However, sometimes the attempts to teach a young demon-vessel civilized manners can backfire. Take the case of a friend of mine, who had spent time teaching his three year old daughter that giving compliments is a good thing.

Most of the time the compliments had been harmless. “I like your shirt Mommy” or “I like your cooking Nana” was the order of the day, and was always reinforced with a “thank you” or a “that’s very nice!” At least until the day my friend was in the bathroom when his three year old came in behind him. He’s not shy, and potty training was only recently taking hold so he let it fly. Unfortunately for him, he had no sooner started to go when he heard her say five words:
“I like your penis daddy”
I don’t know about you, but that would be enough to make me stop mid-stream and reconsider my life choices.

Still… how do you respond to that? You have to be very careful with your reactions around a three year old. If you say “NO, dont say that!” then they will wonder why and it will come out at the wrong time. If you laugh, it will be the only thing they say for a week. You can just imagine what would happen if a child were to start yelling “I like your penis daddy” at Wal-Mart hoping for a quick laugh from passers-by.

But thankfully he opted to just say “thank you” and let it drop. At least until his wife came home. His wife thought it was hilarious and cracked up about it for quite some time. Then she told all of her friends, and suddenly he has a new nickname. He is now known as “Daddy” whenever her and her friends get together.

But hey, it could be worse…

I mean, seriously, have you ever had problems with animals coming out of your pipes? Have you ever seen a place that had pipes just strewn about randomly outdoors where they would do no good at all? Have you ever just suspended a pipe from your ceiling for the hell of it? Plus, I’m sure the EPA would be damn interested to hear about all the pipes just randomly gorging their contents into the water reservoirs. No wonder some of the fish can fly there.

Even going back to the original 1983 Mario bros… crabs coming out of the pipes? I mean, I know some of you have crabs going into your pipes (you know who you are) but has anyone ever seen crabs coming out of them? No wonder Mario spits fire.

I lose faith in humanity somewhere between the discharge and the Indian smelling.

If you’re interested in how the “Google Suggest” feature works, check out this page on Google for more information.

For the record, Google Suggest has helped many on the Pen forum realize that they hate people too! I finally have some people that agree with me that people suck.

Its too bad I hate them all.

Dr. Washington, What Would Minnie Think?

Characters

• Socrates, a Greek
• Dr. Ellis Washington, professor of law and political science at Savannah State University
• God, a god (mute part)
• Ghost of Stephen Douglass, a ghost (mute part)

~ Dialog ~

Socrates: Welcome, professor Washington. We are gathered here today to examine your life, and find out whether you feel remorse for what you have done.

Dr. Washington: {confident} I believe that I have done nothing to feel remorse for.

Socrates: Did you not write a dramatic dialog in which you put words into the mouth of a dead person? Words which any child knows he obviously would not have said?

Dr. Washington: Yes, I did.

Socrates: Do you feel no remorse for so cheap a rhetorical gimmick?

Dr. Washington: {remorsefully} Yes, I feel profoundly remorseful. It was the disputative equivalent of finding a picture of the man, and drawing on a Hitler mustache.

Socrates: Do you have anything to say in your defense?

Dr. Washington: {defensively} I often gratify myself sexually with a stuffed Mickey Mouse doll, to which I have attached a dildo.

God: {raises eyebrows}

Dr. Washington: Well I say a dildo, but it’s really more a kind of an arrangement of dildos. Its construction was quite involved.

Socrates: Let’s stick to the rhetorical issues. Pretty grade-school, isn’t it? Putting words into the mouths of those you disagree with and then responding?

Dr. Washington: {weeping} Oh, God! I’m sorry, so very, very sorry. Is there no redemption for me!?

God: {examines fingernails of left hand}

Socrates: Let you now submit to your judgment.

Ghost of Stephen Douglass: {teabags Washington vigorously}

Dr. Washington: It may a bit late to bring this up, but perhaps I should mention that I also gratify myself sexually by having short men put their…

Socrates: Thank you Dr. Washington, I think we’re finished.

Dr. Washington: {resignation, utter despair, profound silence, facial expression belying douchebaggishness}

FIN

One is practically driven to lament: O tempora o mores! (Oh Times, oh Daily Mirror!)

