An Important Christmas Message

Hello, and merry Christmas everyone. You know, with all the commercialism surrounding Christmas, it can be easy to forget what this day is all about. It's to celebrate the birth of someone who came into this world with a message of joy and peace. Someone who died, rose again, and will return again one day. So happy birthday, Frosty the Snowm...

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In A Country Far Far Away...

Snit (aka Droopy McCool). Jabba's palace. 1983. Sara the walrus. Istanbul. 2008. George Lucas is like Nerdstadamus. Who knew? ...

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Aorta Be in Pictures

Remember when I made that appointment to see if I had Marfan Syndrome? Well, I just got back. Did you know that geneticists are located in the same part of the medical facility as the OB/GYN? I didn't. And neither did the lady behind the desk at the gynecologist's office apparently. I got some weird looks when I walked in there. Can I help you? Um, I'm here for an appointment. With an OB/GYN? Uh, no. Genetics. She asked for my name, then she looked me up and asked me to sit down. So I sat there for about thirty-five minutes as wave after wave of female patients came in, sat down, were called into the office, and left. The lady behind the desk was talking to her co-worker about David Otunga, the guy from "I Love New York" who's engaged to Jennifer Hudson. I had already made the co-pay...

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Wenis Envy

Every day we are surrounded by war. The war on terror. The war on drugs. The Battle of the Network Stars. But the oldest of them all, older than the bloody conflicts between Israel and Palestine or even Great Taste and Less Filling is the battle of the sexes. It's been raging for tens of thousands of years, with no end in sight. Nowhere is this battle more prevalent than in our nation's electronic inboxes. Well, I guess it's much more prevalent in the thousands of domestic abuse cases reported each year, but that doesn't really gel with the light-hearted tone I've established on this blog. So let's stick with the annoying e-mails we get all the time that basically amount to "Ha Ha! Men don't ask for directions! Hee Hee! Women are overbearing!" While both sides are equally repugnant, I'm...

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Get It Off Me! Get It Off Me!

I suppose I should have written this yesterday, since it happened yesterday, and because of this, I got to go home early yesterday. Sure, the power came back on right about the same time I got home, but it worked out for the best because I was still able to get my projects done on the laptop, plus I didn't have to wear pants. But let's go back to the beginning of the day. Actually, let's go back a year or two, when I broke the zipper on my jacket. It just snapped off when I was pulling it up one day. The zipper itself still worked fine; it just didn't have the part you pull on anymore. Which, incidentally, is called the puller. You don't really need the puller, though. At first I tried to replace it with a bent paperclip, but it was way too pointy at the end, so I wrapped some masking tap...

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I Can Finally Sleep at Night!

This had been bothering me forever: who are Huey, Dewey and Louie's parents? They always seem to be with their uncle Donald, or uncle Scrooge, who is actually Donald's uncle and their great-uncle. But if Donald is their uncle, then he must have a brother or sister, right? And for that matter, if Scrooge is Donald's uncle, who is Donald's father? And where did all these parents go, anyway? I seem to remember even Mickey had two nephews. How did Disney get this family-friendly image when nearly all of their characters' parents are either seemingly non-existent or die horribly? I don't want to get off track, but I have to mention that friggin' song is on again. I wish Sugarland was a Disney character's parents. Anyway, I've always thought it was weird that everyone was an "uncle" and wondered...

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Faith and Begorrah! Me Poor Ears!

A couple of months ago, I got my own office under cartoonishly ridiculous circumstances. So now I'm all the way down the hall from Joe, which sounds nice in theory, but it seems like he's in my office now even more than when I was next door to him. That's mostly because the back-up computer was moved to my office. We really only use it if we need to scan something (which is maybe twice a year) or if we need to pull a job off of--or put a job onto--the archive. By the way, Joe dubbed the backup drive "Hogwarts", which he thinks is hilarious. Anyway, no sooner had I sat down in the new office, Joe's in here saving old jobs to the archive and checking every ten minutes to see if it's finished. I told him I could check for him, so he doesn't need to come down here all the time. The estimated time...

