It’s Friday the 13th! One of my favorite recurring days of the year, but maybe not everyone else’s. I’ve already seen some Friday the 13thy things happen to a bunch of people around me, but so far I haven’t been too negatively affected. Hope everyone else’s paths remain black-cat-free!
Archive for October, 2006
According to CNN, a small plane crashed into a building on 72nd Street. I’m on 33rd Street, so I’m OK. I went to the roof, but I couldn’t see anything. The multitudes of sirens are making the city sound like more of a war zone than normal, but that’s the only way I’m affected. Gus is working on 59th Street, and he’s OK too.
However, we’ll be traveling to Houston for a wedding soon. That may not be OK.
I was feeling a little hungry. Not really hungry, just a little. So I grabbed last night’s leftovers from the fridge to idly nibble on for a few minutes. I took a few bites, and lo and behold, nestled before me in a clear tupperware tray, I saw Him.
From the heavens above, I was being given a sign. He has sent his image to be displayed before me as a reason not to lose hope and to spread His good word across this populated land! I have seen the light. I have found The Flying Spaghetti Monster. In my spaghetti.
I must alert the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster immediately. The elder pirates will surely want to analyze the form and texture of my sacred religious finding.
What great feats I shall accomplish due to this miraculous experience! The most important job I can do right now is to make sure everyone knows His greatness so they can be touched by His noodly appendage. Indeed, the Pastafarian religion is spreading like wildfire, but it is due only to aspiring pirates like Daniel and myself proclaiming His good word to the masses.
But this makes no sense! people say. It’s all made up! they accuse. They make it sound like I’m running all over the city trying to convince other people to believe in this all-powerful being that I found in my spaghetti, even though I’m unable to prove its existance. But I truly have faith that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is coming back to earth to judge us, so you better convert now!
See, it sounds stupid when you do it too.
I think it’s time some people in the world learned a few things about comedy and jokes. To provide a disclaimer, I may not be an actual “comedian” or even really that “funny,” but I did hold my cell up to a microphone one time so that Gus could deliver his comedic routine to as part of a private comedy-karaoke showcase. I also view Comedy Central frequently and surround myself by goofy people who will not shy from the opportunity to provide a good laugh. Using these extremely strong credentials, I am delivering this short blurb on explaining what is funny by helping to define what is not.
I’ve had the displeasure of knowing people throughout my life that tend to cut people down, may it be for being gay, southern, or otherwise different, or simply because they wore a strange garment or bought music of questionable quality. I don’t know if these societal confidence-choppers have a collective name (or did I just give them one?) but you’ve undoubtedly met one before. They mistake an excuse to be mean for being witty. There’s a place for sarcasm, and it can be very funny, but only when there’s a cleverness about it that is missing from the mind of most “choppers.” These folks like to say things that are offensive and follow them with the phrase, “It was a joke.” (I remember the days when these people used to say, “No offense” instead, but I think they were giving the objects of their torment negative ideas regarding their intentions, so the former phrase is now used in attempt to abstract listeners from such possibilities.)
Today, I stand on my virtual soapbox to say, “No, it’s not.”
This is a joke: “Two guys walk into a bar. The third one ducks.”
This is not a joke: “Only stupid faggots like Insert Name would get that question wrong.”
This is a joke: “Why is a woman like a hurricane? Because when she comes it’s wet and wild and when she leaves she takes your house and car.”
This is not a joke: “I’m reading this article about some fat, money-grubbing twat. It’s probably about Insert Name but they changed the names to protect the nauseating.”
This is a joke: “Boudreaux calls the doctor and says, ‘Doc, doc, my wife Marie is in labor and da contractions are only two minutes apart!’ The doctor asked, ‘Is this her first child?’ Boudreaux shouts, ‘No, you idiot, this is her husband!’”
This is not a joke: “Or if you’re from the bayou like Insert Name, you’re probably too busy parking your ugly, retarded ass on a fishing boat to resolve that kind of issue.”
Funny: Jabs at public figures who deserve them.
Not funny: Deliberately singling out someone in the room.
Funny: Clever inside jokes with close friends who share your sense of humor.
Not funny: Derogatory comments toward people you hardly know in large groups of people who hardly know you.
Funny: Anything on Mr. Show.
Not funny: You.
Get it? So quit it. Thanks.
There are days when you wake up and have a ton of shit to do and you’ve already missed more daylight hours than you care to admit but you work as hard as you can and still feel like you’re not getting anywhere.
Pepperidge Farm Remembers…*
The water in New York is nasty, or at least from my New York sink it is, and when you’re doing a ton of stupid work where you find more problems than you solve, leaving the house to buy water is a good deviation from the frustration that lies ahead.
Pepperidge Farm Remembers…
Friends’ birthdays are important, but unlike Pepperidge Farm, you forgot your friend’s birthday and need to buy a gift at the 11th hour. After walking around town for awhile with every intention of buying a nice gift, you get frustrated and decide to just get the damn water. And maybe stock up on soup because the Emporium o’ Foods is having a sale.
