRA brain-control devices in my weiner.

Oh, and you can buy them in bulk! 50 pairs of Neodynium Eternal Life Rings for only $900. "The distributor packages will be in store-front presentable blister packs," just like Slim Jims.

Look--I don't want to live forever. A couple of thousand years would suit me fine. Maybe I could let list members borrow these for a few weeks at a time, and we could all live to Party Like It's 3999!

Bill the Splut Eternal
I have Eternal Life--And you don't!

Lo and behold...Two days after receiving my magic magnets from Maryland, today I was sent a SECOND set, this time from San Francisco. And evidentally from the hand of Alex Chiu himself--the return address is one of those free pre-printed mailing labels charities send you with their requests for money. I had a good laugh when I saw that Mr Chiu used a label that had a Christmas tree on it.

The neodynium (is that a real word?) rings are the same as my first pair, but the foot rings (wrapped in the entertainment section of a Chinese language newspaper) are not: About half the thickness and weight of the first pair, and of a different design. The electrical tape wrapping isn't as finely crafted, either. Most interesting to me is that the magnets are obviously much weaker than the first pair's--Will these only give me semi-eternal life? Will all my immortal friends laugh at me when I die centuries before the inevitable heat-death of the Universe? But if these came straight from Alex, maybe the Maryland guy is the Anti-Pope of foot rings?

At any rate...I've got 2 sets of eternal life and I only need one.
WHAT AM I BID?

Bill the Splut
"Get a life"? I've got 2!

(Note: I did not intend to imply in the 1st post that my brain is in my weiner)

5/1

April is over, & hopefully too is the yearly April malaise, the 1 that almost led to this page's end. Possibly so, as this week I have a slight inclination to do a brief weekend report.
It was a semi-lovely Sunday, sunny & 65 but with a howling wind, so I went antiquing. Bought 3 cheap things, 2 of which will not be mentioned, as 1 will be an Ob & the other will be a gift. The 3rd is a little desk calendar from 1958, courtesy of Ryan's Amoco. It has really detailed, full-color 3/8"high drawings for every holiday. I'm sure that Ryan could choose what style of calendar he wanted, but I'm not sure what the name of his template was. I guess a Catholic 1, as every Fri (& an occasional Saturday) has a fish on it. The Patriotic Catholic 1 maybe, as 17 of the 34 presidents birthdays are there with a head shot of the guy (who the hell celebrates Grover Cleveland's birthday?). But, uhh, so are Robert E Lee & Jefferson Davis. And General MacArthur. May 1st says "DEWEY-1898" with a picture of the Admiral while something explodes in the background...Remember the Maine Day? Excluding the major holidays (& presidents), here are 100% of what this calendar considers Important Dates: "1st RV. chartered 1822" with a picture of a choo-choo, what's that supposed to be? "Fulton's Steamboat: 1st Trip" is also considered on par with New Year's & Christmas. "Hawaii annexed, 1898." (no other states mentioned) "US Naval Academy opened, 1858." (that's important) Guy handing over his sword is depicted on "Japan Surrenders to Allies 1945" on 8/14, & "V-J Day 1945" with a pic of a bomber on 9/2 (so important that it gets in twice, but the Nazis are left ummentioned) "World War 1 1914," picture of Mars God of War wiggling his sword at Europe. Pearl Harbor & Pilgrims Landing make it too, but my fave is that unforgettable date seared on everybody's memory, "11/29: 1929 Byrd Reached South Pole" with a picture of a penguin. Maybe they meant "Bird." RYAN: "Yeah, gimme the Patriotic Catholic Militaristic Steam-Powered Hawaiian Antartic Kill-the-Japs motif, will ya? There just better not be James K Polk's birthday on it; I hated that fuck!"