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They Should Call this Blog Johnny Deformed

You know how people ask how do you know if the refrigerator light goes off when you close the door, and they think they're being clever or something, but it's a stupid question because there's a button that switches the light off when it's pressed, and since it's right in the door track, the weight of the door turns it off? You can press it with your finger when the door is open, for crying out loud. I don't know where I was going with that. I think it had something to do with what I do when I'm not blogging. I'm not some monkey here for your amusement, I've got a lot on my plate right now. It's not like when I'm not posting here, I go into stasis or anything, in a giant, hermetically-sealed Tupperware container 300 feet below the surface of the Earth, where an advanced society of mole-men...

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It Puts the Dring in the Basket

Apparently more people read this thing than just you guys. I guess that means I have to update more. Lousy new people. So here's one that's been in the queue for a while, because I couldn't really think of a good intro. All you need to know is Brianna's school had a fundraiser, so she brought home a catalog for us to bring to work and see if anyone sees anything they might want. There was actually some pretty cool looking things in there, not the crappy magazine subscriptions we were forced to shill. My mom bought a trivet. Here are the instructions that were printed on the back of the box. INSTRUCTION 1. HEAT PRESERVATION WHILE HEATING PUT...

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I Just Blew My Mind

For some reason, Saw V is coming out this week. I guess they're just going to do that every year. The only Saw I ever saw was Saw. Whoa. That's weird. That's a lot of saws. Also, saw spelled backwards is was. And saw and was are past-tense verbs, of see and is, respectively. Si is Spanish for yes, and si spelled backwards is is, the present tense of was, which is saw spelled backwards. Dick York, Dick Sargent, Sargent York! I think I need to lie do...

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Theological Entomology

Bugs have a considerably more advanced society and social hierarchy than most people realize. Which makes me wonder, do insects have a religion? Do they see the crumbs and scraps left by humans as gifts from the Gods, and fly swatters and magnifying glasses as the wrath of God? Are there stories that get passed on from generation to generation about great bugs of the past, or even heavenly bugs that promise salvation? If bugs had a Messiah, would he be the Anty Christ? If Jesus was an ant, Christians would wear asterisks around their necks. Think about tha...

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Babar, the Possibly Sinister Disappearing French Elephant

I was about to check my email on Yahoo just now, and I saw an article about the biggest box office bombs in history. So I had to look at that. Just like he does in most of his movies, Eddie Murphy plays more than one part in this list, appearing in both Meet Dave and The Adventures of Pluto Nash, which had the biggest budget vs. box office intake deficit of them all. But the lowest-grossing movie ever is Zyzzx Road, starring Katherine Heigl and Tom Sizemore. It cost 2 million to make and did a grand total thirty bucks in theaters. Or, the one theater it played in. Thirty bucks. No wonder Sizemore's a crackhead. Anyway, after that I spent three minutes trying to explain to a co-worker who Katherine Heigl was, and another ten minutes trying to remember who I always confuse her with. The other...

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Same Crap. Different Day.

Yeah, I know the last thing a wrote about was a giant floating turd breaking loose and wreaking havoc, and I'd really rather not have two back-to-back poop stories, but remember when Shaun the Homeless Black Guy and Sandra Bernhardt left a present in front of our office? Well, it happened again. Of course, we can't be certain exactly who's been laying bricks out there, since everyone's a suspect. But somebody did it. And it's been there since Monday. That's not really a smell that you want to start your week off with. The guilty party did have enough shame to cover it with the foil wrapper from a burger. I didn't really examine the thing to see if it was from McDonalds or Burger King, but regardless of what the wrapper said, underneath was definitely a Whopper. Again, in addition to our...

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Giant Poop Terrorizes City

No, not this, it's a story in today's Metro: BERNE, SWITZERLAND. A giant inflatable dog mess, the centerpiece of an exhibition at a Swiss museum, broke free of its moorings, brought down a power line, smashed a window and landed in the garden of a children's home. The wind carried the house-sized fake poop 200 yards. METRO Forget the creepy eggman, this is the now the best thing ever. I especially love how every news outlet that's picked up this story has used different euphemisms for "dog turd." But I am disappointed that no one referred to the escaped crud balloon as "loose stool." Here's some more about the incident, which happened July 31 but is only being reported internationally now, from the UK's Guardian: ...The exhibit, entitled Complex Shit, is the size of a house. It has a safety...

