Pants on fire

Di and I got in the car to drive to work today. This conversation occurred as we were merging onto the freeway.

Me: It tastes like burning in here. Hopefully it's not us.
Di: I can't smell anything.
Me: Man, my butt is stinging like crazy. Jeez, why does my butt sting?
Di: Stop! The car's smoking!

But the smoke wasn't coming from the hood. It was coming from my burning ass. My seat heater malfunctioned and burned a 1-inch hole through my seat cushion and starting burning through my pants. Yes, my new pants. That explains why my butt was stinging.

Another pants store

My trusty dog jumped up on me the other day and ripped my trusty pants, so I needed to get some new pants. So I went to the pants store. Trusty wife had a coupon good for 30% off everything, even clearance stuff. So I got two pairs of pants. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Who needs two pairs of pants? But that's another story for another day.



So anyway, I was pretty happy because I estimate I saved at least $30, and it only took me ten minutes in the store. I went back to my car and found that I'd received a parking ticket - for $30.

Baby animals

With my spawn moving closer and closer to fruition, trusty wife and I have been shopping for all the requisite support items needed to sustain the little squirt. One thing I've noticed is that everything baby related has to have some "cute" phrase on it, like the following:



Even though the statement is absolutely true in my case (Di never makes me eat my veggies when I pull that face), the little veggies are a little ridiculous. Ditto to all the little baby animals on baby clothes. What would happen if everyone in the world over the age of 2 just suddenly disappeared? I'll tell you exactly what would happen: The kids would all get stomped by elephants, eaten by crocodiles, and mauled by lions, because by buying them all these cutesy animal-laden clothes, we have inevitably set them up for disaster, making them think that all animals are cuddly, friendly creatures that have opposable thumbs and play with beach balls and eat with utensils. What a mess. So I think a new line of clothes should be launched, and I'll call it "Don't Touch The Freakin' Animals". Instead of a shirt depicting a squirrel playing tennis with a gorilla, it will be of this:



It's about time you little kids knew the truth: Animals aren't your friends. Even the family dog is terrified of you.

The pants store

The trusty wife needed some maternity pants, so we went shopping. We ended up at this place called "A Parasite In Your Pod", and no joke, they are crazy. In the time it took to buy a pair of stretchy pants:

- A worker asked at least 5 times if we needed any help.
- I was given a brochure about a college savings plan for the kid. I found this particularly offensive as I have yet to complete college myself.
- I was offered subscriptions to two parenting magazines. I also take offense to this. Do they offer people without excessive facial hair only one magazine, or even no magazine at all? Did I really look like I could use two?
- I was grilled for my personal information to get on their "mailing list".
- My receipt was assaulted by a highlighter to show me that if I give up even more of my privacy, I could win $1,000. Like I would ever want to go back.



Moral of the story: Don't buy pants.

Out of the Matrix

I'm unplugged.



I took the blue pill. Or the red pill. Hell, whichever one got Keanu Reeves out of the Matrix. I deleted my Facebook account. Finally. I've always hated it. Hated my "friends", their stupid status updates, all the notifications about everybody taking those damn quizzes, and seeing how much time everyone wasted playing Mafia Wars. And as I type this I just realized that I spilled super glue all over my desk after gluing acorns together. And it won't come off. Stupid acorns. Stupid super glue.

White trash radar

Someone should investigate the phenomenon known as "white trash radar". You probably haven't heard of it but will know exactly what I'm talking about when you hear it. Here's the setup:

You have a trashy neighbor to the north, a whole apartment complex full of them to your east, and then some more a block or two south who insist on spinning the tires on their redneck Dodge every time it rains. Remember, this is purely hypothetical and not from any personal experience. You think they're just living their trashy lives, shopping/sleeping at Walmart, hollering in the middle of the night, and yelling at their poorly trained pit bulls, but then you see them walking between each other's houses, going to Walmart together, and sharing food stamps. Could there be a white-trash version of gaydar? Would it be called dumbdar? Retardar? Cheapbeerdar?

Cat horking

I woke up at 5:30 this morning to this sound:



My cat Stella was sitting on the side table next to me, horking all over. In case you haven't heard a cat throw up, it sounds like a toilet plunger working on a really bad clog, followed by the toilet erupting its contents all over the floor. My cats do it all the time after they've eaten our plants, only this time the barf didn't land on the carpet. It landed on the dog, who was sound asleep next to the side table. I think it traumatized her. When she heard the barfing sound coming from the above YouTube video she went and hid.

State fair reminder

That state fair thing is happening again this year. Don't forget to print off your improved scavenger hunt list.