You're looking to buy a car. Scanning the classifieds, you find: "1999 red Porsche, 1000 miles, all options, perfect shape. $1500 or B/O." WOW! You rush over to the address. The seller says, "The Porsche? Umm, it's not here right now. But here's a picture of it." The photo is fuzzy; the Porsche is white. "I thought that it was red," you say. "Huh?" he says. "Dammit! The newspaper misprinted that! They're conspiring against me! Hey, VINNY!" he screams to a neighbor. "Isn't this my car?" "Oh, yeah," says Vinny. "I seed him drive it lotsa times. Real good car. 0 to 60 in 2.3 nanoseconds." "Do you have the title & registration?" you ask, suspicious. "Oh, no, the Gummint agents stole those to discredit me. It's a conspiracy to keep me from selling my car! So, $1500, do you want it or not?"
Would you buy that car?
Do you believe in UFOs? Then you've already bought that car, pally.
Fuzzy photos & 'Some Guy Said,' to me, is not enough evidence to believe anything. Depending on to who you listen, Aliens have been regularly visiting Earth for 50 years or a million years. And yet, they've left no evidence at all. "They can't prove that this photo *isn't* a UFO, so that means it is!" Nooo, lack of proof for something is not proof of something else. Maybe it's a photo of a Flying Monkey. Some Guy Says aliens stuck stuff up his ass--Well, maybe it wasn't Aliens, but Elvis. Some Guy Says he's seen Elvis, & if you accept anecdotal evidence for anything, you have to accept anecdotal evidence for everything. Government Conspiracy? EVERYbody knows about Aliens...That's 1 shittily run conspiracy they've got going there. The Alien species are dying off, so they want to crossbreed a new species using our DNA? They've got faster than light travel, but they can't do something that we're only years from doing? I guess there isn't 1 Alien scientist who's figured out that 1 toenail would give them all the DNA info that they'd need, so they've spent the last millenium fingering our butts by the thousands. RIGHT. Why can't they make their DNA minty-fresh with some critter from their OWN planet? Something that had evolved with them on their planet would be a lot closer to their DNA than anything on a planet light years away. But if they ARE aliens, name 1 critter on Earth that the Greys look more like than humans. 2 eyes, 2 ears, 1 nose, 1 mouth, 2 arms, 2 legs--oh wait, they have really huge eyes & heads. Just like human BABIES, which I think says more about the Alien believers than anything else. They're not looking for Aliens, they're looking for Humans.
Other points:
Relativity is almost 100 years old, & no one's found a flaw in it yet. I don't care what Star Trek/Wars says, there's no reason to believe that Faster Than Light travel is possible. So if it takes decades to make the one-way trip, why the hell do these guys keep coming, only to scare farmers & diddle people's anuses?
There have been billions of species on the Earth over billions of years. How many have developed technology? ONE. (hint: It's the 1 that also developed striped toothpaste & the Backstreet Boys) So why should the odds be any higher than that throughout the universe? Sure, there are trillions of stars, and while the sheer number of potential planets is large enough that there must be *something* else out there, the odds are nanoscopically small that they also have the technology & the desire to come here. And even smaller that their main reason to exist is to bug us people on Earth.
How egotistical to believe that we are the Center of the Universe. Are we out looking for stone age tribes in the Amazon jungle, just so we can buzz them with helicopters & steal their dung? Then why would these not-very-Alien-at-all beings be doing the same thing to us?
There is a UFO conspiracy, however. The media realizes that you'll swallow this crap whole, so they're choosing not to give you any reason to doubt it. Not out of evil, just greed. Watch the UFO specials, & you watch the ads & give them Nielsen ratings. With all that Roswell anniversary hype, were there any TV shows telling you what a load it all was? Did they point out that the key "witnesses" for Roswell have changed their stories repeatedly over the years, or that none of them said 1 word about an alien autopsy until the late 70s, when some kook wrote a book about it? If it took them 30 years to remember something that important, how can you trust them to remember anything correctly?
Can I prove that Aliens aren't visiting the Earth? Of course not; you can't prove a universal negative. You CAN prove a universal positive. Prove that they ARE. Surely there must be SOME concrete proof by now. Show me your damn Alien implant, & don't give me this shit that the MIBs stole it. Fucking Flying Monkeys could've stolen it, too. You don't believe that they stole your implants, & your little dog too? Then prove me wrong.

