TV, How I Love Thee

It's election day.  I'm not voting due to a fictitious felony conviction that I use as an excuse.  Trust me on this one, when you're totally apathetic about local politics and someone asks you who you are going to vote for this is really the best way to go.  When someone asks you who you're voting for they are really asking, "Hey, want to listen to me explain who I'm voting for?"  And I never do.  If you try to tell them that you don't see the point in it they will likely launch into a speech about civic duty and things of that nature.  Heaven help you if you explain that don't consider your opinion on the matters educated enough to cast a ballot because that's all but asking for them to dump a bunch of campaign propaganda for their selected candidate on you and declare you "educated."  But, "Sorry, I'm a convicted felon," will stop that shit cold.  The next question is always what crime was committed, but if you sell it well enough they only ask it silently in their head while they are sort of backing away and thanking you for your time.  The worker monkeys know I'm joking when I say it, although I think every time I do Blondie becomes less and less convinced that I have no criminal record.

I didn't come here to talk politics however.  I came here to talk television, which unfortunately has a lot of stuff about politics on it right now.  Last night during the World Series I got to see three Houston mayoral campaign commercials back to back to back.  The first was largely forgettable.  The last two were hilariously timed because they featured two attack ads directed at each other.  At present TV is doing well enough for itself that I do not feel the need to rescue it yet.  This may change if anything I'm watching starts to falter, but for now it seems that I'm not destined for the heartaches of last year's round of cancelations.  Thus far it seems that this fall my wife and I are not curses to new shows.  We started watching NCIS: Los Angeles and Flash Forward and both seem to be doing pretty well ratings wise.  NCIS is not exactly hard hitting stuff, though it generally steers clear of the patriotic tripe that made JAG unwatchable.  Well, the parts that are attached to Catherine Bell were highly watchable, but that's about it.  Anyways, they manage to make some likeable characters who are enough to hide the fact that the plots are pretty cookie cutterish.  My wife is getting into The Good Wife as well, and while on paper I like the cast I generally hate courtroom dramas. 

Flash Forward is hopefully the next "water cooler thriller" in the mold of Lost.  I say hopefully because I spent the last three or four years unable to talk to circles of friends about the show because I saw the promos and said, "Pffff, they have the guy from Party of Five and one of the hobbitts trying to put a serious twist on Gilligan's Island."  If you're not watching it you should be.  The basic plot is that one day the entire population of the earth (almost all of it at least) loses consciousness for two minutes and seventeen seconds.  They awake with intense, vivid recollections of what would seem to be a shared vision of the future in six months.  Some visions are frightening, others comforting.  The biggest part of the show focuses on LA's FBI office attempting to sort out what the hell caused all of it.  It's all about the age old sci-fi play on the future, fate vs. determination, and whether trying to change the future simply reinforces it.  Joseph Fiennes takes over for Damien Lewis in the role of British actor playing an American law enforcement officer in a show that I really like.  The New Sulu, John Cho, plays his partner.  It's entertaining, it's tense, it's one of those shows that lends itself well to the nitpicking/obsessing/fine tooth combing of the internet age.

Then there's the returning faves, which are all doing well.  My lone concern is that I think How I Met Your Mother has lost a little zip off its fastball by trying to tame Barney.  I know that they couldn't have him as a cartoon character forever, but his infinite sleaziness was always the perfect accent to the other four more grounded characters.  It's still funnier than 95% of the stuff on TV right now, but it has fallen a step behind Big Bang Theory, which is hands down the funniest show at the moment.  Throw in the fact that The Amazing Race has somehow managed to find a way to find teams I don't hate and life is good.  Seems I'm watching a lot of CBS lately and somehow without seeing any CSI.  Seems like a mathematical impossibility.

Then there's the bitter sweetness of NBA League pass.  It's sweet because they've made some pretty kick ass upgrades this year, including a channel that gets me a league wide scoreboard at a glance.  The biggest improvement is that they are providing both the home and away feeds for games now, which means I will be able to get the glory that is Sean Elliott doing Spurs coverage all year round.  Woohoo!  The bitter part is that Comcast sucks.  A lot.  Basically the League Pass isn't really working all that well at the moment.  We got to sit and watch a dedicated Comcast tech pull apart just about every part of our cable trying to fix it.  I really felt for the guy because he was leaving no stone unturned in his efforts.  Then came the really wonderful news, we're gonna need a repair to come out and take care of the line.  So we've got a Friday morning appointment for that.  Anyone want to take bets on how they'll fuck this one up?