I had high hopes though. Not only were we seated immediately when every restaurant nearby was busy, but the waitress gave the six of us a single menu to share amongst us. I remember thinking to myself “How much more perfect can this place get?”

That’s when it happened… that’s when a woman left the kitchen and started to clean a booth nearby.

She was a vision, sashaying around in blue hair and support hose. This beauty couldn’t have been a day over 95. After teasing us all by bending over the table and ineffectually wiping parts of it off, she looked over her shoulder and her eyes caught mine. She lifted her face up to the ceiling and said in a husky voice that reached the ceiling tiles “We have Pepsi products” before knocking a piece of lettuce to the floor and moving on to the next booth. Off in the distance, tomorrow’s special barked.

I was smitten. I knew at that moment that I was in love with Pepsi. This woman proclaiming that her establishment was not only carrying Pepsi products, but doing so exclusively, well that only drove my desire that much more.

Suddenly one of my companions turned to me and asked me what was wrong. My reply was simple: “How can anything be wrong? We have Pepsi products”.

What a perfect day.

I come to you with a fresh warning:
Do not watch the Disney channel immediately after viewing a large quantity internet pornography.

Kim Possible and The Emporer’s New School may take on subtexts that get kind of creepy. Its even creepier than a 30 year old man watching them to begin with…

I’d make an excuse about the remote being across the room, but I’d be lying. That shit is engrossing.

My question is this: Has anyone that was proposed to over Twitter actually accepted?

Related: How many homicides have occurred thanks to Twitter marriage proposals?

Wait, let me start over.

People these days. No respect. We’re a species of spoiled brats. I often bitch about this indirectly when I see anyone start exhibiting behavior that personifies a complete lack of acknowledgment about how privileged a person is or how retarded it is that they are bitching about a specific [noun]. Louis CK recently did a better job at this when he bitched about it, essentially because I usually start berating someone in an effort to make them feel bad rather than make them laugh.

As much as I bitch about this, though, I do it as well. Last week, I was complaining about my slow, 3-year-old cell phone. Here I am, holding a computer that is much more powerful than the one that first landed on the moon, and I am bitching because it sometimes takes a few seconds to respond to a keypress.

I am slowly growing more and more convinced that, as time passes, the human race is getting soft.

There appeared to be two coarse, curly hairs growing out of my ear. Upon closer examination I found that their roots were based on my ear lobe, but the effect was disturbing. My ear was growing pubes. Not Isaac Asimov style ear pube/mutton chops, but full-on pubes on the ear lobe itself.

Suddenly images jumped into my mind of my grandfather decomposing on his recliner with fistfuls of hair growing out of his ears. Then suddenly my face was superimposed on that image, with fistfuls of ear-pubes instead of gray old-man hair.

Two minutes with tweezers eliminated the threat for now, but I know that the ear-pubes will be back. I have a feeling that this was a colonization party from the hair on my back.

My back hair has adopted its own manifest destiny, and vows to take over my entire body. It has slowly been climbing my shoulders and waging war with the hair on my chest. Its been moving south, clearcutting the forest of hair on my legs and replacing it with its own scraggly high-rises. The mountaintops of my ass are too cold and barren for the hair now, but it has found a valley where it has integrated with the natives, growing strong hybrids that will some day terraform the high altitude areas.

I have been conquered, and the hair on my head knows it. There are signs that some areas have begun to emigrate, leaving behind nothing but my scarred and dented pate. The fuckers are salting the earth as they go though, so even the ear pubes and back hair wont be able to move there in the future.

Such is my fate… I shall become a Sasquatch by the time I’m 50, except for my battle-scarred head. Some trick of my mutt-genetics has managed to combine all of the various undesirable hair features of my lineage into a single tidy package.

Thats all for now. I need to finish combing my knuckles before my hair dries.

“You know, some people’s lives hit their peak in high school. Those are the people that will repeat any High School story they can think of to anyone that will listen. Whenever they recognize someone from their High School past these people will automatically pounce on them because they can relive High School moments. They will never leave their home town. They’ll always be yearning for the glory days of High School all over again.

