Major Tejas did something I was completely unaware of. Something very nice. Something that made the AJs of the world very happy.
He went on e-bay, and got me a replacement battery for my laptop and it came in the mail on Friday evening. This is the awesome, because my old battery worked for about 30 minutes and then kaplutz.
Yaay for Major Texas.
I called the PT office this morning to cancel my appointment tomorrow, because the love of my life has infected me with his heinous cold/coughing illness/whatever brand of icky that he has/had.
The salient points in that last sentence: cancel appointment, tomorrow.
I just got a call from the woman that I spoke with. It appears that she canceled the appointment I had on Oct. 5, and wasn't sure why she did that. So, she wanted to verify which appointment I wanted canceled.
It was all I could do not to say "Me. no. come. tomorrow. Me. sick. You. Get?"
*sigh* When you're coughing so hard your ass muscles are pulled, you don't need to deal with that. (Sorry, K. Jen -- I know I said I'd try to keep comments about the Greater Rear-opolitan Metro Area to a minimum, but I'm trying to keep a sense of humor about this.)
I'm off to medicate myself. You all play nicely.
Here at the G'porium, I strive to keep standards to a minimum and morality at low, low prices. Today's effort to achieve this end, is partially inspired by a comment I read on another blog. (I'm not sure if she knows that I periodically peek in on her site, and we only really commuicate in the comments section over at Neil's. So, I'm not going to mention the blog by name.)
AJ wants you to think of the best professor you ever had in college (i.e., the one that had the biggest impact on you -- the one that pushed you to be the best, challenged you, etc.) The next part of AJ's experiment is for you to say if they were liberal or conservative (I'm not talking merely Repub. vs. Dem., it's the whole nine yards.) Then consider the worst professor you ever had and then assess their liberality or conservatism.
Because we use only the highest quality scientfic methods here at the G'porium -- we shall naturally over-generalize the results and come to conclusions that are 100% specious true. Post your findings in the comments section.
And seriously, I think we should take time out of our days to thank and/or appreciate those educators in our lives that made us want to strive to be something better.
Ladies and Gentlemen!:
Your TV is no longer your best friend. Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie have mended their rift and are about to get busy and film the 5th installment of The Simple Life. Something about them being camp counselors. (I wonder if they're working at a summer camp for future Porn Stars?)
Your TV will punish you if you tune it to E! in the upcoming months when this trash lands on prime time.
I've been seeing these really strange ads on the metro lately. They're print ads for a cell service called Pingo. However, it took me a long time to figure this out based on how the ads are set up.
I've seen 3 different Pingo ads so far, and they all follow the same formula. For example:
PINGO
Pang in Phuket.
I've also seen one for Priyanka in Panjaka. I wondered why Pingo had ads up all over the metro in foreign languages, and thought it was really odd. It wasn't until I ran across the ad with Paolo that I figured out what they were doing, even if I'd never heard of the city in Brazil they were referencing.
Is it just me or is there a glaring problem with this ad campaign? I'm relatively educated, and can find just about every major country on a map, and I didn't get it. Me thinks they forgot to factor in that Americans don't know were Portland is on map, so figuring out that Phuket is the name of a city somewhere in Thailand (I had to google that) definately isn't going to happen. Then when you chose names like Priyanka -- well, it's not Betty or Sue, so it's not likely that your average Joe is going to figure out that's a person's name.
It's sad that Americans are that ignorant about the world. However, I'm thinking an ad campaign that uses names of people and cities that start with the letter "p" to go with the "p" in Pingo isn't such a great idea. Sure the alliteration is catchy, but I think most people are going to scratch their heads and think "Hum, what is this?"
UPDATE: A little yahoo research revealed that Pingo is a calling card comany. Presumably the only calling card you'll ever need again. I tried writing that last sentence using nothing but words that started with the letter "p" and it just didn't work.
I've been meaning to propose a game for everyone to play. In my recent escapades at work, I've ran into a nice gentleman named LaNile. We're not going to talk about how whoever came up with that name for their child needs to have their head checked. People name their kids stupid things on a fairly regular basis. (See: Bad Baby Names for lots of entertainment.)
Shortly after meeting him, a friend and I decided that we needed to rename ourselves using the pattern that LaNile's parents came up with. Take a body of water in Africa then add a "La" in front of it, and presto! new name. We quickly released that we only knew of Lake Victoria, the Congo River and the Nile River, so we expanded the game to include names of countries. I suppose we could have also used names of other geological formations.
I'm now LaChad, and my partner in crime is LaTanzania.
The rules are simple:
1) Boy or girl you start with the prefix "LA" (since obviously LaNile's parents didn't get that memo).
2) Pick a body of water, a country name, a place name, etc. in Africa
3) Put the 2 together.
4) If the second half of your name starts with a vowel ... say, Ivory Coast then you are L'Ivory Coast. (I had to put this in there for Neil, because he's nit-picky like that.)
Go forth and name yourselves. And share the results.
So. Very. Pissed.
