Last weekend I took my dog out to a dog park despite some recently wet weather. Other than the smell of wet dog, the trip was a success and a good time was had by all. However, when I stopped for gas on the way home I didn’t count on the go leaving its normal blanket-covered seat in the back and curling up in the drivers seat. Suddenly my seat was covered in a wet puddle that smelled like a lovely combination of swamp and wet dog. Thankfully my drive home was relatively short, and after I got home I promptly gave the dog a bath and changed my clothes.
The problem didn’t come until Monday morning.
See, I had forgotten that my car smelled strongly of wet dog and swamp mud, and (as usual) I was leaving my house with almost no time to spare). So without a second thought I grabbed a bottle of Febreeze and sprayed the hell out of the driver seat, giving a good misting to the rest of the car for good measure.
I didn’t smell wet dog or swamp during my drive in to work, so I thought I did good. However, about an hour into my day when the office manager walked into my work room and complimented me on my new cologne. I was very confused, since I had not put on any cologne that morning. I started to say that I wasn’t wearing cologne when I realized what the smell was and promptly tried to change the topic.
The office manager would not let up though… she saw through my ruse and insisted on knowing what type of cologne I was wearing.
I thought about lying, and just giving the name of the cologne I occasionally wear. I thought about making something up that would be unverifiable. But in the end I decided to just spit out the truth. “Uh… its Febreeze, actually”.
She looked horrified and began to back out of the room. In retrospect I’m not completely sure what she was thinking, but I think she took my comment to mean that I was using Febreeze in place of proper laundering.
Her reaction made me panic, and I started to blurt out the story about the wet dog. But after about 30 seconds of blubbering I finally just said “Look, the story doesn’t matter, just know that I coated my car seat in Febreeze this morning”.
But apparently the story did matter. Because I think she went from thinking that I didn’t do any laundry to suspecting that I recreated a Febreeze commercial by keeping my car full of disgusting trash that needed to have its odor masked. I gave up at that point and just ushered her out of my work room and tried to get on with my day.
By strange coincidence though, the office supply closet did have a couple bottles of Febreeze in it on Friday. I put some on just for good measure.
When I was a young child my mother seemed to have a theory about disease: Feed a cold, force-feed a flu.
As a result, I can remember many times where she would send me to bed, but put a paper bag (double-bagged) next to the bed for me to throw-up in in the likely occurrence that I couldn’t make it down the stairs and across the house to the bathroom. (Plus one of the other members of the house was likely to be in there when a sick person needed to puke anyway). This went on until I was 12 and we moved into a house with more than one bathroom.
However, I can also remember one day when I was nine when I overheard my mother on the kitchen phone complaining about how my little sister being sick was really stressful and she hated it. As a result, when my sisters contagion hit me a day later I decided that I would set up the bags myself rather than burden my mother. Despite a mild fever and frequent nausea I just pretended that I was well and apparently no one was the wiser.
Well, it seemed that my plan worked… when I had a sudden episode of puking later that evening I couldn’t make it to the bathroom and used the conveniently placed bags. However, I also didn’t know what to do with the puke-filled sack so I just left it next to my bed.
All was good for about two days. At that point the smell of two-day-old puke actually began to make me feel sick again, so I took the bags to the kitchen and threw them in the household trash. My mother saw me, and said (I quote): “I was wondering when you were going to throw that disgusting smelling shit away.”
I forget what the point of this story was.
I think I was going to attempt to draw some parallels between a 9 year old puking and the sequester… but when I think about it the sequester is more like the 9 year old waiting until the smell of the puke made him ill again before cleaning up his mess. Either way, I think I’m going to be sick.
In some parts of the world (particularly Catalonia) placing figurines discreetly shitting in the nativity is a tradition going back centuries. Its been happening for so long that most of the explanations for its origins are lost to history.
But that isn’t the only tradition that Catalonia has with Christmas defecation! Take this amusing tidbit about the “Shit log of Christmas” or Tió de Nadal.