"I'm Not a Street Fighter...or a Prostitute."

That is an exact quote.  Pretty much the only situation where it could be considered a reasonable response would be if a woman was stopped by police on her way to a Halloween party while dressed as Chun Li.

Anyone who has read what I've had to write here on a regular basis knows that I am not a police officer (or a woman, much less one that would show off that much thigh or could pull off a pair of boots like that).  So if there is no logical reason that such a sentence should be uttered in my world, then why did I hear it?  I suspect my regular readers already know the answer.  Cue up the theme song!

He's business in the front, party in the back
Definitely high on something, but I don't think it's crack
On the crazy list he's number one with a bullet
Hey, what's that smell?  It's Methy McMullet!

(Sadly, our production values, like most all of our values, at KOTWM productions are pretty low.  Imagine that song sung by one of those all female trios or quartets you see singing "Boogey-Woogey Bugle Boy from Company B" in World War II period pieces.  I would have hired them to sing that here but we blew most of the budget hiring Simon and Garfunkel to write the song in the first place.)

Today's episode:  "MMA: Methy's Manicure Adventures!"

Unfortunately I walked in on this one about half way through so you're getting second hand accounts after talking to Blondie and Doc, who had the good luck to be in the office for his latest visit.  The unfortunate thing about me missing out is that you really lose a lot in translation with this guy.  In going back and reading some of the stuff I've written I feel like I have never been able to adequately communicate the strangeness of this creepy little man, but I'll try.  Because I love you all that much.  And because I am alone in the office and have nothing to do.  It's mostly because I love you though.

So a couple days ago our friendly neighborhood tweaker enters the office as usual looking for someone to take his case to.  The case in this case was that he felt the guy sitting next to him in the hair salon on campus was trying to threaten him or pick a fight or something like that.  ("...or something like that" is probably the most commonly used phrase whenever someone is trying to recount Methy's many meandering rants.  Trying to track this guy's train of thought is like riding with a stunt pilot.  You can only take so many twists and turns before you get completely disoriented or black out.)  Amazingly enough the setting of the story that he began to weave may have been the strangest thing about it.  It's hard to picture the man sporting the scuzziest mullet this side of the Daytona 500 in a hair salon.  He actually wasn't seeking hair care, but rather, in his words, "getting his nails did."  At this point Blondie let out a chuckle because she thought that he was joking about that, then she looked at his hands.  Sure enough, there were 10 little trimmed, buffed nails only an arm's length away from the least metrosexual head on the planet.  She felt kind of bad for laughing, as though he might take offense.  I wouldn't feel bad so much as worry that he would add us to the ever expanding shit list he has because it's only a matter of time before someone says, "Background check, schmackground check.  Here's your handgun, pal."

Anyways, once the initial shock of his manicure revelation they sat awaiting to see what boogeyman the meth paranoia had spawned this time.  Seems that a football player ended up in the chair next to him getting a hair cut and starting trying to talk to him about Ultimate Fighting.  I guess since we weren't there we weren't able to pick up on whatever threatening tone that was part of this.  Or something like that.  This was about the point where I walked in just in time to hear, "...but I'm like, I'm not into that garbage where two guys try to kill each other.  I study martial arts but I'm not a street fighter...or a prostitute."  Just my luck I was catching the very end where he asked who he needed to talk to about this.  He wasn't convinced that the campus police were the guys for the job.  For starters, in his eyes, they weren't very good at what they do and we were talking about something as serious as a threat of violence.  On top of that, since this guy was an athlete he figured that no one at the school was going to lift a finger against "this football thug guy who's running out of control, trying to pick fights all over the place.  I'm thinking the FBI is probably who I need to be calling."

After he left came the usual post visit pow-pow discussing just what the hell is wrong with that guy.  Blondie was in the middle of giving me a run down of her exchange with the guy.  "I tried a couple of times along the way to tell him that we really couldn't help him and that talking to the cops was the way to go and he just kept talking."  At that point the phone rang and she answered.  Her eyes bugged out and she said, "Yes, I remember you, sir....Sir?  Sir!  Really, I don't think there's anything we can help you with that the police can't..."

SING US OUT OF HERE GIRLS!

He's business in the front, party in the back
Definitely high on something, but I don't think it's crack
On the crazy list he's number on with a bullet
Hey, what's that smell?  It's Methy McMullet!

Oh What a Beautiful Morrrrrrrrrning

It's not really.  That's sarcasm.  I suspect the song title that I used for the title of this entry was written sarcastically as well since it was supposedly written about Oklahoma.  Let's face it, even with immaculate weather conditions it's not a beautiful morning when you step out of your trailer and have to step over least three piles of cow shit, beer cans, and drunk/dead roughnecks to get to your truck or Camaro.  That's not to say that the state is completely useless.  I once referred to all points north of Texas as a giant geographical foam cowboy hat that the state wears (making Mexico, Central America, and South America its kickass ZZ Top style beard).  On a smaller, more practical headwear metaphor scale Oklahoma is like Texas' shower cap.  Every year illegal immigrants cascade south across the 49th parallel intent on taking jobs away from hardworking American brewers, professional wrestlers, hockey players, and mounted policemen.  They flee their homeland's oppressive cold and the ever present danger of stepping on an old French colonial era beaver trap in search of a place where you don't have to shovel through a foot and a half of snow just to get from your bed to your toilet (going uphill both ways at that.)  So they naturally select bountiful non-frigidity of Texas as the destination their toothless, maple syrup soaked exodus.  Like a great human freight train powered purely by Molson they charge on through the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas.  With each state passing underfoot the promise of a new wonderful life seems so close they can reach out and touch it.  Then they hit Oklahoma and discover why it was the only logical terminus along something called the Trail of Tears.

Have you ever seen a speeding car crash and generally bust up into an unrecognizable heap?  That's what it would look like if the souls of these migrating canucks could be seen as they cross the border into my neighbor to the north.  The postal abbreviation is OK and I would fully support someone bringing suit against the postmaster general for false advertising.  They try to soldier on for a while, thinking, "It's a small state, eh.  If we just keep moving and keep our eyes on what's beyond we can make it, eh."  Soon, one by one, the sports car of their spirits all wrap themselves around the telephone pole that is the 46th state.  The lucky ones find the resolve to turn around and skate back home.  The less fortunate are left behind only to be captured and herded into re-education camps, the closest thing the state has to any sort of actual education program.  Within weeks they are all singing Toby Keith songs and develop painful psychological aversions to sleeves. So in that regard the state of Oklahoma does serve some purpose as sort of a buffer zone.  They also occasionally crank out a college team good enough to beat the Longhorns, who I hate.  More so it's the Longhorn fans' misery that I enjoy than any happiness for Oklahoma. 

Where was I going with this?  Oh yeah.  It rained a lot this morning. 

Not Up To Much, and I'm Down With That

What's going on here?  So very little, but that's not going to stop me from begging for attention on the world wide web.  I demand your adoration!!!!!!!!

-I spent this weekend living like a college student which is to say that I did six loads of laundry in row and the heaviest lifting I did in the kitchen was breaking out George Foreman's Lean, Mean, Fat Reducing Grilling Machine and making some burgers.  Damn good burgers too.  Mmmmmm.  The reason for such laundramatic measures is an upcoming visit from my mother in law, which is always nice.  The odd thing about it all is that she's coming into town, besides just to see us, for the purpose of getting a tattoo at the same parlor that my wife and I had ours done.  Oddly enough the last time that I heard she was thinking something along the lines of possibly a hummingbird somewhere on her, wait for it....lower back.  I think my wife just didn't have the heart to tell her the kind of reputation such tattoos carry with them.  Or maybe she knows and is already booking her tickets for Spring Break '10 in Cabo.  Either way, my mother in law is coming to Houston to get a tramp stamp.