Biggest nerd alert ever

We were leaving the Parley's Gulch dog park after walking the cats when we saw some children dressed up as knights. Then we saw their parents:



Probably 50 of them. In full makeup. Carrying shields and swords. Some wearing tights. One guy was dressed like a cat (medieval cat?). Then one guy said "To whom do we speak about the horses for the battle?" No joke. I was disappointed that they didn't have any horses. Based on what their shields and swords were made of, I can only assume that if they did have horses, they'd be foam too.

My blog is bigger

Some people blog about something interesting. I blog about things I hate. Other people blog about nothing. You could call them "Seinfeld blogs". And by nothing I mean the only reason they even have a blog is to make it seem like their lives aren't as boring as they really are. But I see right through you, faker.



These blogs have turned into a huge pissing contest as to who takes their kids to more places, who goes on more vacations, or who loves being a mom the most. Now they're really grasping at straws. Out of ideas? Oh wait, your kid just wet the bed - you can get a whole week of posts out of that.



The competition gets more heated with people trying to make more posts than anyone else. And then it gets really hilarious when these people realize that they've practically written a stalker's guide book for their own family. So then they make their blog private, only to make it public again when they realize that they have just forfeited the pissing contest.

Leveling the playing field

While getting educated today, I noticed this on a bulletin board:



Obviously some anglo sans accent is looking to level the mating playing field by taking away foreigners' secret weapon. I think there is a better way to make it a little more fair:



It's like I always say: Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to speak with an Italian accent, he'll be chasing tail for a lifetime.

The truth about Walmart

I will do just about anything to avoid going to Walmart. I hate everything about it. The employees, the people who shop there, the merchandise, and most of all, the low prices. Walmart is the poster child of American arrogance and ignorance. Screw the environment and open green space, as long as we can park our prick cars in their huge, hot parking lot, shop, then eat at the McDonald's inside, then take our fat kids to the integrated arcade, then we're happy.



Yesterday I had no choice but to go inside hell's armpit to see if they had something that no other store in the area had. Luckily, I didn't find it, which made the trip short. But then I realized why I hate Walmart so badly: Seeing the people in Walmart is like seeing yourself at your worst, and that scares the non-retarded portion of the human race. You see what you would look like if you started smoking, stopped washing your hair, parked on your lawn, didn't spay/neuter your animals, and had 6 kids with 6 different people.

Moral of the story: If you think you've hit rock bottom, go to Walmart and you'll see that you haven't.

Business time

The picture below sort of looks like a funky hair stuck in a scoop of ice cream, but it's not.



I put on my business socks and business time quickly occurred, and thus my trusty spouse is now acting as host to a 3-month-old parasite that I've named Clarence Anne. Supposedly in 6 months or so the parasite will come out looking like a human. According to the internet, the kid will look like this.

Lonely dog

This is a dog:



This is what a lonely dog does when you're at work:



And this is a dog acting sheepish when she realizes she's in trouble:



Any questions?

Oh noes

This morning I woke up to find that a meteorite had landed on my balcony and made a small but noticeable crater.





The weirdest thing is that this is the exact spot where I made dutch oven apple cobbler just the night before. I know, weird. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something. Something like, "Hey idiot, a cheap plastic balcony will melt even if you have three layers of tin foil between it and red-hot coals." Or maybe it's just a big coincidence. I'm going with the latter.

Local news

Few things annoy me more than local news stations. I'm not being specific about any particular location, I mean all local news, no matter where it is. Local news is like the Geek Squad of journalism: They think they're cool but everyone else thinks they're just a herd of dorks.



The local news equivalent of the Geek Squad VW Beetle is the news helicopter. But it's not just any damn helicopter, it's a special one, which is why they call it a chopper. Local news crews salivate all over themselves about how cool their helicopter (excuse me, chopper) is, and then they get so eager to use the stupid thing that they send it out to film things like car accidents and cops standing around crime scenes. A very efficient use of expensive fuel.



Then there's the reporters, who consider themselves God's gift to the world. In the real world, these people are called puppets. In the UK, these so-called "reporters" are given a much more accurate title: "News readers". Whenever people see a news reader outside of their television boxes, they spit all over themselves. Note to all retards: These people are not celebrities. They're highly trained monkeys who can look into a camera while reading a teleprompter, all while making a ridiculous amount of money for doing nothing. I just realized that all this spells a guaranteed recipe for success: Look into a camera while reading + refer to a helicopter as a chopper + be an egomaniac = $$$.

The bigoted idiots who get in fights on the internet message boards of local news stations also need to go. If you ever post on those things then you need to get a life. I imagine it's the same group of 55-year-old men who are responsible for forwarding the world's supply of e-mails of Photoshopped pictures of Air Force jets shooting at Arabs.