Tronca (“log”) popularly called Caga tió (“shitting log”), is a character in Catalan mythology relating to a Christmas tradition widespread in Catalonia. Beginning with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8), one gives the tió a little bit to “eat” every night and usually covers him with a little blanket so that he will not be cold at night.
On Christmas day or, depending on the particular household, on Christmas Eve, one puts the tió partly into the fireplace and orders it to “shit”. To make him “shit”, one beats him with sticks, while singing various songs of Tió de Nadal.
My favorite thing about the Christmas shit log are the traditional songs:
Shit log,
shit nougats,
hazelnuts and cottage cheese,
if you don’t shit well,
I’ll hit you with a stick,
shit log!
Shit log,
log of Christmas,
don’t shit herrings,
which are too salty,
shit nougats,
which are much better!
I suppose I shouldn’t be too shocked. After all, some of the original American and British fairy tales were really fucked up prior to being sanitized over the last 100 years or so. But I cant remember any that deal with shit quite in the way that Catalonian tradition does!
Moving away from Christmas for a moment, I wanted to give honorable mention to the story of Patufet. Much like the Tom Thumb stories some of us may be familiar with, Patufet is abnormally small. In fact, he is the size of a grain of rice and wears a smurf hat.
In one story, Patufet is eaten by an ox. While inside of the ox he consoles his parents with the following verse:
I’m in the ox’s tummy
Where it doesn’t snow or rain.
When the ox farts
Patufet will get out
That is some good shit right there, and on that note I must take my leave. If you need me I’ll be playing games on my iPad while in the bathroom. As the Catalans say: Eat well, shit a good deal and don’t be afraid of death!
Pussy Riot is a Russian punk band that some readers of our forums will be familiar with already. A few selections of their work are really quite impressive, even to those of us that don’t speak the language.
But I’m really posting this because of the headline:
Pussy Riot Denied Bail
The three activists were arrested in March after allegedly staging a flash mob-style protest at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior on Feb. 21. Dressed in the group’s signature scanty clothing and brightly colored balaclavas, Russian authorities say they and another performer walked up to the altar and launched into an impromptu performance of their anti-Putin, anti-church “punk prayer.”
Parishioners and church officials hustled the women off of the altar in less than five minutes. A few days later, Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Samutsevich were charged with “hooliganism.” If convicted, they face up to seven years in prison.
About a two months ago I planted a bush on the side of my house near the property line. This space was once a flowerbed, and is only about ten steps away from the street. I had grown tired of caring for the sickly plants that were there, and I figured if nothing else a bush would give me some illusion of privacy when I sat out in my yard on nice evenings.
Why am I writing about shrubbery? Am I going to turn this into a gardening blog? Well, no. Is this really just a complicated Monty Python Joke? Not really. Am I going to use a lot of puns involving pubic hair? Absolutely, but that is not the primary reason for the story. The primary reason for typing this is because my neighbors are fucking with me.
See, five weeks ago while watering my plants I noticed that several branches on the new bush appeared to be dying. Upon closer examination, I found that the branches had been cleanly cut, and only appeared upright because they were just tangled in the other branches.
At first I was just wondering if I had pruned poorly, or if my wife had accidentally pruned healthy bits off the bush. But then a week later, two more branches were cut and left next to the bush. This time one of them was cut, and the other was broken in a way that stripped the bark back all the way to the root. I knew at this point someone was fucking with me.
I began to get a little paranoid, and started to check on the plant three or four times a day. I was watering obsessively as an excuse to go and look at it in hopes of catching a neighbor walking around with a pruning shears. I had nightmares where I walked outside to find all of my neighbors turning into roses and peonies and then having sex with orchids.
…Wait, strike that last sentence. That dream was just because I fell asleep watching The Wall..