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My Hometown: The Good, The Bad, and the Completely Made Up

Every kid that ever went to elementary school in Weymouth has been to Abigail Adams' house. They also went to the state prison for a ninth grade field trip for health class for some reason. I think the moral was "Be sure to wash behind your ears, or a big guy named Angel with a giant crucifix tattooed on his chest will do it for you." Anyway, I'd imagine the the Abigail Adams house has seen a spike in attendance since HBO aired it's critically-acclaimed John Adams miniseries. There's no way to tell for sure, short of looking it up, and I don't feel like doing that. But they must be keeping busy, otherwise they would have had time to update their website. When was that thing designed, 1996? Get with the times, Abigail Adams' Birthplace and Museum! Book Laura Linney to give some tours or something. The...

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Why, Lord? Why?

This picture is on my server. I vaguely remember making it, but I can't remember why. I'm sure there was a good reason for it at the time. Anyone from the old days have a better memory? I think it had something to do with NYPinTA. EDIT: Um...found it. Turns out it really was to torture NYPinTA. Sorry about that...

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A Real American Hero

I got an email this morning, purportedly from "Allah Stemple," with the following subject line: Fat Chinese Man Kills And Eats Brother Because He Was Hungry. So did lots of other people. I was then encouraged to watch the video. Given the recent horrific events in Canada, using this as a subject line for spam is probably in poor taste. Actually, under any circumstances this as a subject line is in poor taste. Still...what could possibly be the point of sending something like that? And what did that video link lead to? It almost certainly wasn't a fat Chinese guy eating his brother. Hmm, now that I think about it, it doesn't say "his brother," just "brother." Maybe he was eating someone from a religious order, or a black guy. I'd like to think that the video link contained a massive virus,...

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My Left Foot

I started to write this over a month ago, then thought better of it and let in languish in Draft Hell, then later thought, this is a perfectly good post. There are some people that don't have any posts. So here you go... I noticed something this weekend that somehow went undetected for 29 years. Something that shocked and horrified me and left me completely confused as to my very existence. The middle toe on my left foot is the shorter than the rest of them. Well, not the pinky one, but the two on either side of it. It looks like one of the bone segments is missing. This is messed up. Is it possible that I've somehow overlooked this my entire life? Feet fall slightly above the veiny backside of the wrists as my least favorite body parts, so I suppose my conscious effort to avoid looking...

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Obligatory Catch Up Post

I've been a little distracted lately. It's been known to happen. But I'm back now, and nothing is going to, holy crap, what's that little music icon? Is that a new Blogger feature? Oh. Nevermind, it's a Foxytunes feature. I can now insert current track as my signature. But I'm not currently listening to anything, And since you most likely can't see the icon I'm referring to, this entire paragraph probably hasn't made any sense to you. Suffice it to say, if you use Firefox and have Foxytunes, you'll see a little G-clef icon just below "Preview" when you're creating a post in Blogger. I actually almost posted something over a month ago, because something happened that scared the crap out of me. Or, I thought something happened, but it turned out to be nothing. It's sort of embarrassing, actually....

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The Greatest Thing in the World

I will now attempt a transcript. Unholy Humpty Dumpty Mutant Eggman thing is sitting on a wall... Kinder...yibbo shaky! shakes smaller, non-mutant egg Me unscrabbly. unwraps foil cover to reveal chocolate egg inside. Choca Doobee! opens chocolate egg to reveal yet another egg, this one made of plastic Doubly Choco Doobee, ops wubbo! (laughs) opens yellow plastic egg, tiny plastic man which could possibly be a soldier but on further inspection he's got a red chef's hat on and holding a wooden spoon (also inexplicably red) Tooooyy! Mutant Eggman has apparently just eaten some of the chocolate Yodel yum and choco scrum with multi-pumfabo toys! picks up a small toy airplane from assortment of Kinder Surprise toys next to him Oh, grobelee! moves arms in circular motion; raises...

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But I'm Your Density...

