Rick Poker Tour

Gosh, I love poker.  And the more I learn the more I love it.

So right now I’m in a 45-player sit and go, $3 buy in.  Top 7 finishers are in the money.  30 players are eliminated.  I’m in fifty place out of 15 with a stack of 6395 chips.  The player to my left, J, has just 1065 chips.

Let’s see what happens.

(Some time later)

Six people left.  I’m in the money, anyway, but low on chips.  Second lowest stack at the table.

(Some time later)

And it killed me.  I finished sixth.  But that wins me nine bucks on a three dollar buy-in.   I had fun, I learned more, and I paid for this tournament and a few more.

I’m not really a gambler, and poker isn’t really gambling anyway, it’s a game of skill.  What I love about poker is it’s something I can learn, and can learn pretty cheaply and on my own time.  It exercises my brain.  It helps that I’m generally dispassionate about such things; my happiness at getting a lucky river card is short lived, and when I get a bad beat I express dismay for two minutes and get over over.  So I can honestly look back at my game (helped by PokerTracker, a program that records how you played) and say “hmmm, I made a mistake there.  And there.  And there.”  I like seeing the mistakes I made, and I like seeing better players beat me now and then.

It’s a truly fascinating game, and the more you learn about it the more fun it is.  And it doesn’t cost me anything, really; I’m still playing with the first money I ever put in.

Leafs Suck

I hate the Toronto Maple Leafs with the intensity of a thousand suns.  I hate their uniforms, their players, their coaches, their history, their announcers, their wives, their souvenirs.  Most of all, I hate their fan base.  Leafs Nation can lick my crusty ass hairs.

The Maple Leafs are not just the most despicable franchise in sports, but are in fact the most despicable organization or endeavour ever conceived by human beings.  Everything about the Leafs is hateful. 

The Leafs have stupid logos, stupid uniforms – somehow, each subtle change in their uniform makes them even uglier – and even have a stupid name.  It is wholly befitting this band of scum-sucking lowlifes and their mouth-breathing fans that they are the only pro sports team in North America with a name that is flatly, unquestionably illiterate.  Their ownership is avaricious, incompetent and uncaring to a degree that is breathtaking even by the woeful standards of professional sports.  Their fans are, with fewer exceptions than the fans of any other sports team, ignorant, boorish, masochistic, and stunningly ignorant of the history and goings-on of the sport the Leafs attempt to play.

The Leafs are a horrible team with a horrible history, supported by surely the most horrible sycophants in all of professional sports journalism.  Toronto’s hockey press are largely a pack of reprobates and ne’er-do-wells who succeed, against all odds, in consistently criticizing that which does not deserve it while ignoring that which does. 

But if there is any solace in having to live in the “territory” of the most awful sports team to ever blight the earth, it is that the Leafs suck.  The Leafs are a comically, stupidly inept franchise that has failed, failed and failed again throughout my lifetime.  With an almost wondrous consistency they have failed over and over by making the very same mistakes over and over, seemingly never learning anything from their own catastrophic errors.  And so every year the Leafs send out another pack of blue-clad losers, has-beens and never-weres to flail about the ice before a crowd of empty corporate seats and cheap seats filled with the portly asses of beer-swilling, knuckle-dragging ignoramuses while “Championship” banners – all won in the heady days of a six-team NHL that barely qualified as a professional sports league by modern standards – flutter among the retired numbers of ancient Leaf players whose names are scarce remembered by the moronic denizens of the Air Canada Centre. 

The saving grace of having to put up with the oversaturated Leafs market is that the Leafs suck.  They have sucked for longer than I have been alive, and they will always suck.  Know this; the Leafs will never win the Stanley Cup again.  Never.  They will not win it this year (even Leaf fans know that) and they will not win it next year.  They will not win it in five years.  They will not win it in ten years, twenty years, fifty years or a hundred years.  If the Stanley Cup is contested every single year for the next one hundred million years, through the development of the human race, the spread of man throughout the galaxy, the ebb and flow of history beyond human conception, indeed even the  evolution of Homo sapiens into more advanced hominid species, the Leafs will still not win the Cup.  They have no chance whatsoever.  I do not mean “no chance” as in a slim chance, or an unlikely chance, but none.  There is a probability of zero that the Leafs will ever win the Cup again.  If the Maple Leafs were somehow to make it to the Cup final and win the first three games and were up 7-0 in Game 4 going into the third period, they would find a way to lose. 

Year after year, the Leafs will lose, and it will upset their fans, and that makes me very, very happy.  When the Leafs lose, and a child in a Leafs jersey cries, I laugh at that child.  I find joy in the agony of Leafs fans.  Every time a Leafs fan is upset by the Leafs, an angel gets his wings.  Knowing that Leafs fans will go their entire lives never seeing a Cup victory, that they will suffer in agony year after year after awful year, finally going to their deathbeds wishing, hoping against hope, to see the Leafs win the Cup before they die, and then realizing at the moment of death that they have wasted a lifetime of fandom – that just tickles me pink. 

The only thing that would make me happier was if the Leafs franchise were to actually be destroyed.  I think it would be wonderful if the Leafs would actually go an entire season and lose every single game, all of them in unbelievably spectacular fashion; blowing 8-goal leads, losing games by scoring into their own net, forgetting their goalie equipment, the works.  Then at the end of a perfect 0-82 season, the Air Canada Centre burns to the ground, burning all the Leaf offices, and the NHL announces that the Leafs franchise is revoked, causing almost limitless anguish amongst Leaf fans, only to have the franchise reinstated after a year and then the whole thing could start over again.

I hate the Leafs, and I always will.  My favourite team is the glorious, wonderful, noble Ottawa Senators, but my second favourite team is whoever’s playing the Leafs.  They’re playing the Coyotes?  I’m a Coyotes fan.  Playing the Predators?  I’m a Predators fan.  As soon as I can afford to I am going to buy the jerseys of every one of the other 29 teams in the NHL so I can always wear the jersey of the team playing the Leafs.  If the Leafs were playing a rep team for Hell, coached by Satan, starring Hitler in goal, I’d not only wear a Hell jersey, I’d probably bring a hand-lettered sign.

Fuck the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Extra! Extra!

Today I thought I’d have a look at the online Saturday editions of Toronto’s newspapers and find articles or editorials that are obviously idiotic.  I figured this would be easy to do.  I was right.

In this Toronto Star opinion piece, by Patsa Aldana and Rick Wilks, the two authors appear to be saying that reading is very important.  They seem to be very concerned that kids don’t enjoy reading as much as they used to and that we much teach children to read.  What’s hilarious about the article is that’s it’s some of the most awful WRITING I’ve ever seen in a real newspaper (and that’s saying a lot.)  It reads as if it were written by eighth graders who didn’t do the assigned reading.  All the sentences are technically correct, but read through it a few times and ask yourself “What is the central point they’re trying to make?”  It doesn’t have any clear point.  In fact, it doesn’t even match its own title, “Literacy is not enough if content is mental junk food” – nothing in it refers to that metaphor.   The article just bounces from idea to idea and cliche to cliche, connected by no clear thesis or argument of any kind. 

As a general rule, you should not take advice on the importance of reading from someone who can’t write a coherent 300-word essay.

Next Stop: Sleepyland

…

If you are reading this, I am already dead.

Ha!  No, not really.  I’ve always wanted to start a blog entry that way.  Got your attention, Credulous McGulliblepants.

Anyway, today’s topic is how to sleep at work.  I am sure you have heard of the recent controversy involving sleeping TTC employees (Toronto Transit Commission, for those of you not from southern Ontario.)  A few weeks back someone snapped a picture of this TTC employee hard at work:

Shh!

Damage control on this had barely started when someone else found a picture of a TTC employee visiting the Land of Nod whilst earning a comfortable salary on the public dime:

Rock a bye old guy...

This has touched off a predictable shitstorm.  The public – who just got hit with a fare hike a few weeks before these pictures hit the ‘Net – is filled with cries of outrage over highly paid TTC folks spending time sawing logs on the job.  The TTC union, predictably, went beyond defending their employees and actually attacked the public, saying that the picture takers were irresponsible for not seeing if the employees were in medical distress.  (They weren’t.) 