Pepperidge Farm Remembers…
You can walk through aisles and aisles of random foods, organized loosely by type and brand, and no matter what’s there, you want something else. Like a cookie. A big, soft, sweet, chewy cookie. But this store doesn’t have those cookies. It has Chips Ahoy… and Chips Ahoy. Those cookies are acceptable, for instance, when you have to bring a snack to a party. But I was going for quality, not quantity. How could a store that calls itself an Emporium have such a limited selection of cookies??
Pepperidge Farm Remembers…
You’ll still cruise the store 10 times over so you don’t have to make a trip to another store, like Grizzly’s, which is right across the friggin’ street. You know the effort is fruitless from the beginning, but that’s the amount of walking you’d do back at the HEB or Walmart in Texas, and you’re going to be glad you had a little exercise before you finally find the cookies you seek.
Pepperidge Farm Remembers…
To say, “Fuck it” and go to Grizzly’s, where P-Farm’s Soft Baked Chocolate Chunk cookies are a whopping 20 cents off the regular price. In your face, corporate marketing whores! I was going to buy these cookies anyway!
Pepperidge Farm Remembers…
Back in the old days, no one cared about nutritional value or calorie-counting because everyone was working on the farm instead of sitting back at their desks trying to find new ways to procrastinate and amuse one’s self before a nice dinner with friends that makes your mundane days spent rotting in a chair seem worth living.
Pepperidge Farm Remembers…
What a fucking pig you have to be to eat a whole (okay, half, but only because of sheer willpower) bag of cookies. Actually, a bag only contains eight cookies. That’s okay, right? Half of that chocolately goodness got stuck in your braces so you brushed it all out of your mouth right away and it’s like you never ate anything, and now that you’re not dying for cookies anymore, you can finally try to get some work done. Oh forget it, I’m heading to the pub.
Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
*For those in the dark, this was part of some comedian’s stand-up routine. I not only stole his joke, I kicked it in the face, slammed it against a wall, declared it dead, and chopped it into bite-sized pieces to store in my fridge. My apologies. But only for this post, not eating half a bag of cookies. Those were delicious.
128K RAM? FORTRAN?? Data… base??? WOW! This whole “personal computer” thing just might take off!
And maybe by the year 2000, we’ll have colonies on the moon and ad designers will learn how to lay out a two-page fucking spread.
*Ahem*
Although the views from my roof are great (see previous post), the roof itself is kind of sad and desolate. Some roofs (rooves!) have little gardens on them, or at least some brickwork and patio furniture. Not mine. It has a weird insulation-like flooring, and there are a bunch of things on the roof that are probably preventing management from even thinking about building a patio.
The elevator control room is up there, as well as some other little building that takes up a considerable amount of the roof’s footprint. There is also a scattered bunch of large silver things that probably do something very important (besides make a lot of noise)… I’ll try to furnish a picture when I have daylight again.
In one corner, there’s a huge antennae that looks like it came from the 80s. Leaning against the elevator control room is a cracked full-length mirror, accompanied by a large orange bucket and a container of soap. Kind of makes you wonder what kind of kinky stuff goes on when I’m not there.
Although I’ve never seen anyone up there, I know someone has used the roof. Someone who drinks Miller Lite and smokes a Marlboro Lights, maybe 100s. If I knew people here, I would invite them to drink and smoke on my roof. I’m very surprised, I’ll daresay shocked, that with enough residents to fill 32 floors (minus floor 13, which my building doesn’t have), which is so many people that I have almost never seen the same person twice in my daily comings and goings, NO ONE from this building uses the roof EVER.
The most curious thing of all though, is that there are weeds growing in the cracks of that strange insulation material. Although not heavily trafficked by people, somehow a few seedlings managed to make their way up 32 stories to take root in the very infertile roof-flooring.
Sunny and 68 degrees. See?
The weekend was pretty cool too. Although the weather wasn’t quite as nice as today’s, we still got a lot done.
I found a great shoe at NextFest:
I always wondered what happens when you shove a Gameboy into a pair of Candies. As soon as they make another one, I’ll be the first in line for my own pair progressive platforms. (It’s where the “plat” comes from, you know.)
We also went to Toys “R” Us. ARRRRRRRRRRRR! …Backwards! That’s actually an indoor ferris wheel behind us, but there were no pirates on it as far as I could tell.
And I got a good shot of the biggest booger in board games, Plumpy from Candyland:
Did I mention I’m a fucking tourist? I thought I’d stop all foot traffic on my block of Times Square to take this amateur, poorly lit photo. I’m awesome!
We joined some other tourists at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum (but not as many as we thought we would, which is a good thing). Gus liked this plane:
We went inside this plane:
We thought it would be cooler than it was.
And of course, no loosely thrown together photo blog post of mine would be complete without a dead bird.
We found this one in the train tracks as we departed Paoli, Pennsylvania a couple weeks ago. Besides the new BlackBerry Pearl (slick!), it was probably the most interesting thing we saw in Paoli. What the hell were we doing in Paoli? Meeting some interesting people at the annual Boathouse Bash. I drank my first shot of SoCo since high school and remembered all over again why I’ll go at least another 10 years without touching the stuff. Bleh!