Why didn't George McFly divorce his wife when his son came out looking exactly like the guy that "helped" him get her to go out with him high school? Once Marty hit puberty, George should have been a little suspicious of the striking similarities. As if that wasn't bad enough, she named the kid after him, just to rub it in! Maybe he just decided to let it slide. Why let one little indiscretion ruin a good thing? Maybe he thought, "It could be worse. At least he doesn't look like Biff...

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Nonfiction Books: Why I Hate Them, Why I Think Every Nonfiction Author Should Die A Horrible Death, And Why You Should Think So, Too

Why does every single non fiction book include a colon followed by a friggin' paragraph-long subtitle? That ticks me off a lot more than it probably should. It doesn't help that the two biggest offenders, political hit jobs and and self help books, are the two most deplorable genres anyone could ever write about. It's bad enough they're blood-sucking leeches, but do they have to be so obnoxious about it? One of these days someone is going to write "CHAMPION!: The true story of how I overcame adversity, and against all odds, wrote a book with the longest subtitle in history and scored a bunch of chicks and a sweet movie deal, so look for Champion!:...

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Coming this Summer

Today I learned that if you put Daniel Day-Lewis' head on Will Smith's body and tint the the whole thing orange, you get Vin Disel. I also learned Daniel Day-Lewis makes a great evil Grimace. ...

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The Majority of People Are Unusual

This lands in my inbox every once in a while, but for some reason, this time I started thinking about it, specifically the first paragraph: Fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad...

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Test

This sucks. where the hell is my website? Edit: Okay, some of it's back. But where's the masthead? And Amazo? I guess it's a start... EDIT: Gah! All the images are gone! EDIT: Hold on, I think everything is back know. I had to switch from posting everything via FTP from my own server to publishing from Blogger using a custom domain name. I don't know what any of that means, but I think it's working again. Except now I've got that stupid Blooger toolbar think at the top of the page. How do I get rid of th...

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Who Am I? Why Am I Here?

I've lost my memory. Well, half my memory. Well, it's not technically my memory. Let me start over. I'm typing this on my company-issued Powerbook G4 with 15-inch screen, two RAM ports, a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time. This particular model has a defect that can render the lower RAM port unreadable, cutting the speed of the machine in half. When this happened to a couple of the computers here a few years ago, they were taken to the Apple store to be repaired and we checked the rest of them to make sure they were using both RAM slots. Mine checked out all right, so I thought I must have gotten lucky and didn't get one of the defective ones. About a month ago, I noticed my laptop was running ridiculously slow. Every command was followed by a lengthy appearance by that...

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Nothing Can Kill the Grimace

We were talking about the Bourne movies at work and somehow that led me to Yoda backpacks, and then to the Wikipedia page for McDonaldland characters. I don't know how exactly, but I do know that what I saw there confused and frightened me. Tacked on to the last line of the write-up about Grimace, the lovable purple blob that's supposed to represent milkshakes, was the following epitaph: "The character was retained after the streamlining of the characters in the '80s, but was dropped in 2007." What? What?!! Those sons of bitches! They killed Grimace! And by extension, Uncle O'Grimacey! But that wasn't even the worst of it, apparently Early...

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You Want One!

Gee whiz, it's Wuvums, the adorable, marketable rodent thing! Wuvums! Shouldn't he be emblazoned on t-shirts and other cash-flow generating materials? Isn't it an injustice that he isn't? He's so damn cute! His big doe eyes are crying out, "Please slap me on a canary yellow onesy. With feet!" Like last year, I made Valentine's Day cards for Brianna. This time, they feature Wuvums, and more horrible puns. The pirate one says "Arrgh...you gonna be my Valentine?" That's probably my favorite. I guess if I had any forethought, I could have drawn them weeks or even months ago and try to sell them in time for Valentine's Day. There's always...

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He's Toying With Us

It's been over a year since Joe mentioned Captain Nice. Or Mr. Terrific! I'm a little concerned. Yes, he does still end sentences with "Arrrurrghrgrurrgh!" when he thinks he's said something particularly goofy, or when he's frustrated, or whatever the hell other reason he makes that stupid noise. And he still somehow manages to to add extra syllables to both "hello" and "you" in his stock greeting "Hello-o. How are yew-oo?" when he's making personal calls. I'd commend him for finding a way to stretch "you" into two syllables if I didn't want to hit him repeatedly with my stapler. He even threw a "Holy D'Artagnan, Batman" or two at us recently. I think I heard Hassan chop not too long ago. "There you go thinking again," is another one. Oh, and "They always spoke so highly of you" is another...