“Then, there are the people who absolutely hated High School. Those are the people at this party tonight. Most of us lost track of all but a few High School friends, and we generally dont recognize or dont like the other people when they pounce on us to tell their stories.

At first I just kind of shrugged them off politely and tried to find something non-alcoholic to drink since I had to drive home. Mostly I shrugged them off because I didn’t completely hate High School… Certainly I hated parts of it, and I definitely hate people in general. However, by my Junior year I had learned which classes I could skip without getting marked absent and that made the rest seem downright tolerable.

But then a few nights ago I got good and drunk and had some time to think about that statement again. Suddenly I hated this stranger for making me dwell on the past. It was irrational, sure… but using drunk logic it made perfect sense. Yes, I hated High School. I dont mind admitting that, but something about the implications the stranger tied to hating High School made it sound elitist and stupid.

Then I realized that the stranger was using drunk logic as well. This made it even out… in fact two wrongs made a right!

I finally let the statement go and began to focus on figuring out which brand of diet cola went best with my rum.

I started out taking notes and attempting to apply the scientific method to my drinking, so that the process could be replicated for additional tests. Unfortunately after a few experiments I cant read my notes. Obviously my methods are flawed, and I need to find someone to dictate to.

Heh. I said dictate.

There is a also a school of thought that people should mind their own damn business and leave a person to their own devices.

Unfortunately extremes in either direction can be a bad thing. If you don’t know your neighbors then when a situation arises in which you are forced to interact with them you will be caught off guard.

Take this situation, that a friend of mine recently described when he allowed a neighbor to borrow his restroom facilities.

**Knock Knock**

Man: Yes?

Woman: Excuse me, I live upstairs and my apartment’s bathroom is being worked on. Can I use yours please?

Man: Oh, sure. Please go ahead.

Woman: Thank you.

Sounds innocent enough, right? Well, lets revisit that scene about 10 minutes later.

Woman: Excuse me, where do you keep your poop stick?
Man: Poop stick?

Woman: Yes. A stick for pushing the poop down when its too big for the drain… I’ll go get mine.

Man: Oh wow.

So my question is… is a poop stick a common household item? Can it also be used to club rodents and punish your children? Can it be used to club children and punish your rodents?

Do you rinse it off when you’re done?

My mind reels.

In the end everyone could agree that calling a Pepsi “Coke” was stupid, but no one could let bygones be bygones and agree that soda or pop were equally valid.

Then somehow the topic changed to drinking fountains instead.

See, many in Wisconsin call a drinking fountain a “Bubbler”. This is due to the Kohler company, which is based in Wisconsin. The first drinking fountains were called bubblers, but thanks to Kohler patenting the term its use is limited to certain areas that adopted the bubbler early. In those areas it is used much like “Kleenex” or… well… “Coke”

After a few minutes of arguing about bubblers I had to put a stop to the conversation. Again, we’ve all had conversations like this before. They didn’t have anything new to lend to it and their minds were made up already. So I came out and said “I dont call it bubbler or drinking fountain. I call it ‘Whites Only’ because thats what it says on the sign”.

My friends got quiet and started to look around nervously. They didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

I added something new to the conversation at least.

Plus we avoided the whole “ATM vs TYME machine” conversation.

Bad Taste doesn't just come in beverage form.

In this age of email, laser printers, and text messages kidnappers just dont have to expend as much effort in their demands any longer. Its relatively simple for them to just log on to to some public computer and send a message from the victims hotmail account. If they are really lazy they can just send a text message from the victims phone. That’s hardly a challenge at all.

Its the death of an art form! There was something special about a kidnapper that would take the time to scour through their old issues of Playboy or Boy’s Life to find letters or words that matched their message. In fact, the magazines they picked were part of the art form! We’re not talking some bullshit modern art thing like that old goldfish in a blender shtick. We’re talking a real devotion to their craft.

Besides, it really makes me look old fashioned to all the other kidnappers out there.

Oh… I dont know if getting that cat high is such a good idea. Its probably going to act like its in heat and eat all the cat food.

Wow. Its running in circles…

Its still running in circles…

It better spin the other way soon or I’m going to get dizzy.

What I said:

Hehehehe. Kitty zoom.

When I’ve been drinking there seems to be a larger disconnect between my brain and my mouth than normal.