Searching the final frontier

Once again, it's time for Fantastic Searches That Somehow Led People To My Site jolly anger candy - I just liked this typo. It made me laugh. what is a man servant? - Ask Scott, and you will have your answer. status of leprosy in sulu - I didn't know that Sulu even had leprosy. Well let's take a look: Actually, I think I do see something. Oh, wait -- my mistake. That's not leprosy. I think that's just a little spot of man-nip. 

dangling and swollen nodes on labia - Just a crazy thought, but if your clitoris is over five inches long, maybe you're a dude. thigh butthole - This could be kind of a handy thing to have, actually. No more sitting down in the bathroom, for starters. And it would be much easier to surreptitiously scratch....so I'm thinking there would be many benefits to having that thing closer to the front. Maybe some geneticists could get on that. Give mother nature a little boost in the evolution department. dark patches on inner thighs of overweight people - wait just a second...could it be? Are fat people the evolutionary vanguard of the human race? what does a country look like when it is in shambles? what are shambles? - A shambles is the state in which you left your grade school education. is hydrogen poisonous, or helpful? - Well that all depends. Are you combining it with oxygen, or a couple of European guys name of Teller & Ulam? It makes a difference. why do testicles turn brown? - My advice is to get your brown nuts to a doctor as soon as possible, because as a general rule, testicles do not turn brown on their own. That is a key point, actually -- On their own. There are many things that could quite possibly make them turn brown, however there is usually some dipping or other direct involvement on the part of the testicle owner.

Procylon vs. Enzyte: Smackdown!

OK, so it appears that Enzyte has some stiff competition these days. I was listening to the radio on the way home from Boston, and I heard no less than ten commercials for this herbal supplement called Procylon, which has all the standard longer, fuller, firmer claims that Enzyte makes.

The reason I thought this commercial was hilarious is because they toss another claim in there that I've never heard before:

"Longer, fuller, firmer, more frequent erections!"

I can only speak for myself here, but the marketing department seems to be missing the mark a little bit. If I were having erectile dysfunction issues, the one thing I wouldn't care so much about is frequency.

I just want it to work when I need it to -- I don't necessarily need more of them.

I don't want to be walking through the international foods aisle at the supermarket, minding my own business, and suddenly --- THWACK! -- knock a box of Ortega taco shells off the shelf.

I'd be thinking, "Son of a bitch! Not another one! That's like my 13th today! You'd think once or twice I'd actually be in a position to use the damn thing when it happens, but no."

What if I happened to be looking at the Apolo Ohno Wheaties Box at the time, or even worse, at Captain Crunch or Frankenberry? That shit could scar you for life, not to mention the fact that if anyone saw you, they would probably call the police.

So listen up, Procylon marketing department -- stop trying to pitch me on frequency, ok? Unless your pill can get me more frequent opportunities for sex along with more frequent erections, we have nothing to talk about.

Smenita is pissing me off.

I can't seem to comment on anyone's blog tonight -- I keep getting the same verification word, even after clearing my cache, and the effing blogger program won't take it. I guess Smenita wins this round. Russian bitch.

I am currently sitting in a hotel on the outskirts of Boston because I have been at a training session this week. It's a smallish classroom with about 10 workstations, and they're all full. I was early, so I had my pick of seats. I decided to grab the aisle seat in the back row. Pretty good placement, I thought.

Turns out, there's a 450 pound guy who decided he needed to sit in the same row all the way against the far wall. I don't know why.

I do know that the only way this guy can fit between the back wall and my chair is if I'm not actually sitting in it. The first day, he tried to get by without asking me to move, and I am pretty sure my torso almost got sucked into his fat roll. From then on, I just listened for the shrieking chair, which meant he was heading to the bathroom, and I used that as my signal to get a serious move on. Then I have to wait for him to come back, and go through the same exercise.

The instructor is a big guy too, and unfortunately he smells like ass pickles. I am not really sure what an ass pickle actually is, but it's the only way I can accurately describe his particular stench. It's like dill pickles, only with a solid base of vintage ass. He has brown teeth with an 1/4" gap between each one. When he smiles he looks like he's going to eat your head. Friendly, but a little weird.

I was all happy because for once I was going somewhere I didn't have to fly to, and it turns out I get to spend three days in aisle-hell instead of three hours.

Having a great time. Wish you were here. Not with me -- instead of me. Just wanted to make that clear.

Wrong turn.

I'm currently listening to the unabridged audio book of "Memoirs of a Geisha" and I decided to look up some terms to get a better understanding of their history.

Here's a little search tip for you all:

Although they may sound similar, Kabuki and Bukkake are two very, very different things.

I cannot stress that enough.

Things I really don't need to know about my co-workers.

Since everyone at work but me seems to have a fast connection at their houses, there are a fair number of people who decide to work from home on any given day. There's an automated notification that goes around every morning, and it has a little (WFH) next to their names. I always mis-read that as WTF but that's my problem.

The upshot of all this "working from home" stuff is that you could be attending a teleconference and suddenly you'll hear a dog bark or a kid scream. Then someone will generally say, "I'm sorry about that. I'm working from home today," or some such. (Side note to that person: We have already figured that you're not in the office. So unless the blood-curdling scream we just heard was you killing a drifter, don't feel you need to inform us.)

That's all fine, as far as it goes. However, today I read this, which states that "One in eight male teleworkers and one in 14 female teleworkers say they do their jobs in the nude, according to a new survey on the habits of remote and mobile workers worldwide."