Jeez, that wasn't very brief at all!

5/2

Did you have the boardgame Mousetrap as a kid? You know, the bowling ball/marble falls through a hole in a bathtub & lands on a seesaw that makes a man jump off of a diving board, & he lands in barrel of water but it's really boiling chicken soup, so he jumps out screaming which attracts the attention of a bear which eats him then steps on the mouse? (my memory may be fuzzy on some of the details)
A guy asked to borrow our phone book today. I picked it up off of the top of the cigarette case, which jarred this 10-foot-long stick we use to close the ceiling vent enough that it fell, pushing the handle of the feather duster forward, which caused it to prod a bottle of Turning Leaf Reserve Pinot Noir off the shelf, which bounced cork-end down then fell on its side & exploded. The wine was swallowed by Stuart Little, who drove drunk straight into a crowd of mice, killing them all, just like in Mousetrap!
OK, my memory may still be a bit hazy.

5/3

OK, I guess that this was to be expected. Some obvious jokes (here's my fave), & some that strike me as 1) serious 2) kinda sickening.

Ahh, what difference does it make. The world ends tomorrow, anyway.

5/4

My mother, who lives in VT, had something to relate to me:
"It was on one of the New Hampshire stations during their news show. 'A man held up a Fleet Bank today and he is described as a white male, with red hair and bad teeth'. I thought that was pretty funny because aside from the red hair that describes half of the male population in N.H. and Vermont."

This utter loser (in a beret) came in today to buy WHAT ELSE DO LOSERS BUY a half-pint of Bukoff vodka. He didn't have enough money, & wanted us to ignore the difference (yeah, I think I'll try that with my mortgage payment next month. "I'm a little short this month, ignore the $100 I left off of the payment." And I suppose that it would be OK with him if we said "Ah, I don't feel like opening up this roll of quarters. I just won't give you your change."). So he completely emptied the courtesy penny jar. He still didn't have enough (just 2 cents short by now, but we HATE these people, & we get them every day--Why are we being unreasonable in wanting them to PAY for what they BUY?). So he offered to trade a book of matches for 15 cents.
That's how I'll pay my mortgage next month! In MATCHBOOKS!

My fave Elian thing of the moment.

5/5

OK, last Elian ref, I promise. From a New Zealand list I sub to:

Last week, I said that, sure, Elian's mother shouldn't have had to
"defect in a leaky boat" and that "a free country would have just let her
get on a plane". Turns out, I made that up.
        The fact is that the Cuban government doesn't restrict the right of
its citizens to travel and migrate. The problem is with US government
policy.
        In 1980, an immigration free-for-all known as the Mariel boatlift
saw about 125,000 hopeful Cubans turn up on America's doorstep. Many of
them were former prison inmates and the US public was not at all pleased
about them being let in.
        So the US and Cuban governments signed an agreement allowing for
20,000 Cubans to legally migrate to the US each year, particularly where it
would reunite families.
        But the US has never honoured this agreement, and, most years
allows only a trickle of legal migrations from Cuba. At the same time,
CIA-funded TV and radio stations actively encourage dangerous illegal
migration. It automatically grants residency to the illegal Cuban migrants
who make it. If you're a six-year-old kid kidnapped by distant relatives
they hold an asylum hearing. Some policy.
        I certainly shan't be approving of a regime that has refused to
allow a free press for more than three decades, but when the Americans
invite China into the WTO, their economic blockade of Cuba looks more
morally bankrupt than ever.

A brief note from Karl, who lives near the epicenter of this amusing incident:

Kathie Lee Gifford got a big surprise on Thursday at the Garden State Plaza,
a suburban New Jersey shopping mall where she was signing copies of her new
CD of love ballads. Most fans came up to her flashing the CD, but one guy
offered something else -- a bag of live mice, which he opened up and dumped
at her feet. The "Live!" star shrieked and jumped up in terror, reports the
New York Post, while the culprit got away, despite the best efforts of mall
police.