What all this just serves to illustrate is that if you want to sleep on the job, you’ve got to be good at it.  These guys are awful job sleepers.  I mean, they’re just conked out right in front of everyone, heads back, arms on their fat bellies.  You can’t get away with that.  If you want to sleep on the job, here’s how you do it:

1.  Make sure you have a job you can sleep on.  Sadly, I do not; my job involves interacting with customers all day and spending a lot of time walking around asking people questions.  They’d notice if I dozed off.  So unfortunately, my sleeping on the job days are behind me.  Other bad jobs for sleeping:

• Race car driver
• Live news show host
• Airline pilot (not that it stops a lot of them)
• Opera singer
• Brain surgeon

2.  Have a cover story.  Look, you can’t just doze off right in front of people.  You’re also going to be briefly off your guard when you’re caught, so you need to have your story absolutely, perfectly rehearsed.

I remember once at my previous employer I was tasked to do some of the monthly safety inspections.  It was a pretty big office – too big for our size, in fact – and some rooms weren’t used.  I went into one room and a guy who worked some admin job was laid out on a 3-by-6 folding table, snoring away.  My entry woke him up, frightened, and he fell off the table.  (I did not note the fall in my safety report as an incident, but I guess I should have.)  I said, “Uh, hi, Dave (not real name) are you okay?”

His response was “Uhhh, ummm, uhhhh…”

Wrong!  If you’re caught sleeping you need an absolutely rock solid response that you can deliver with immediate sincerity and conviction.  There are two avenues you can take, which leads to points 3 and 4:

3.  Set up your sleeping area so you can say you’re not sleeping.  A classic method, cited in many places, is to spill a box of some common stationery like pencils or binder clips next to your desk, then assume a head-on-the-desk sleeping position with your hand handing near the spilled items.  When interrupted, simply pretend you were leaning down to get them.

That isn’t bad, but to my mind a better approach for the lazy worker is the Prone Cord Adjusting trick.  Just lie right down on the floor with your head under your desk and in proximity to either the power cables for your computer setup, or, if applicable, the network cable.   When someone asks you what you’re doing, say a cable came loose and you were just trying to fix it.  (For added realism, actually unplug your network cable, then plug it back in when you’re found out.  The computer will pop up a little balloon saying the network cable’s back in, supporting your lies.)

Another tactic:

4.  Create an elaborate backstory to justify sleeping on the job.  Saying AFTER you’re found sleeping that you have some medical condition that makes you fall asleep just sounds like you’re full of shit.   (The TTC union tried this, too.)  I mean, of course someone’s gonna come up with an excuse.  Nobody believes excuses because excuses are usually filthy lies.  What you need is to run a proper confidence scam.

First of all, start setting up by making passing mention to medical conditions of unspecified nature.  Don’t be specific and don’t go out of your way to tell anyone.  Just take two or three half sick days over the course of six months or so.  It’s important they be half days and that you appear in the office because that makes it apparent to anyone who thinks to look that you aren’t acutely ill, so it must be a medical appointment.   If anyone happens to ask where you’re going, say you “have a specialist’s appointment.”  Nobody will ask for details because it’s rude and, anyway, they’ll be afraid it’ll be something gross.

While you’re doing this, make it apparent – again, without being silly about it – that you’re tired at work.  Don’t whine and complain that you don’t get enough sleep; nobody does.  But act worn out every afternoon.

Then begin working your way towards sleeping on the job.  If you have a door on your office, close it every day for 30-45 minutes around lunchtime.  Don’t TELL anyone you’re sleeping.  That’s a dead giveaway.  If you don’t have a door and an office, close yourself off in an empty meeting room.  (Note that this only works for people in office-type jobs; if you’re not in an office job, or like me you never work in the same office two days in a row, you’re screwed.)  Or find somewhere else to rest.  Nobody can really complain about you snoozing on your lunch hour, right?  It’s your time. 

Then, make a huge transition.  Go all the way.  Not only should you sleep on the job, but be absolutely, totally shameful about it.  If at all possible try to time this with a reorganization, company move, or significant turnover.  Sleep at your desk and let people KNOW you’re doing it.  In fact, why not bring in a sleeping cap and a change of pyjamas?  A pillow’s a good touch too.  If people ask what you’re doing, or even make noise around you, be indignant when you say “Hey!  I’m sleeping!”  If you’ve properly set it up and you’re sufficiently brazen about it, people will simply assume you have a justification for sleeping.

Try it out and let me know how it works.

DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible if you get fired doing this stuff.

Two Sides

There’s a couple of connected websites called “FML” (F***k My Life) and “GMH” (Gives Me Hope,) the idea being that people write in things about their lives that either suck pretty bad, concluding the story with “FML,” or things that are wonderful, concluding them with “GMH.”  As one might expect, the FML side became a repository for anecdotes that are really more amusing (and, I suspect, in many cases, fictional) than tragic.  The GMH side is often quite poignant, though; it’s hard to make jokes about nice things.

Anyway, prudence and the fact my identity is so well known on the Internet dictate I can’t tell you the innermost things about what makes me say FML, but something happened this weekend that sure made me say it: Some goddamned cocksucking goatfelching grandmotherfucking asstastic shitfaced pusguzzling knobthrusting slapnod stole my iPod Nano.  I loved my iPod.  I’d had it for four years and it’s gotten me through about a million hours of airplane rides, workouts, walks, and just generally a lot of damn fun.  I need it to exercise.  It even looked cool; it was a first gen Nano with the stainless steel back, which made it cool in a retro way (inasmuch as 4/5 years can be retro) and for all you hear about iPod batteries dying young that thing was clipping along just fine.  And some bastard got into our car and stole it.  I hope that whoever stole my iPod burns to death in a car wreck.  In fact, I hope he’s fiddling with it while he slams into a telephone pole and he’s broiled alive in burning gasoline, the dirty shit-eating thieving cockknock.  I just hope my iPod is thrown clear and is safe.  So, for that, FML.  Why would someone take that?  I can’t afford to replace it. 

But then when I mentioned this to my sister, she was like, “D (my brother in law) and I both have ones we aren’t using.  You can have either, or both.”  So, GMH. 

It’s awfully great to have family you can count on.  Makes up for almost anything else.

It looks like this. It has pictures of my little girl on it.

Stupid Frickin’ Vampires

Depending on the day I get anywhere from 100 to 200 hits a day from raw search engine hits.   You know what the most common search is that leads people to this site?  Vampires.

Enormous credit to whomever I took this from, which unfortunately I don't know.

Everyone’s all bananas about vampires these days.  I hate vampires.  I hate vampire books, vampire movies, vampire TV shows, people who wear vampire T-shirts and clothes, and especially, more than anything else in the whole world, I hate people who think vampires are sexy or cool. 

Whole Ph.D. dissertations could, I imagine, be written on how it is we got to the point where an undead monster, which was once the fictional pinnacle of undead monstrosity, has become a sparkly romantic lead in really, really lame teenage fiction.  Of course – you knew this was coming – this has reached the zenith of perversion with the Twilight series of books and movies, a story with a classic Mary Sue teenaged character being pursued by an undead ephebophilic senior citizen who stalks her, physically abuses her, and treats her like a possession and is, for reasons too genuinely frightening for me as the father of a young girl to even begin to contemplate, regarded as a romantic hero.

What’s unfortunate about this, from the perspective of a guy like me who likes a scary movie as much as the next guy, is that the vampire has been turned from a legitimately frightening monster, a commonly understood object of fear and revulsion into… well, an emo teenager who doesn’t have to do his homework.  Everything that’s good AND bad about vampires has been sucked out of them (ha!)

The thing about vampires is that they were legitimately scary in part because they didn’t play by the rules.  They were inhuman, while at the same time they used to be human and still look human, usually.  That makes them especially scary.  There’s a concept called the uncanny valley where humans find things that looks like humans, like robots or computer simulations, cute, until they get TOO much like humans, but aren’t quite the same, and then at that point people find them horrifying and repulsive.  That’s why so many people find movies like “The Polar Express,” which tries to simulate human beings with great accuracy, “creepy,” whereas nobody finds “The Incredibles” creepy, because while it’s animated humans they’re obviously cartoonish:

The Polar Express: Almost human, and creepy.

The Incredibles: Less realistic, not creepy.

 Vampires are sort of human, but they’re not, and what made them horrifying is that they were evil.  As someone else (who I can’t remember and apologize for stealing their idea) pointed out, vampires are the monstrous incarnation of selfishness; people who refuse to accept that, as humans, you have to die, and steal life from other humans to avoid death.  One of the great fairnesses of the human condition is that we all get one shot at living and when it’s over we’re all equally suitable for worm food.  You can be a Haitian eathquake victim or the Queen of the Nile, but you only get one shot and when it’s over you’re dead forever.  Vampires break that rule, taking other people’s chances to put off what we all must face.  They steal the one thing you can’t get back, and in so doing, give away their souls and become monsters. 

So when you get vampires like in “Twilight” or that vampire in the Buffy TV show who was supposed to be a good guy, who DON’T kill humans, what do you have?  Well, to be honest, you’ve got emos.  Stealing life from others is what makes a vampire a vampire.  If they don’t do that, they’re not vampires.  Edward isn’t a vampire in any sense of literary tradition of cultural understanding of horror; he’s just the ultimate teenager, broody, self-absorbed, pale and endlessly immature. 

So here’s the rub; when people arrive here looking for “vampires” or “picture of vampire” or any of the number of ways people seem to find this site, they not looking for vampires.  They’re looking for Edwards.  They’re looking for boyfriends who’ll be really romantic and devoted and help them sneak out past curfew.  If you’re one of those people, you have REALLY found the wrong web page.  On this page I talk a lot about how to blow up elephants with bazookas.  You’re welcome to stick around but I don’t think you’ll like it.

Manager For Hire

Here’s my wife’s new resume-as-website.  Click on it to be very impressed.

That’s at www.sharronjones.com – seriously, it’s pretty remarkable.

Once you’ve been through the website, be honest; is it not the best resume you’ve ever seen?  It’s informative, professional, interactive, and modern.  Talk about differentiating yourself; anyone can submit two peices of paper stapled together, but this is a one-person sales pitch extraordinaire. 

In fact, I suspect that this is going to become the new standard for professional resumes – the multimedia resume presentation.  How can two pieces of paper alone compete with this?  My bold prediction is that within five years, this will be the minimum expectation for professional level jobs – resumes unsupported by websites will be considered second rate.

So spread Sharron’s resume around and let’s see how effective it can be (so far the calls are flooding in, but she’s available for the time being.)  And if YOU need a resume website, I guess now you know who can make one for you.  She’ll do the photography, too.

Super Duper Play Place

I’m presently sitting in the “super duper play place.”  The super duper play place is an indoor playground in Burlington.  Here’s a hastily snapped photo:

The jist of this place is you pay some money and you take your kid into a warehouse full of play stuff and they go nuts while you sit in leather couches and drink free coffee  while surfing the ‘net if you had the foresight to bring a computer.  It’s the greatest business idea in the history of the world.

Maddy loves this place, though her enjoyment’s higher when we bring her with a friend and unfortunately none were available today.

While this place is very grownup-friendly, what we really need are adult super duper play places.  No, not “adult” in that sense.  Well, maybe a little.  What we need is a place which mixes every conceivable leisure activity.  I wanna pay a cover charge and walk in to a big warehouse that includes:

• A full casino (less on the slot machines and more on the table games)
• Bowling
• Karaoke
• Video games
• Full bar service
• Big screen TVs with sports and awesome movies playing 24/7
• Comfortable couches and lots of magazines and newspapers
• Live music
• “American Gladiator” style area where you can beat the snot out of your friends on big padded battle areas
• Spa for the ladies
• Strippers for the men

I’m a goddamned genius.  I could charge a $100 cover for this place – I’d call it “Rick’s Freaking Awesome Fun Place” – and people would happily pay it.  I’ll be accepting your investment dollars starting today.  GEt in on this idea while you still can.

Coffee Confusion

Today I visited a customer who served me a coffee I would not have fed to my worst enemy.  It was made by some sort of machine, I would assume one forged and assembled in the bowels of hell, and tasted like lukewarm water mixed with milk, sugar, and dirt.  It was appalling.  I was amazed that they would have the nerve to give such a disgusting, horrible beverage to another human being, much less a business associate.  But they were all drinking the same awful coffee so maybe they didn’t know any better.

What was curious about this is that the customer actually has a hell of a good quality management system.  Of the 120 or so different companies I visit every year they’re one of the six or seven best, maybe top three.  That makes them an extremely rare exception to Jones’s Law of Coffee/Quality Correspondence, which states, “The quality of a company’s coffee is directly proportional to the company’s management system abilities.”  Normally, when you go into a place, if they have shitty coffee, the company’s shitty.  If they have good coffee, the place is probably good.  Good coffee does not guarantee a good company, but it’s a strong indicator; bad coffee almost always means a bad company.  This place I was at today was the one exception.

The relationship of coffee quality to company quality is explained in this chart: 

Coffee Quality	Quality Management System
Tim Horton’s on site or brought in	Leading edge of the industry
Gourmet coffee with all add-in options	Pretty good
OK coffee, maybe powder instead of cream	Some nonconformances
Shitty instant coffee, maybe no cream at all	Many nonconformances, reaudit needed
No coffee	No better than a troop of baboons

However, one must be wary of donuts.  If the company brigs in a box of donuts, something’s wrong.  Coffee is a proper business etiquette thing; donuts are a bribe.  If they bring you donuts you know they’re trying to appease you with cheap gimmickry.  The customer who serves up sugary pastries is sure to serve up lies and prevarications.  Good coffee means a good audit, but donuts are a sure sign of impending deception and treachery.  Never trust a man with a box of donuts.

Freeze Frame

Jesus M. Christ, I take a bad picture.

Today MBW needed some photos taken for her rather amazing new resume website, so we set up the living room with some lighting accoutrements and took some shots of her.  Frankly, a lot of them looked amazing, as you can see at the link.  She’s gorgeous, ain’t she?

Since we had the camera out I asked her to take a few of me so I’d have some better Facebook shots.  Here’s what we got:

Honest to God, I am not actually this ugly.  The glare’s a bit too high but still – I look all crooked.  My eyes appear to be two different shades of blue, which they are not.  We tried some poses with me looking off camera and got some shots where I look like a completely different, and yet equally hideous, person:

Somehow in the 14 seconds between the previous shot and this shot I gained sixty pounds, had a massive stroke that paralyzed my left side, and unloaded a stenchalicious fart which pleases me enormously even as I’m realizing how bad the stroke is. 

Coincidentally, we had passport photos takes today and you can imagine how those turned out.  Mine (I don’t have it scanned or else I’d let you see it) looks like I should be holding up a board with numbers and “Buford Country Sherriff’s Department” on it.

What’s curious about these is that I really don’t mind my own appearance, especially now that I’ve lost some weight.  When I look at myself in the mirror I actually kind of like how I look, from the neck up at least.  I never have a decent shave and my forehead is too big, but I have symmetrical features, good eyes, a good nose and good lips.  All in all I’m handsome – at least when I look in a mirror.  But when I try to capture it I look like Quasimodo. 

Just for the hell of it I just now took a webcam photo of myself:

This actually looks a bit more like ME, probably because I deliberately put on no facial expression at all, but I still think in real life I look better.  So I got famed celebrity photographer Annie Leibowitz to come over and take a shot of me:

That’s more like it!

Kaboom!

There’s an old saying in entertainment that if you open with cannons you’ve got to close with dynamite.  Stories have to build up. 

WARNING: “LOST” SPOILERS AHEAD!

So I was pretty intrigued by the conclusion of the last season of Lost, which ended with the detonation of a nuclear weapon. 

On February 2 “Lost” begins again so we’re presumably going to pick up after the nuclear weapon went kaboom.  It is worth noting that the weapon detonated in reasonably close proximity to many of the main characters.  I’m no expert on nuclear weapons but I am pretty comfortable in stating that if you are close to a nuclear weapon when it goes off, you’re toast.  I think it’s also fair to say that the detonation of a nuclear weapon on a small tropical island – the setting of “Lost” – would have some pretty dramatic and negative effects on the island and anyone on it.  So what the heck are they planning for Season 5?   Not a lot in the universe is more powerful than a nuclear weapon, so maybe the island’s going to be hit by an asteroid.

I think a lot of shows would be vastly improved by nuclear weapon detonations and asteroid strikes.  Imagine how much cooler a lousy sitcom like “Two And A Half Men” would be if a lame gag was interrupted by a blinding flash of light and all the character’s skin was flash-charred and they stumbled around shrieking “Oh my God, my eyes!  My eyes!” while the laugh track played.  And you have to think CSI: Miami would be significantly improved if David Caruso’s sunglasses, instead of him whipping them off in dramatic fashion, were permanently melted into his face by the bone-boiling heat of a hydrogen bomb.  And I think we can all imagine the potential for fun an asteroid strike would entail if that were what the morons in “The Amazing Race” were running from.  Instead of the competitors saying “wah wahhh, I’m tired, I don’t like you anymore, you made a mistake, wahhhhh” they’d be saying “OH MY CHRIST JESUS!  THE SKY IS RAINING FIRE!  RUN!  RUN!  AIEEEEEEEE!”

 Actually that sounds really horrible.

Every Part of Me

I have a long history of sending strange and unsettling e-mails to my sister.  It bothers her.  I enjoy things that bother my sister.  My, how the world is admirably arranged.

My favourite email was this:

From: Rick

To: Stupid Sister

Subject: Hello

Dear Carly,

I like to poop.  It makes my bum feel nice.

I like cookies.

Love,

Rick

It recently occurred to me that I had not sent her any disturbing emails in awhile.  I also happen to have gotten my webcam back on.  So I’ve been sending her close-up pictures of various parts of my body.  I started with an eye:

Then moved onto the tongue:

Ear:

Nose:

I was running out of funny parts of my face and so tried an armpit:

And my big toe (right foot):

At this point I felt kind of bad for filling her inbox with all these crappy pictures.  They’re very low resolution.  So I set the camera for a better resolution and took a much better picture of the inside of my nose, cropping it and getting some lighting in there so you can see all the little hairs:

There’s a lot of hair in there, isn’t there?  Yesterday my wife accidentally burned up all the hair inside her nose (or so she says, I’ve never noticed she had a hairy nose) by accidentally getting too close to a scented candle she was trying to smell.  I’m going to try that.

This is the stuff I do for fun.

The Pope and I

I’m getting pretty sick of Joe… most of you know him as Pope Benedict XVI… sending me emails late at night when he’s drunk.  Look at this crap he sent me this morning:

From: Pope Benedict XVI (hisholiness@vatican.vc)

To: Rick The Great (rickjay71@hotmail.com)

Re: you sukc asshole

 

Hey fuck face you know something else Nikki told me was you smelled HA HA HA I made a poem about you

 

I once knew a guy and his name was Rick

He was stupid and he was a dick

nobody was his friend because he was a jerk

 

the last line doesnt rhyme so sue me jerk wad I had like 10 jagermeisters and now a cardinal is bringin me more wine I party all I want and you can suck it

His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI

I’m getting pretty sick of this.  The whole thing between Joe and I about Nikki and that time at the Welly was years and years ago and I’ve put it behind me but he just won’t get over it.  I’ve tried to be nice about this.  When I was at Queen’s and in the Army with Joe, he wasn’t my best friend or anything but we got along okay, except for the part about me making out with his girlfriend.  I admit I was on Nikki like white on rice but give me a break; aside from it being years ago, we were in university.  And piss drunk.  What do you expect?  We were kids.

Anyway, since I started the blog Joe’s been sending me non stop emails and snail mail so I think it’s high time I fired back: Joe/Benedict is a complete asshole.  I know you’re out there thinking I’m referring to his stance on homosexuality, or birth control, or ordination of women, but I don’t care about all that stuff.  I’m telling you he’s a jerk in person.  It’s not just all the drunk emails he sends me.  For instance, have a look at some of the photos I’ve got from our Army days.  Here’s a picture of Joe about to hit a cute little kitten with a hammer:

Actual unretouched photo of Pope attacking kitten with hammer, circa 1992 (Associated Press)

And if that’s not enough, I also found this picture of Joe shooting an lowland gorilla, which I should point out is an endangered species:

Actual unretouched photo of Pope shooting a gorilla (Reuters)

If you need more proof of the Pope’s being a jerk, I’ll post more drawings photos of other horrible things he did back then.  I feel bad airing this dirty laundry about the spiritual leader of a billion people, but he started it.

The Ten Least Popular Service Animals

Everyone’s seen a seeing eye dog (except for, ironically, their owners) and you may have heard of other kinds of service animals, like monkeys that assist quadriplegics.  But what service animals just aren’t in high demand?