Anyway, the last straw was three weeks ago. I came home from work and found that there was only one branch upright in the bush. Just one branch. The message in this had gone beyond “fuck with me” and right into “Fuck you, we hate you” territory. My bush had been trimmed into the hedge equivalent of a landing strip and they didn’t even have the decency to shave the taint. At that point I was certain that someone in my neighborhood was rubbing one out at the thought of making me upset.
Needless to say it was working.
When I got into the house I immediately started digging through old totes looking for webcams. I pulled together enough parts to build a computer to set up in my garage. Then I stayed up all night setting up the computer and mounting these old webcams on the side of my house with stupidly-long USB extension cables.
I dubbed my creation the bush-cam, and now I was able to check on my bush at all hours of the day just by looking at a website.
It was at this point that the damage to the bush stopped. This makes it worse for me… I had actually put a lot of emotional attachment to getting proof that someone was fucking with me, even though I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do with that proof once I had it.
Confronting someone seemed like a bad idea, there would be no possible positive outcome. Suing someone seemed like it was too expensive. Matching them at their own game just seemed like something that would escalate or get me arrested. Chances are I would probably just post it on the internet and whine about how unfair life was. (By the way, have I mentioned that life is unfair? Yes? Oh, good).
So I figure that the lack of activity means that either my nocturnal activities must have been witnessed or whoever was fucking with me had been satisfied with the final ‘fuck you’. In either case, this evening I shut down the bush cam with nothing to show for it except grainy pictures of rabbits fucking.
*sigh*
To think, just a few years ago grainy pictures of rabbits fucking would have been enough.
A warning for those that may have their Windows 7 Updates set to automatically install the optional updates: For some reason, Microsoft added “Bing Desktop” to the Windows Update optional updates last week.
In case you’re not familiar with this horrible peice of software, imagine a combination of a search engine bar, Browser Hijacker malware, and a Win98 “Active Desktop” virus.
The concept is that that rather than opening a browser or having a search bar, you get a giant Bing search box right smack dab in the center of your desktop. Dont want it in the center? No problem! You can have it in the top of your screen too!
So what happens when you type a search into the box? Does it search your emails or files like the already built-in windows desktop search? Nope. Does it figure out based on contect wether you need to open a map app or schedule something on your calendar like Apple’s Siri? Nope. It just opens a browser with the search results. Wow. What a time saver! Yep… It opens my browser right up so I can use my google search bar to actually find what I’m looking for.
Now, at least the crappy software comes a feature that I may actually have found useful… the ability to set your desktop image to be the “Bing image of the day”. If I could do that without the damn Bing search box I may not have removed it. Of course, when you remove it… it shows back up in the optional updates.
The only way to prevent this software from prompting you every time is to right-click on the update and select “Hide Update”.
Being a dead controversial figure does not come without unintended consequences. I’ve started to see the following on several news/blog aggregate sites:
Largely due to his reputation, some reporters appeared hesitant to repeat word of his death out of fear that it may have been a hoax.
That really brings up an interesting point. Why haven’t we seen a death certificate? I can not accept that Breitbart is dead until someone shows me a long form death certificate that has been notarized by a caretaker in the Reagan library.
But just in case he is dead… Andrew Breitbart, how should we eulogize thee? Should we treat you with the respect we normally set aside for the dead, honoring the person and temporarily forgetting politics and personal views?
Well, actually yes.
Of course, we cant discount things like this…
Andrew Breitbart, a Washington Times columnist who oversees Breitbart.com and BigHollywood.com, tapped into the anti-Kennedy vein in the hours after the senator’s death was announced, posting a series of Twitter messages in which he called Kennedy a “villain,” a “duplicitous bastard” and a “prick.”
“I’m more than willing to go off decorum to ensure THIS MAN is not beatified,” Breitbart wrote. “Sorry, he destroyed lives. And he knew it.”
(From Politico.com, regarding Breitbart after Ted Kennedy’s death)
Huh. Ironic, no? But still, no sense in taking a grade school mentality about this. I can hardly call him names just because he did it first.