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Ode to Kimmy

Ahora que es un wenis. ...

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Indian Burial Ground

I always like to check out statcounter to see what kind of weird crap people search for to end up on this blog. This morning, someone in Tamil Nadu, Chennai, India, found their way to the page about my creepy dead people on the lawn dream by doing a Google search for "composting human corpses." Well, that's...unsettling. Sure, maybe someone was searching for a non-traditional, eco-friendly way of putting their loved ones to rest, or perhaps they were even planning for their own final arrangements. But just to be on the safe side, the Tamil Nadu authorities might want to check and see if they've got any missing persons cases open. Someone might have a body they're trying to get rid of. ...

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A Trip (And Fall) Down Memory Lane

You know what's fun and not a cop-out at all? Copying and pasting Revisiting old stories from the FMD days. Since Sean and Sandra Bernard took their hump'n and dump'n act to more hospitable doorways, and the Metro doesn't have any blatant mistakes today, let's take a look back to another time, when cataloging every single event in my life was a suitable, if temporary, distraction to the ad nauseum blather of Joe. Back in December of 2004, we had only just recently moved into our new office on Newbury Street, and most days I walked from Park Street Station to work, via Boston Common and the Public Garden. Let's have a look back at one such cold, December day, shall we? The past couple of days I've had a few close calls with icy patches on the sidewalk, so I guess it was only a matter of...

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Whatsa Mata?

As I've mentioned before, the Metro is my favorite paper. Both ironically and non-ironically. It's free, it's exactly the correct length to read cover to cover from Braintree to Park Street, and when they run out of space for an article, it just ends mid-sentence. I come for the free news, but I stay for the hilarious typos. While not technically a typo, one thing that always gets me is when a story reads "on yesterday" as opposed to just "yesterday" or "on Monday/Tuesday/Whatever day preceded this one." I don't know if "on yesterday" is grammatically correct (although I'm almost positive it isn't), but it definitely sounds...off. I can only...

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Mmm...Floor Chocolate

I'd never heard of Amy Vanderbilt, but she was one of those Annie Cavanagh-type purveyors of etiquette and taste until she fell out a window. Does my ignorance of Ms. Vanderbilt mean that I'm uncultured? Perhaps. For example, I had no idea that black suits are only proper for servants or the dead. That doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, and why lump servants in with dead people? Apparently this obscure rule that most people have never even heard of came about as a result of President Abraham Lincoln being assassinated in a black Brooks Brothers suit. According to Brooks Brothers' Wikipedia page, anyway. Incidentally, that's the second instance that someone's made a point to mention that Lincoln died in a Brooks Brothers suit. The Duck Tour guides usually mention it when they drive...

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Sweet Tapdancing Jesus!

Heath Ledger died! I did not see that one coming. And Michele did it to me again! People really need to stop dying before I find out about it. It messes up my whole day. I wonder if they finished all his scenes as the Joker? What if they left the ending open-ended for the Joker to return in future installments? I mean no disrespect, I feel terrible for his family and his daughter, and the whole this is very tragic, but it seems like they finally got this Batman franchise right, and I wonder what kind of effect his sudden death will have. Do they keep the Joker out of any further Batman movies, or do they find a new actor to fill the role? And...

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Things I Found Out In My Twenties

The first in an ongoing series, unless I change my mind and don't do any more I've got less than a year and a half before joining the creaky ranks of the thirty-and-over crowd, so now is a good time to reflect back on some things I've learned in the past decade. For example, while there very well may be someone named Annie Cavanagh somewhere on this planet, she is not mentioned by name in the J. Geils' song Love Stinks. For the first twenty-odd years of my existence, I'd thought Annie Cavanagh was someone who'd spurned Peter Wolf, and calling her out by name was some sort of revenge. Take that, Annie! You got served in a top 40 radio staple! The other idea was that maybe Annie Cavanagh was a noted romance or etiquette guru with a weekly advice column/radio show, like Dear Abby or Dr. Joyce...

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