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.

Sometimes I have to post things just because they make me smile. The grinders on the guitars is just icing on the cake.

(Stolen from Weis in the forum).

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!

(Thanks to Dave for the Caganer source).

Alternatively, would you like the opportunity to see if the firewall or web filter at your place of business blocks attempts to connect to web IRC?

Well then, I’ve got a solution for you! Either fire up your favorite IRC client or click on this finely crafted link HERE!

Get your pen fix in real time! Chat with fellow pen readers and staff! Sometimes you may even find people that aren’t just idling!

Enjoy!

Then compare, if you will, this youtube video of a classic Sesame Street guest:

I love it when life imitates art.

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.

Read the full article here

Seven years in prison for ‘hooliganism’? Wow. I guess the judge didn’t like the song.

When it comes to riots though, you cant go wrong with a teenage riot.

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.

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”.

You can find more information here.

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.

Unless he isn’t dead. I haven’t seen proof yet.

Of course, logically I know this couldn’t be the case… people are, in addition to being sick and horrible creatures that will always find new and different ways to get off, only human. Plus, anyone who has ever been 12 years old has more imagination about sex than the average Jane Austin novel would lead us to believe.

But I digress. I stayed home from work recently and spent quite a bit of time hopping through the internet in a way I haven’t done in quite some time. While reading about James Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake (which I still have very little desire to read) I happened upon a reference to love letters that the author and his lover had written to each other. Apparently only Joyce’s letters remain, though his lovers letters were apparently even more graphic and descriptive.

Below the cut, an excerpt of the Joyce letters.

Joyce’s estate has managed to keep the letters from being published since 1970, but there are many excerpts available online. The most complete collection I’ve found is HERE.

As for graphic descriptions, it beats the hell out of anything the era of instant messaging has given us. Although I have to admit some of the lines kind of make me queasy.

Here is just an example:

My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter.

I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if a gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual, fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside.

You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her.

I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

So I thought I had a quest: Pornographic love letters throughout history! Then one of our faithful forum members linked me to this. I made it through about a third of the book before I gave up and began to weep for mankind. Then I used to tears to lubricate my self abuse.

I suddenly want to grudge-fuck the whole of humanity.

I found that night soil is the soil recovered from places outhouses used to (or still currently) stand. During the period of time that outhouses were in use, they had to be cleaned frequently (or moved to a new location). Cleaning became more common as the ‘night soil’ was found to be valuable for crops. Even more valuable once they started to compost or treat it before application so that disease and worms stopped spreading through the food

It was supposedly called night soil because the workers collecting it would do so at night. Basically it was a polite reference to a product that may not always have been completely composted when it was collected.

As more and more houses got plumbing through the 1960′s, the pits were sometimes cleaned one last time…and sometimes they weren’t.

So, that led me to find that there is a whole culture in ‘privy digging’. Who knew there were so many young bottle collectors digging up old outhouse pits?

My first though was that its strange what people will do for an off chance at finding some old bottles. My second thought was that they must not find much since I had just read about how valuable ‘night soil’ was for a period in history. My third thought was wondering if they could still find any kernels of corn. Heh. Corn.

Well, it turns out even the emptied privy pits had a lot of bottles… someone picked out the bottles from the (sometimes soupy) mess when they emptied them, and frequently threw them back in. Plus of course, even when there was a market for night soil it doesn’t mean that a family didn’t still just dig a new hole and move the outhouse, particularly if they were in the country and lined their pit with wood rather than stone/brick.

Finally, let me just say for the record: It is crazy how many websites are dedicated to outhouses, pit toilets, and privy digging. Holy Crap (pun intended).

Yes, its an old story. I just read it recently. Get the fuck off my lawn.

Just in case you’re missing Reddit during their outage I’d like to share a lovely screenshot that came from there thanks to the fine folks at the pen forum. Besides, it kind of fits in with what this site is sometimes known for… dirty old men and incest.

(Click the image for the full size).

So on Sunday I noticed one of my cats had stopped pooping, and I realized there may be a problem. On Monday it started to produce again, but unfortunately its output dial seemed to be stuck on vomit instead of poop. I gave in, and resigned myself on a visit to the cat mechanic.

Thankfully there was an opening for Monday afternoon, and the mechanic was able to identify the problem after a minor examination.

It turns out that the cat must have had some… digestive problems… that resulted in poop getting stuck in the hair around its anus. This happened enough times in a row to form a strange hair-and-poop plug over its anus, and eventually prevented the cat from pooping.

This is apparently known as an anal cap. I prefer to call it an ass hat.

Suffice it to say I was happy that the poop machine was easy to repair. I’ve grown attached to this one, and this really isn’t the time of year to go shopping for a new one.

20 minutes later I had a very relieved cat and a bill for shaving the ass cap off the cats ass.

Now if (for some reason) you are curious about what could have happened to the cats internal systems during this ordeal, imagine what happens to a car when a banana is shoved in its tailpipe.

On a related note, I present to you, Beverly Hills Cop in one minute: