Our driveway, which is long and slopes downhill at the end, is an uninterrupted sheet of ice. They could play tomorrow's Winter Classic on our driveway. I didn't plow the last snowfall because the next day it was warm and I figured it would melt. Which it did. But then it froze. Then the weather got cold. Wallah, ice rink driveway. I tried to stop the truck in front of the house and slid 100 feet past it. It's an honest to god death trap. Visit Keith, possibly die. Helluva New Year's welcome, eh.
January 2, 2012
To shy Lutheran boys, closeted Amish teens and nebbishes everywhere, I have the cure for what ails you:
With this suit you will have the attention of every room you walk into, the eye of every girl you see, the envy of every guy you pass, and the shock of every parent of good taste everywhere. You get yourself a suit like this and the good times will be endless. Will too.
January 3, 2012
A friend related this experience to me. He was looking at houses to buy in a nearby city. The realtor showed him a few and then said she was going to take him to a brand new listing, one she hadn't even seen yet. It was a modest duplex on a normal street and it had a sex dungeon in the basement. The realtor flipped out. She got on the phone and kept saying hysterically to whomever she was talking to, "It's Silence Of The Lambs, it's Silence Of The Lambs!" The thing is, my friend looked past all the fetish gear and really liked the space. He liked the whole house and asked the frazzled realtor to put in an offer. She almost choked herself replying, "You want to buy this house of horrors! Did you see the perversions?! I'm a Christian! I won't do it!" My friend shrugged and ended up negotiating directly with the owner, a regular guy who was into freaky sex and happy to sell his house.
Say boys, is that a rocket in your hand or are you just glad to see me?
January 6, 2012
I met a guy whose cousin was a one hit musical wonder. He had a song that charted in the 80s, but failed to turn it into a career. His cousin says he now works on a loading dock at Costco and talks incessantly about how if he had better management or more promotion, he could have made millions. "The thing is," says his cousin, "the song was crap, and he's a better dock worker than he ever was a singer. But you can't tell him that because he lives in his own rock 'n roll fantasy world. Turns out his brush with fame was a knockout punch." Ouch.
January 7, 2012
Ran into a nefarious friend who told me he was engaged. I looked surprised. He then added, engaged in criminal activities. Ah yes, that was more like it. It's always good to have a chuckle in one's day, don't you think?
January 8, 2012
This threesome from the strange green tunnel, I don't trust them.
Jeez, talk about inappropriate and embarrassing. I'm in a retail store when a male stripper with a boom box dances in through the front door. He prances over to a female employee and starts shaking his junk in the middle of the store. The stripper whips off his fly away pantaloons and is dancing around this girl like she's a fire and he's trying to keep warm in his thong. Seems it's her birthday and her teenage immature brain dead co-workers thought she might like a lap dance at work. The birthday girl is about to die, but it's the customers who are worth watching. Young people, old people, mothers with kids, all standing there with their mouths open. It was special.
January 10, 2012
At a flea market I came across a self-published book written by an ex-con who spent ten years inside. It appeared to be a primer on what to do when you get out. Some of the chapters were:
-- What Up, Homies, Remember My Ass?
-- Payback Time For The Walking Dead That Ratted You Out
-- Free Willy or Why Prostitution Needs To Be Legal
-- Face Tats - Should You Get One?
-- Crime Sprees, Pros and Cons
And the final chapter,
-- Loot Not Where You Stashed It? There's Plenty More Where That Came From
At $1.00, I bought the book immediately.
January 11, 2012
If you think that you are powerless and awful and can't do anything about it and prefer to wallow in self loathing and blame others for your condition because you sure wouldn't wish this on yourself, you are wrong. All the rest are just lies you tell yourself.
January 12, 2012
Help! Can barely get this out. Computer is possessed. It's been sabotaging my effor
January 13, 2012
I'm at a coffee shop with a friend. We're sitting by the window that faces the street right at a stop light. My friend is looking at the cars waiting on a red light when his eyes open wide. "Is that Brett Favre?!" Sure enough, the second car in line has a driver that looks uncannily like Brett Favre. It couldn't be, could it? What would Favre be doing in rural British Columbia? The light changes green. Brett's gone. Was it?
And over here is the secret passageway to the Altar Boy room.
January 15, 2012
Marlon from New Zealand wanted to know if he could come to Canada and be my valet. He said he liked the cut of my jib and thought working for me would be a hoot. I don't really need a valet but Marlon seemed pretty keen on the idea so I'm going with it. He flies in tonight. He said that despite his jet lag, he will lay out tomorrow's clothes just to show me the kind of work he is capable of doing. Heck, I'm stoked.
January 16, 2012
This is kinda bad. Marlon is colour-blind, can't really tell his left from his right and only has one serviceable arm, the other not wholly there ever since Marlon tried to pet one of the big cats at the Auckland zoo, which, as it turns out, wasn't an inadvertent mistake as Marlon informed me that he speaks tiger and was sure that this one was saying, pet me. Um, we'll see how it goes.
