There is not enough time in my day. That's cool because I've got two neato kids now, but it is really sad too because I have very little ME TIME anymore. Back in the Halcyon Days (which is I believe a political term in reference to the Clinton administration) I had all this time where I could run my mouth via keyboard over at the BG and blow people's minds with my unbalanced wit, delicate sense of empathy and excellent use of markup. I was a TRIPLE THREAT. Now I change diapers real good. I think maybe the worst of it is the sheer isolation. The closest I come to current events outside of which rerun of Jack's Big Music Show NOGGIN is running today is the line from the previous night's Cavs game. I try sometimes to watch the news, but after a year or so away from it, it is hard to get back into harsh reality. Any given evening, I turn on the news and the first three things I see, without fail, are 1) 45 people dead at a wedding reception we mistakenly bombed in Iraq, 2) Couple who kept 13 retarded foster children in cages in their basement for three years plead not guilty, and 3) Drunk driver crosses median on the freeway and collides with soccer mom SUV, killing three children ages 2, 4 and 8. I don't know why the news stations here keep running the same three stories over and over, but I generally turn it off after that 'cause I just can't deal.

Ahh- screw that stuff. What the hell? DON'T TYPE WEEPY NONSENSE. That was rule # 1 here, and I was about to totally blow that.

Okay, different tack. Is that a sailing thing? Tack? I must say, even though I've been not so good at keeping up with it daily (I'm a BUSY PERSON), I find doing the Tip of the Day deeply satisfying. I don't know if anyone besides me reads those, but I find me hilarious. It's like, when I was a kid I used to love Peanuts comics. Not the dailies, the old school book collections. The genius of Charles Schulz was that he didn't write comics for the quick hit gag- it was a cumulative effect. Those things weren't funny 'til you'd read two hundred or so in a row, and then they were ALL funny. That's what I'm shooting for with Tip of the Day- there will be plenty of days I just don't have it, or maybe the ones I've agonized over specific wording for hours and I feel are awesome don't impress you at the time. But then, hopefully, you read them all in one sitting sometime and laugh 'til your guts hurt. That might be a long time from now. Like, decades. Good gravy, I'll be dead.

Fun's over, Ty's awake. Not even 12:30? Dang.*


* Edit: I changed "Fuck" to "Dang", because in the light of day it doesn't seem as bad as all that.

Tags: What? TV Kids Swearing

Tyler took a header into a pile of Legos this morning and mashed his nose pretty good. He's fine, but he looks like he was in a bar fight. Anyway, I got baby blood all over my shirt, and since then I've been nothing but lucky!

Look! I just found a dollar in my pocket! And there- another!

Wait- who's pants are these?

Tags: Kids What?

We have TiVo boxes, which are normally the best things on this or any other planet. However, sometime last week TiVo flashed them with some software update, and now our boxes won't record the end of TV shows. Like, it stopped four minutes before the end of 24, so I don't know what happens there. And the box upstairs cut off the last 7 minutes of The Office last week, so I had to buy the whole frickin' episode from iTunes just to see the end. Lost also got the shaft this week, but we were actually watching that during the recording so we got to see the end of it.

I checked on the TiVo forums, and it looks like lots of people are getting the same thing. SHENANIGANS! If we can't count on TiVo, the last good thing there is, what can we count on? Religion? The Government? The Power of Love*? I think fucking NOT. I don't care how much George Bush and his brother Jesus love us, I still can't see the last three minutes of The Shield.


* I think Huey Lewis seems like a solid guy though. Maybe he has 24 on tape!

Tags: TV Geekery

This morning my boss was cleaning out the conference room at work, which normally is loaded with the chaotic spillover from his office. "Must be a loan tour today," I predicted in my head. Sure enough, the suits from some bank that we don't yet owe prodigious piles of money to arrived a little later. That's the only reason the conference room ever gets cleaned, when we're begging for money. My boss did his usual hourlong meet-n-greet with the sly presentation of the dubious financials right before he whisked the well dressed man and woman out for the facility tour.

"And here we have the engraving area where we blah blah for whatsis and the other place. that's our really expensive router table that is controlled by that computer over there. I don't think we've ever turned it on but it does fabulous work. There's Arnold who is our shop manager, don't mind the wife-beater and shorts in February, he dresses for comfort. His, not ours. HA HA! Now we move on to the art department, they use these computers you may have heard of - Macintosh Apples, and they do some amazingly wonderful things. Here's Matt our resident genius and lead designer, I'm not really sure what he does most of the time, but he's the best. I think he's taking pictures of something now because that's our digital camera he's got there. Oh and lights! He uses lights when he takes pictures, I've seen him do it. And this picture will be put in the computer, right Matt? Yes- I thought so. Anyway, moving on to the paint area, where you may have guessed we paint things like blahhdy-bloo bloo and waddle waddle dee doo..."

This goes on for another hour or so. He takes these folks in their nice suits through the building, describing every piece of equipment and what it does, introducing all the employees, cracking his little jokes. It's pretty much the same song and dance as usual, he's got it down to a science. He'll get that loan if he has to talk these people's ears off for the rest of the day. They'll cave, they always do. I've been here twelve years and Ted has never not gotten the loan. At the end of the tour he keeps schmoozing even as the suits edge closer to the door. Four or five sets of handshakes later and a "we'll go over the numbers and let you know in the next 24 hours," the bank folks finally leave.

I always imagine the first minute or two is silence as the bank people pull out of our mud-and-cinder parking lot on their way back to the home office. The quiet is nice after the nattering of my boss over the clamor of air compressors and printing presses. But eventually, one will look over at the other, swallow hard, and say, "WHAT A DUMP!" At which point the other says, "OH MY GOD WHAT WAS THAT SMELL?" "I DON'T KNOW BUT I NEED A SHOWER SO BAD." "I'VE HAD TO GO TO THE BATHROOM FOR THE LAST HOUR BUT I WASN'T GOING TO GO THERE!" "OH I KNOW- I THINK SOMEBODY TOOK A SHIT IN THE KITCHEN!" "THE SINK? I SAW THAT TOO!"

Do they talk about the impressive and informative tour they just took? The nice people they just met, or the fine work we're doing with the equipment at our disposal? No. They're talking about the shit someone may or may not have taken in a sink. Jerks.

Tags: I Am Professional Good Times What?

Tonight during 24 I saw the new ad for the Nissan XTerra. They're using "Set You Free" by local band (well, Akron, that's close enough) The Black Keys for the background music. Nice!

Quick Black Keys story- the band is comprised of two regulars, the singer/guitarist and the drummer, who is the gangliest motherfucker ever. That freak can play the hell out of some drums, so more power. Anyway, the guitar guy is sort of average looking, nothing special. Before they got signed he'd been dating his high school sweetheart for several years. After signing some record deal and a European tour later, he comes back with a Dutch (French? Whatever) lingerie model. My brother-in-law, who used to fix guitars for them, asked him what was up with that? He said, "Dude- I'm famous in Europe!"

Tags: Tunes T.V. Good Times

When most sports teams are bad, their fans are angry and stop supporting the lousy product by not going to the games.

When the Cleveland Browns are bad, their fans are angry and buy season tickets.

Why? Retardation, that's why.

Tags: Sports What?

I wasn't going to add comments to the Tip of the Day! section. Why? I don't know, mostly because I didn't realize that I could. But I just figured that out, so now you can tell me how right I am. I also added an RSS feed over there too. That way you will know almost instantly when I've posted my awesome and inspiring advice for your enrichment, which I am going to attempt to update daily like the title would lead us all to believe. We'll see how that goes.

Oh- and P.S.- Does anyone know what the "trackback" thing is? I'm just going to disable it if no one can give me a good reason not to. All the "(0)"'s depress me.

Tags: What? Internet Testing

That's the gist I got out of that last night. And everybody on the planet will experience LIBERTY! Of course, it will be the sort of liberty that will be determined by their own individual cultures and histories; but it'll be US THAT GIVES IT TO 'EM! YYEEEEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAWWW!!!! Gonna fill some third world troughs with Freedom grown right here in Heartland, U.S.A.!!!! Gonna push their heads in those troughs and make 'em eat! Bend over and Eat our Freedom! The oppressed people want the hot Freedom Seed our Big Freedom Pipes will thrust deep into their infrastructure to provide with NUCULAR FORCE. Their Freedom Lust grows every day! Look at the way they dress- tattered rags barely covering their tyrannized brown bodies. They're totally asking for it!

I'm not a megalomaniac!

Tags: What? Politics Good Times