-I don't like to think of myself as a prejudiced sort of fellow, but there are times where people are all but screaming for you to make assumptions about them.  Case in point: my wife and I were stepping out of a restaurant and walked past a gentleman with a mullet.  Now I don't want to say it's the official haircut of white trash, particularly this one.  Unlike our old pal Methy McMullet, this one was fairly well groomed and looked like it had been washed at least once during the Obama administration.  What sealed the deal was when I actually heard him speaking as we walked away.  He was singing the praises of the used Camaro he was getting ready to buy.  That combination settled it decisively.  It's like the poisons that the Jack Nicholson's Joker created in the 1989 Batman movie.  Individually toothpaste, deodorant, and shaving cream were harmless, but when used all together they became lethally toxic.  Same thing here.  It's possible that someone with a mullet is just wildly out of touch with fashionable haircuts.  It's possible that a Camaro enthusiast just has a liking for American cars with lots of power.  If you have a mullet and a Camaro?  It's not looking good for you.

-Had a guy come in yesterday looking to rent a car.  It was a little unusual but nothing too out there, at least at first.  We did what I expect most sane folk would do in this situation and offered to look up the number to Enterprise.  He was ready for this.  He had already talked to them and they wanted him to rent the car for a whole day.  What he needed was a car for three hours, tops.  He and his friend needed to go a total of about ten miles.
"Well sir, I don't think you're going to have any luck with any service like that.  Pretty much all the rental places require you rent it for a day."
"Oh, I know that.  I talked to a few of them.  What I need to know if you guys (me and Rookie) had a car that I could borrow.  I would be willing to pay you 30 dollars."
"Uhhh...."
"Oh no no no, sir.  I wouldn't expect you to just give me your car.  You could drive my friend and I to where we need to go and I would pay you the thirty dollars."

The request was odd enough but the guy was plenty weird himself.  For starters he didn't speak much english, which wasn't all that unusual for these parts.  What was unusual is that he looked to be of middle eastern descent but spoke with sort of a muddled eastern european accent like random Bond villains might have.  I really can't say which though worried me more: that this guy was looking for a short term, no strings chauffeur or the thought of this idiot leaving my office to randomly present his proposal to who knows what kind of characters.  Either scenario seemed equally likely to end in a robbery or murder.  I recalled the conversation to Fratty this morning.  I summed up my thoughts by saying, "The whole thing just felt kinda sketchy."
"Kinda?  There's no "kinda" about that guy.  He wasn't kinda sketchy, he was Etcha-sketchy."

-I've taken to using google's autocomplete as a quick spell checker on the occasional word or two.  When I couldn't remember if "interrupt" had one or two r's (it had two) I went there.  It was there that I discovered the most awesome piece of punctuation that "they" don't want you to know about.  I give you...

THE INTEROBANG!

It actually took some debating on my part as to whether or not I wanted to run the Google search for this new found word.  With the magic of the internet and enterprizing perverts around the world I had to admit that this could be some new kind of porn that I had never heard of before.  My immediate suspicion was that it pertained to sexy CIA agents getting it on with suspects during questioning.  So if Michael Douglas had just gone ahead and nailed Sharon Stone right then and there when she flashed her beaver in Basic Instinct, he would have been interobanging her.  Ultimately I chose to trust that Google would not steer me wrong or add anything that would get me fired into the search history.  Turns out I was right.  What you see before you is a modern day super-punctuation mark made by splicing the DNA of a question mark and an exclamation point.  Seems it was the brainchild of an adman in the 1960s but never really caught on.  Instead, we remain slaves to the Big Ink and Keyboard industry which forces us to wear out our toner cartridges and keys faster by having to use superfluous punctuation when asking exclamatory questions.  Oddly enough I think this has auditory applications as well.  Like in soap operas when they have asinine lines like, "You mean...Hartman is still alive!?!?!?" that are usually followed by some sort of dramatic crash of music.  I move that that musical boom be rechristened as an interobang.  We're bringing this thing back!  Whose with me

-And the Rollercoaster Coogs are on an upswing, cresting back up to #23 in the national rankings following a win against Mississippi St.  Somehow the same team that gave up 300+ yards to friggin' UTEP last week managed to hold a running attack that averages over 200+ yards per game in check.  I really don't know how the hell they did it.  And in reading some quotes from the head coach in the school paper yesterday I'm not convinced he knows how it happened either.  When I saw the final score my assumption was that the Coogs offense scored early and often enough to force the Bulldogs into a more passing heavy mindset, but in fact it seems they stumbled out of the gate and fell behind early.  Seems the defense just suddenly put it all together.  Next week the game is in New Orleans against Tulane who are a perennial conference punching bag.  Here's hoping for a second straight week nestled happily in the rankings.