January 17, 2012
Sad to say, Marlon's toast. The dude just informed me that he has been helping a Nigerian prince recover lost funds and felt so sure that I too would want to help that Marlon signed over my fabulous collection of Bing and Grondahl plates to the prince's cause but that I wasn't to worry as I would be paid back handsomely as soon as the prince's money was released. When I told Marlon it was a scam, he flew into a rage and smashed my reproduction Currier and Ives dinner plates by hurling them into my Renaissance era reproduction masterpiece bust of Francesco Scutori, a talented but not too well known Italian plate maker from the 1500s. Luckily, I know a few people in the Canadian Plate and Bust Preservation Society who were outraged by Marlon's actions and were able to get him deported this afternoon. All I can say is, don't be messing with my plates. I'm serious.
It's really cold. -30 and windy. It's been like this for the better part of the week. Our malamutes are loving it. The rest of us, including every animal that has to live outside and isn't a malamute, think they're nuts.
January 20, 2012
We are losing our email addresses. Our local ISP was bought out by a big cable company and we have to change over to the new domain. I have been using the former email addresses for over 20 years. There are near countless services that have those addresses as my contact. To say that notifying them all will be a giant pain in the ass is an understatement. I am not happy. I thought the point of the digital age was to make me happy. Where did it all go wrong?
January 21, 2012
I ran into a guy I used to know and haven't seen in decades. We got on the subject of a mutual friend and I asked him whatever happened to the guy. My friend says that he's a mercenary in Africa. I thought he said missionary, and I showed my surprise as the fellow we were talking about was a bad seed indeed. I couldn't believe any religion would be hard up enough to have this guy proselytizing on their behalf so I asked what church he was affiliated with, when my friend answered, The church of Blackwater. Huh? Ohhhhh, mercenary, not missionary...
January 22, 2012
It doesn't matter where you're from or what you believe, sexy is sexy.
I was introduced to a guy in a business suit who was wearing orange socks. I asked him about his footwear and he told me orange socks were his trademark. I asked if he was Dutch or perhaps a Florida Gator alumni. He was neither. I asked him if he was a yogi, partial to Halloween or in a cult. No, no and no. I give up, why do you wear orange socks with a business suit? So people will remember me, he replied And it was true. Later, I couldn't remember the guy's name or even who he worked for, but I remembered the socks. His listing in my contacts is Orange socks guy. But I wonder, if you're remembered for an eccentricity and not for your work or who you are, is that such a good thing? Or is this a take on the adage that any publicity is good publicity?
January 24, 2012
If you were given the chance to drive a car 200 miles an hour, would you?
If you were given the chance to leave this planet on a UFO, would you?
If you were given the chance to steal a million dollars, would you?
If you were given the chance to be the Prime Minister of England, would you?
If you were given the chance to get away with killing someone, would you?
If you were given the chance to give someone else your chance, would you?
January 25, 2012
I was in a store talking to a salesman when another customer interrupts us to ask the salesman where he can find a trident. The salesman looks stumped. The guy goes, You know, Neptune, Poseidon, three pronged fork? The salesman tells him the forks are in house wares, aisle 13. The guy goes, No, a trident! Six and a half feet long, tool of the sea gods, controls all water, do you sell them? The salesman says no, they don't sell tridents. The guy says, You know where I can buy one? Jeez, sorta made the toaster I was asking about kinda banal.
January 26, 2012
If everybody hates the MPAA and the RIAA for suing everyone and attempting to enact draconian laws restricting the Internet via bought and paid for politicians with ACTA, PIPA and SOPA, why are these two groups not attacked, protested or boycotted at the Grammy and Academy Awards shows?
January 27, 2012
High couture is supposed to achieve the same effect. Hardly.
I have a few domain names that I no longer need and am letting them expire. In the old days, so many new names were being registered and the money was flowing so fast and furious that the registrars wouldn't even notify you of an impending expiration date. Nowadays you get about 10 reminders starting 4 months before and the closer it gets to expiration, the more frantic their e-mails. Of course they don't care about you, just the money that will be lost to them if you don't renew the name. This time around, they will be getting no such satisfaction from me.
January 30, 2012
There is a birdfeeder by my office window that I take in at night (to refill) and then replace in the morning. But today I got busy and forgot to put it out. I'm working away in my office when I hear a scratching on the window. Outside is a squirrel staring at me and tapping the glass with its paw. I immediately knew what he wanted and went out to hang the feeder. True interspecies communication. How cool.
January 31, 2012
When I asked him what he was up to, he said wearily, "Nothing. Everything has been done before by someone else so why bother." It was the living embodiment of ennui. I said, "So young to be disinterested in life." He sighed, "I know, I know."