Nobody cares

This Facebook and Twitter thing has gotten out of hand. I'm considering dropping half of my "friends" from Facebook because I'm so sick about every petty stupid detail about their lives. Seriously, people, are you so lame and pathetic that you have to update your Facebook status to let everybody know that you're making dinner? How about you just make the freaking dinner? And if you really are that pathetic, then you're probably making a dinner that is just as pathetic, like mac and cheese or Hot Pockets or something.



Nobody cares:
- how many hours you worked this week.
- that you baked pie this afternoon.
- that you think something is "yummy" (a word that should be banished from the English language).
- that you're a great humanitarian and donated blood and a kidney today.
- that your baby won't go to sleep. Maybe the kid won't go to sleep because it keeps hearing the clatter of your computer keys as you update your status to say that your kid won't go to sleep.

And another thing: The open-ended status updates that you people come up with to beckon a response from all your friends. Example: "John Doe is feeling sad." Oh, too bad. Maybe you should get a job and not spend all your time on social networks. I already dropped one dude as a friend because he changed his name on Facebook every day to some stupid anagram of his own name. If he had put half as much effort into something useful then he'd probably be a very rich man.

Freaky Teletubby

Add this to my creepy baby products list. It's called the Peekaru, and something is wrong with you if you buy it.



I guarantee your kid will not be smiling or feel like it's popping out of your womb again. This looks more like a Teletubbies' freak hermaphrodite siamese sibling that was locked in a closet its whole life.

Big brother

I'd have to say that the dog is a pretty well-behaved little beast while we're gone, but I still like to keep an eye on her, so I have a webcam running while we're at work that I can check periodically. Or at least I did.



Apparently, she doesn't like being watched, so she took care of the "problem":



You'll notice that she didn't even touch the camera itself, just the cord, in three different places. She could have chewed it apart at just one spot, but she did it in three, just to spite me.

Elliot (no, not the dragon)

In an abrupt reversal in tone from my usual posts, I will speak of something positive today. We finally got a dog. The cats have been asking for one for at least a year, so we finally got them one, but it's not quite what they expected.



Her name is Elliot (Elli for short). She's an American Eskimo and Australian Shepherd mix, which I guess makes her an Australian Eskimo or American Shepherd, or maybe just a mutt. We took off work and drove up to Idaho (queue the banjo music) to get her. She's three months old and...uh...she's pretty big. This is the size of her paw:



According to my nerdy calculations (narf), she'll be as big as this by the time she's two:



As is typical for anything I do, a mess was created. She (the dog, not Di) barfed three times on the way home. My car smells like a farm, because her puke smells like cow pies. No joke. She was pretty filthy when we got her. This is what our tub looked like after her first bath:



Wait, that might have been after I took a bath. She refuses to use her legs for walking, so I have to carry her around slung over my shoulder. Lazy dog. I'm trying to learn how to say "I'm not buying you a wheelchair" in Dogish.

Magic gloves

I was thinking about doing a Radio From Hell-style "list of things that must go", but then I realized nearly every post I do could be considered an item on that list. So I won't do one. Just read all my posts (please).

Whatever. Anyway, that's not what this post is about. So as you know (or don't know, I don't care), we've been doing a lot of renovating on our new old condo, so we've purchased a lot of new light fixtures, paint, immigrant laborers, and furniture. For some reason, two of the new light fixtures we bought came with these:



That's right: Freakin' Michael Jackson's freakin' magic gloves. Although they are a little small for my huge, hairy, calloused man hands, that doesn't diminish their magical powers. With these babies on I can paint twice as fast, rewire a light without electrocuting myself, and heal sick animals with a single touch. Okay, not really. I just can't make myself throw them away. I mean jeez, when will I ever get undersized gloves included with a new light again? It's like finding my lost wedding ring in a box of cereal - it just doesn't happen often, or at all.

By the way, I hope the Cuban housekeeper who found my ring and then lied about finding it is enjoying it.

Aiming high

I saw this on my way home from work a couple days ago. Apparently you don't have to aim very high to reach your dreams.



I wish someone would have told me that before I started college six years ago.

Don't don't don't

I don't care how well-behaved your newborn/toddler/man-child is, don't bring him/her with you to the movies. Ever. You are automatically a class-A idiot for even considering it. It completely ruined Space Buddies for me.

Oh please

So I guess this is coming out:



Is this really necessary? Haven't we seen enough movies with talking animals? Besides, I highly doubt that animals sound like kids. Probably more like old people, saying "get that frackin' camera out of my face, can't you see I'm trying to sleep on this printer?".

Change of venue

With our recent move from Salt Lake to Centerville has come a change in environment. Here are a few examples:


From efficient and compact imports to lifted, domestic, redneckmobiles.


From "Save Our Canyons" stickers to Truck Nutz.


From Main Street, to, uh, Main Street.


And finally, from a Blue county to a Red one.