Cheating the State, the System, and Death

Cheaters never win.  Unless you count the Patriots, the Lakers, the Yankees, Republicans, Democrats, NASCAR drivers, creative tax consultants, at least half of the medal winners in the modern Olympics, competitive cyclists, and most of the World Cup competitors.  I don't count these things, mostly because any sort of mathematical exertion on my part gives me headaches.  I'll leave that to the felt vampires of the world. 

At present I'm supposed to make sure all the worker monkeys take some on line training courses.  It's bullshit.  I know it, they know it, my superiors know it, and it would seem their superiors know it.  It's a bunch of CYA garbage that the ever present threat of litigation forces us into.  "True or false: The misuse of university funds, facilities, or equipment for personal use is an ethics violation and a form of fraud."  Dumb shit like that.  Basically the bureaucracy realized they couldn't legislate common sense so they do their best to give themselves a legal way to avoid being blamed when their employees don't have it.  The worst that any of the monkeys could do is steal a 7 year old stapler from the office.  Oh the horror of it all!

My superiors know it's bullshit because they printed out the correct answers to the "assessment tests" that are supposed to come at the end of the lessons and distributed them to the entire staff.  In theory an employee should either watch the training videos embedded in the lesson or read through the 20-30 powerpoint style slides, which would take about 15 minutes if you're really paying attention.  Or you can do what we're doing, skip to the test, and ace all five of them in about ten minutes total.  If they didn't want us to cheat they wouldn't make is so damn easy, right?

The reason I say that my superiors' superiors know it's bullshit is because they have offered the first department to get all of their employees to finish these things an ice cream party.  Yes, an ice cream party.  A state institution with 37,000 students is motivating its employees like fourth graders.  I don't know which is more ridiculous: the offer or the fact that it's working.  Since yesterday I've had three calls from my boss' office to check up on the monkeys' progress.   It's milk, sugar, ice, and some other stuff!  Seriously!

It's not all bad news for me however.  This morning at Wendy's I got a free meal.  Basically they rang it up wrong and rather than actually going through the whole song and dance of voiding the sale to redo it they just waved me off when I tried to pay and gave me the food.  Take that, Wendy, you greedy pig-tailed whore!

Then there's all the H1N1 hysterics.  The flu is bad, I get that.  The whole world could stand to be a more hygienic place.  I won't ever deny that.  However I now have enough hand sanitizer to kill not just a horse, but probably the entire field of competitors at the Kentucky Derby and their jockeys.  That's not hyperbole either.  At present I have a filled up gallon sized dispenser sitting on the counter for any idiots who want to wonder in and get some.  There's a smaller one mounted on the wall by the employee entrance for me and monkeys.  There's a work order being processed that will get a second of those wall dispensers installed on the front side of the counter for the general public.  Finally, sitting in the corner, making this place look like a microbaphobe's fallout shelter, are 20 boxes containing nearly 1000 4 oz. bottles of hand sanitizer.  If this flu spread world wide my office is going to end up being the last hope for humanity.  We'll board up the windows and do this shit Alamo style if it comes to that.  As it stands I know that the small bottles will probably be the best way to keep the office germ free.  Not so much because I can carry one with me at all times, but because I intend to empty out a number of the bottles, fill them will gravel, and throw them as hard as I can at anyone with a runny nose that so much as looks at me. 

-And on an unrelated note, Obama wins a Nobel Peace Prize?  What the fuck?  I was ready to say that these lost a lot of legitimacy when they Arafat one a few years back, but in actually reading some of these stories today I realized it probably took a bigger hit when they gave Teddy Roosevelt one in 1906.  Probably scared of the big stick he was carrying.  I hope he earns it with his remaining time in office.