10.  Irritable Bowel Syndrome Dog, which starts barking uncontrollably just before you shit yourself

9.  The Passive-Aggressive Parrot (always grudgingly accepted by patients)

8.  The Pit Bull That Mauls Other People’s Kids’ Faces So You Don’t Feel As Bad About How Ugly Your Kids Are

7.  The Anorexia Cow, serves to help the anorexic patient when coverted into hamburgers and prime rib

6.  The Seeing-Eye Skunk

5.  The Deaf-Assist Bag Of Really Pissed Off Hornets

4.  The Quadriplegic Assist Polar Bear, the idea being the bear would help with household tasks, but instead they seem to just enjoy eating their owners

3.  The Teach-You-To-Swim Great White Shark

2.  The Gila Monster With No Discernable Purpose

1.  The Chimpanzee That They Told Me Could Drive A Car but it keeps getting parking tickets so what damned good is it?

Resolved!

Everyone makes New Year’s resolutions, so why not me?  I’m going to make some resolutions in public here and you can all hold me accountable at the end of 2010.

2009 was a shitty year, all in all.  There were some awesome moments to be sure; Sylvia joining us, Heather and Casey getting married, and… well, that’s about it.  Time at Casa Jones were stressful for economic reasons and the whole darn world is in the economic pits.  So my first resolution is for 2010 to be better, for us and everyone.  But, you know, little Sylvia’s smiling at me from my second monitor right now, and so my first resolution is to tell you all that, all in all, I’m a lucky guy.  So here goes:

1.  Lose another 30 pounds.  I am presently at approximately 240, so I resolve to be at 210 or lower by December 31, 2010.

2.  Take the Wiggler for Disneyworld.  No excuses, no “well do it next year.”  The Small One must see Mickey Mouse in February 2010, and that’s that.

3.  Do not kill a single elephant.

4.  Spend more time with friends.  This may not sound like much of a resolution, but with me it’s a problem; I have a way of cocooning, and it doesn’t help that my best friend lives in California.  So I resolve I will get in a few more games of Supreme Commander with Scott, and get out regularly with some friends like Casey, Steve, et al.

5.  Resolve this thing with Joe, or as you know him, Pope Benedict XVI.  He’s leaving nasty messages on my cell phone now.  I might need to go to Rome and get him drunk.

6.  Lift weights 3 times a week.  I need to lose weight, yes, but I want to gain more upper body strength.

7.  Get a REALLY good photo of myself taken.  I have no good photos of myself.  My Facebook photo is a self portrait and looks awful.  Sharorn keeps suggesting she take one but now I’m resolved to get it done.

8.  Take the Second City standup comedy course.

9.  Do a better job at work of not putting off paperwork.

10.  Keep loving Sharron and Maddy.  This one’s easy, but I needed one I knew I could do without even trying.

Pimp My iPod

I got a $50 iTunes gift certificate.  So far I’ve bought 15, 16 songs or so.  I know I want more, and yet cannot for the life of me figure out what songs to get.

Anyone else remember LPs? Anyone? Holy shit, I'm old.

See, the thing is there’s like a thousand songs I’d like to add but I can never remember them when I’m actually staring at the iTunes software.  The way it always works is that I’m driving around and the radio’s on and a song comes on and I think, “There!  That song!  I want that song!”  I resolve to add it.  And then later I totally forget what song it was. 

Last week, determined to break the cycle of song-forgetting, I actually wrote down the name of a song I heard when I heard it (“A Penny More,” by the Skydiggers.)  But I heard it on a portable radio in a factory I was doing an audit in, and the only place I had to write it down was in my audit notes.  So I have the song now, but I forgot to erase the song from my notes, so now the audit reviewer’s going to be like, “Okay, here are the notes on purchasing.. what the hell’s this?  Hey, that was a cool song.”

Anyway, where I’m going with this is that my write-the-song-down strategy isn’t going to really work all that well because

1.  I always forget to do it, and

2.  Most of the times I hear a song I want it’s in the car and if I write notes while driving I’ll pile my car into a bridge.

So I am asking you, my loyal readers, to recommend songs.  Just throw them out there.  I like lots of music – classic and modern rock, dance, hip-hop, blues, Motown, pop, electronica, anything but country.  No country.  Don’t think “I should send Rick some obscure shit, he’ll have the common stuff” – no, I might not.  I have big holes in my lineup.  Send the popular OR the obscure stuff.  Name as many songs as you want.   Just comment with some suggestions.

(However, I guarantee I have these bands covered: Tragically Hip, U2, REM, Police, Peter Gabriel.  And for some reason people always suggest “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but I have that.)

Thanks!