Conservatives, consider this a kick upside your collective heads. It's time to wake up and realize that the Republican Party as you know it has morphed into the biggest lying bunch of corrupt scoundrels that has ever graced this once-great nation. I'm not saying it's wrong to be a conservative, nor am I mocking your political views. I am saying your Party in its current incarnation needs to go. Your leaders are rallying the wagons behind Mark Foley and trotting out all sorts of excuses for his behavior. In the face of evidence that many of the Republican Top Brass knew about Foley's behavior at least 10 months prior to the story coming out, they're playing a nice little game of cover our collective asses, deny everything, blame everyone else and my personal favorites -- blame Clinton and the Democrats knew about this before we did and leaked it to the press for poltical advantage.
Wake up! Wrong is wrong is wrong. The victims here are a) the pages b) the American people. Consider this: If a teacher were to have done what Mark Foley did, they would have been fired immediately, and full investigation would have been launched. Any school officials that were even implicated in having prior knowledge and not acting upon it would be out on their ears. These are children we're talking about people! And anyone that knew about this and sat on it deserves to be immediately removed from office. Period.
But the Republicans -- who control the House, the Senate, the Executive and the Judiciary -- have promised an investigation. Call me cynical, but I don't see anyone getting in any trouble at all over this. Remember when Bill Clinton got a blow job from another consenting adult? Remember all the investigations? Remember all the time and money spent on that? Where's your outrage over an illegal and non-consentual act? Where's your outrage over people trying to cover this up? If consentual sex (albeit gross and skeezy) between adults is immoral, then Foley's acts are certainly past immoral. You can't have it both ways.
This liberal is done. D-O-N-E. done with this load. And this liberal wants all you conservatives out there to stop making excuses for these scumbags. See past whatever smoke screen comes out in the latest talking point. I'm not asking you to become liberals -- I'm asking you to hold your party responsible, and guide them back to what your party should be instead of what it's become.
I need everyone's help in coming up with names for my 2 PT instructors.
The nice-one (who gives me massages ... but also puts me in Traction).
And the mean-one (who gives me exercises that hurt).
Any suggestions?
I'm not a morning person. Not even a little bit. So, it was with great unenthusiasm that I hauled myself out of bed at 6:00 this morning to make it to my PT appointment at 7:30. The dog was whining to be let out, and after I kick-started my morning with a nice jolt of nicotine, we were ready to walk the pup.
While I was getting ready, I realized I was really looking forward to the 30 minute massage part of my PT routine. The Evil-One (aka, the necksorcist, or as Neil calls her Mistress Domina) can give me all the nasty exercises she wants -- but I'm still getting a nice massage. I made peace with being up that early in the morning.
I get to the PT office and 10 minutes into the massage The Good-One (aka, the massager) pulls off her mask and reveals that she's really the Devil. There will be no 30 minute massage today. Instead, I'm going to put you on the traction machine for 15 minutes. Yes, the traction machine -- a vertiable modern day "rack." She strapped my head down, tightened the neck brace, activated the evil-machine-of-doom, and then walked out of the room while giving me the following warning:
Push this button if it gets to be too much. If you need anything, ring this bell. You'll be done in 15 minutes.
How am I supposed to "ring the bell" when I'm strapped into this machine?!? And I've seen one too many bad sci-fi movies to be comfortable with machines like this. These are the machines that black, hispanic, gay and the "ugly,""fat," best-girl friend characters get decapitated in/on.
But you know what: I kinda liked it. My neck felt awesome when it was all over. And I almost fell asleep a few times.
I want to say I'm totally shocked and appalled by the whole Foley affair. And to some extent, that's true. I'm not shocked that Foley was on the Child Safety commission and helped sponsor that law to protect children from pedophiles. (That seems to be kind of par for the course for our politicians. You can pretty much bet that if they're on a committee to be doing X, Y, or Z that they will be caught commiting a crime that involves X, Y, or Z.)
When I first read about this on Friday (thanks, huffingtonpost!), I thought to myself "wow, another sleazy Republican has been caught up in scandal." With each passing day, the Foley thing just gets odder and odder. The inital story I read only said that he was IM'ing/e-mailing underage pages with sexually explicit content. Later, it came out that he was trolling for some young boy loving.
Yesterday, I found out that Hastert and other leaders had known about this for 10 months, yet nothing was done about it -- other than telling Foley to break all contacts with the page. The president of the alumni pages said that when he was a page 5 (FIVE!?!??!) years ago, all the Republican pages were warned about Foley. Obviously, someone knew about Foley, yet no one did anything to actually stop him. (Head on over to abc.com for a really comprehesive set of articles on the Foley thing.)
Now, today we learn he was having cybersex with a page during a vote. Boehner is blaming Hastert. The President says something lame about how this is just "disgusting." Where is the outrage? Where is the condemnation? Why are people like Rush Limbaugh saying the Democrats "leaked" this story close to the election for political advantage, but praise FOX News for sitting on the story for a year and refusing to air it? Why hasn't every bloody politician, pundit, and anyone else involved in this sorry mess officially condemned Foley in the strongest language possible and promised full, thorough and swift investigation? Come on people, quit trying to spin this to save face -- no one loves a pedophile, the damage is done. If you want to gain points with the Americans, condemn this man for the criminal that he is!
But, of course that's not going to happen. Because Hastert is involved and doesn't want to lose his job. Boehner too. Falwell et. al won't speak up on this because it'll make the Republicans look bad. They're all too worried about losing the election. Congratulations guys ... instead of having it be just Foley -- you've managed to drag yourselves down too.