5/8

I did the unspeakable & watched a TV show that was recommended by a Geocities banner ad.

Jason & the Argonauts was a not-bad Ray Harryhausen "guys fight some cool clay monsters" movie from the early 60s. This new 1 was made by some guy the newspaper TV section called "the miniseries king." ALARM!! That sounds like something that Dino De Laurentis could've been called if he was born 20 years later. Remember the remake of King Kong? (*involuntary shiver*)
It looked like it could've been "good in the sense that it sucks" when it started. It opened with a scene of a mighty army of 10 guys with spears being overwhelmed by a huge multitude of TWELVE guys with spears... Then it just sucked. IMMEDIATELY sucked. When you're 5 minutes into anything & can only picture the "Making of Jason" documentary as a bunch of guys with chainsaws gouging big planks from the Plywood Mine & screaming over the chainsawing din, "These are the slabs of plywood from which we shall whittle our actors!" and then some other lumberjack sweeps up the sawdust and proudly says "And I've got our screenplay right here!"...Well...ya know it's not gonna get any better.
The villain was some guy with a face looking like a worn tire topped with a curly Leif Garret wig. Like a local dinner theater version of the national dinner theater version of the Donny Osmond role in "Technicolor Dreamcoat," as played by Dennis Hopper.
I eventually realized that it WAS Dennis Hopper.
ALARM!!! Any movie where the LEAST interesting actor is Dennis Hopper is due to become intolerable mooey quicko, as I think the Mexicanos say.
I watched an hour without killing myself.
I'm proud of that feat, actually. El mooey proudo. Any TV movie that doesn't kill me can only make me stronger.

Other minor crap from the Weekend...

Got home late Sat after seeing the car-crash classic Mad Max in a theater (I really really really hope that this means that my all-time fave action movie, The Road Warrior, will make a return appearance on the big screen, too). I sat down at the computer & *plink* the left lens from my glasses landed in my lap. If it had decided to do that 15 minutes earlier, it would've happened at midnight while I was doing 75 on the interstate. I might have recreated a scene from Mad Max right then & there.
Buy your glasses at Sears: they fixed mine for free 2 years after I'd bought them. Sadly, I had to wander the mall for 15 minutes while they fixed it. I ran into Shelley from work there--weird, as she lives 30 minutes from the mall, & this was maybe the 2nd time I'd set foot in the place since buying the glasses. If only random chance worked like that when I buy Lotto tickets.

The late movie & the glasses incident are the reasons why the InExOb went up so late. But how bout that Quicktime movie, eh? Oh Those Nutty Canadians. Hey, I want someone's brain to poke in! (jabs pencil) "And what do you feel now?" "I smell tuna fish! Did you just dump cold water on my hand?" "No, I'm eating a sandwich while I poke around your exposed cerebellum, & then I spilled my beer." (jabs harder) "I--feel like DANCING!" (jumps up & does the Hustle)

As Sun is Turkey Day (I got this roasting shit DOWN, yo!), so Mon is Salvation Army day. As I walked in a fat old lady in fuzzy slippers was piling crap on the counter & babbling about someone's mouth operation. I poked around for 10 minutes, finding some odd shit & a clock with a built in weather station. Among the odd shit: a trivet with a joke that has an undecipherable punchline, & a toy. My brain 1st processed it as a severely deformed M&M, then realized it was from Nathan's Famous. I-i-i-i-it is a Hot Dog Man! I-i-i-i-it would've traumitized me as a child to find it in my Happy Meal!
The old lady was STILL getting rung up. It took 10 MORE minutes to finish her up, including her granddaughter coming in to find out what was taking so long. "When you run out of money in the middle of the month, I'll remind you that you spent $100 at the Salvation Army!" she told Grams in the head-shaking tone of the Long Suffering. She also bought a heavy winter coat for $20. It's 92 out (I can tell, as Kill Kill has become a liquid, flowing from 1 Cool Spot to another, to turn into a boneless furry sigh of a cat). The next person in line picked the fuzzy slippers up off the floor. "Are these hers? She just took them off." In the tone of the Long Suffering, the clerk said that she'd picked them off the rack then worn them through the store. She flung them aside in disgust, & told us that we were LUCKY that THIS time it only took her THAT long to get rung up. Another clerk came from the front & threw down a dress, sneering that the fat old lady "wanted this held till Friday." ME: "If she'd held up the line any longer, it would BE Friday!" which got a laff from everyone. Me & My Big Mouth: the next woman's credit card took 6 attempts to go through...Scary part: It went through when SHE reached over the counter & pressed the buttons on the SA machine. Note from a Retail Drone: Customers should NOT know how to run your business better than you.
When I got home, I discovered that, yes, there are people scummy enough to "donate" to the SA clocks that don't work.
It was prly Grandma.

I mention the following for 1 reason, as I'm sure no one really cares about the plant life around here.

I went walking yesterday (can't go on Mondays right now, as the Town is macadamizing the muddy woodland trail into a gravelly tarmac path. Ah, the sweet smell of spring & asphalt derivitives!) But the Green Bomb has gone off. 1 day it's scraggly buds & infant plants, the next day it's a wall of life. OK, it doesn't really happen in a day. It happens in about 3 days. The woods behind my condo are fringed with people's backyards. Last Sun you could see into their houses; this 1 it was all creepers & underbrush & skunk cabbages the size of shrubs. You folks down South are lucky to have green all year, but you miss the wonderful shock of The Bomb. The maples are the 1st--a few days ago the leaves were small shy curls, now they're big badass green thugs beating the brown & gray of winter away. They like to say up here how "beautiful" the fall colors are (yeah right, death is so beautiful), but every Spring the trees rival Fall by being red & golden, or bursting with yellow or white flowers before they even bother with leaves, as if they know that they'll be green all season, & so they start it off in their best.

The 1 reason I wrote that is so I could say "macadamizing."

Ah, crap. The trees are tossing & the sky looks ready to vomit--Thunderstorm a-comin'. I'd better shut Pookie down for now.
Bah-hahaha! As I write this, some clown is driving away in his motorcycle. Into an imminent tstorm. Well, if people weren't stupid, I wouldn't have a web page.

5/9

Explanation for the Odd Trivet comes from someone named vddwesco@ibm.

...the joke on the trivet is 'For the man that has everything',
and a pawn shop sign. Pawn shop signs traditionally have three large gold
spheres...' For the man that has everything, three balls.'

Not a very good joke, is it?  Well, in the 40's it was really
racy...simpler times...

Also from the mailbox, from Abecedarienne:

I have one comment to add to that creeepy kid's toast
party illustration: how can you smell the
intoxicating, subtle aroma of toast when you HAVE NO
NOSE!? Perhaps kids sold their noses during the
Depression to pay for their toast habit? Or perhaps in
that beige circle of hell, it's a particularly ironic
form of punishment...

5/10

Yesterday's high temp: 95. Today's: 55. Welcome to CT...

ADAM has a bellybutton?! And why does Eve's fig leaf look like the wall of an ivy league college? Or is it some huge fungal infection? (Athlete's Torso?) That's gotta be the LEAST Semitic-looking David ever, like he's being played by that son from Eight is Enough. Nice how the African versions are just dark-skinned...The women have some good Biblical perms.
They should've made an Onan figure. You'd squeeze him & he spill his seed on the belly of...
Never mind.

5/11

I don't have anything SHAWTy, so let's fill out this new with a CAT PIC!

While waiting for Jess & the Dali show, I threw my trenchcoat on the chair. Kill Kill jumped into the shoulder fold & purred contentedly at this newly-found nest. If she doesn't look too happy now, it's cuz her weight's pulling her down the chair & she's torn between stopping the fall & pretending that she meant to do it.