It's safe to say that I didn't need to know that there's a one in eight chance that the guy I'm conversing with could quite possibly be nutsack to leather as we speak. As for the women, I really don't want to be forced to envision some project manager's enormous, flopping breasts spread out on the desk in front of her keyboard like some sort of fleshy wrist rest.

I would rather not think about these things, but now I can't help it.

Apparently, the study also found that "88% acknowledge storing passwords in unsafe spots."

They're working from home. How unsafe could the spot really be unless they are rolling their password lists into a tight little cylinders and sticking them up their asses? On second thought, that would be pretty safe from a security perspective. I think I will put that one in the suggestion box.

The other thing I found funny was that "18% of men find time to do household tasks while on the clock."

I would have said that maybe 5% of men actually do household tasks on a regular basis anyway, so the only conclusion I can draw from this statistic is that for most men, doing housework naked is more than 3 times as enticing as actually doing what you're being paid to do.

Dammit, I can't wait to get broadband.

There will be some nicely polished leather furniture in the house, I can guarantee you that.

Yes, Virginia...there is a Bumpass.

So I was browsing ebay tonight looking for some cheap music gear, and I saw one seller was from Bumpass, Virginia. I had no idea there was such a place, nor would I ever have admitted being from there in a public forum like ebay. I would have lied and said I was from a neighboring town like Rattlecock or Flicktitty or something.

In unrelated news, unless you count the possible cow shit overlap in both locations, Japanese scientists managed to squeeze both gasoline and vanilla scent out of cow shit last week. You know, if they can do this with cow shit, just think about what they could accomplish if we gave them an actual raw material to work with. Or maybe we can just keep throwing more crap at them and see what else happens.

I wonder how long it would take them to extract T-bone steaks from disposable diapers?

Because that would be awesome.

In the meantime....

Today I bring you the obligatory filler post while I'm working on something better, because if there's one thing I can't stand, it's an uncomfortable silence.

So off the top of my head, here's a few random thoughts that have been ping-ponging around in there lately:

Why do the same women who have no problem parading around the beach in a tiny bikini cover themselves and scream "GET OUT!" when you catch them in their underwear -- when it actually covers more?

Why do old people drive so slow? You'd think they'd be in more of a hurry to get everywhere since they don't have much time left.

Why do feet sweat? Does anything good ever come of it? And how the hell can they sweat and be cold at the same time?

Why do people with bad breath always have the habit of sighing?

Why does nobody stop by your desk when you're working your ass off, but the second you take a bite out of your sandwich and open "The Onion" website, your phone rings, your IM starts blinking, and people are practically hanging off the rafters over your cube?

Who created the chart that decides the relative vulgarity level of particular words? For instance, who decided that the word "shit" is more vulgar than "crap" and "crap" is more vulgar than "poop?" And why does society decide to enforce this chart? Same thing with fuck and screw and boink. They're all just sounds if you think about it.

And lastly, why does the Victoria's Secret IPEX bra commercial make me want to empty my savings account directly into their cash register? Wait, I know that one. I'm pretty sure Gisele could sell me anything.

Belinda Carlisle vs. The Wendigo

I was waiting for House to come on and I saw two things that disturbed me.

One: My first year in college, there was a band called The Go-Go's that was just breaking out with a song called "We Got the Beat." They played my college gym and there were about 50 people there. I literally stood a foot from Jane Weidlin, taking pictures. I'm sure she remembers me because as I was rotating my camera for a portrait shot, my elbow slammed into the boom on her microphone, which caused the microphone to make a noise like *POOMP* as it bounced off her teeth. At any rate, my budding photography career was cut short by a giant bouncer with a missing neck, and The Go-Go's went on to become quite famous, whereas I did not.

So what does that have to do with what disturbed me tonight? It is simply this: As I was sitting in front of the television lacing up my sneakers, I discovered that one of their songs has been gang-raped by Papa John's Pizza. Apparently everyone in Papa John's entire pizza-making organization goes around singing "We got the Meat" at the top of their lungs. First, I wouldn't recommend going around singing that to anyone, let alone complete strangers, and second, it made me very sad for a few reasons. (a) I hate when I am obviously a target market (b) Belinda Carlisle must need cash, and (c) I can't stand unoriginal ad agencies whose best and brightest shot is reworked lyrics on an old, classic song. They should be castrated with jagged pieces of broken 45rpm records.

The other thing that disturbed me: There's a big black chick on Idol with a pretty damn fine voice. The only thing is, her name is Mandisa. What the hell kind of name is that? Mandisa? It sounds like some sort of evil Indian Death spirit that you talk about in hushed tones around a fire while grooving on Peyote buttons.

"hear me speak, my son...when the wind howls from the east and the moon is full, do not venture beyond the light of the sacred fire...for on those nights, The Mandisa hunts...and comes for you."

Or maybe something that fights Mothra in one of those old black and white Godzilla films.



I dunno. It also could be that it's a little too close to "Vin Diesel." I keep picturing him standing in the shower singing Chaka Kahn songs.

Aw jeez. Now I'm gonna have nightmares.

Searching for Oscar

I'm sitting here half listening to the Oscars, and reviewing my favorite searches for this week. Neither seems to be very captivating or funny, but it could just be me. I guess we'll see.

Once again, it's time for:

Fantastic Google Searches That Somehow Led People To My Site

I often get an erection when drive wheels start to spin, why? -- Because drive wheels are incredibly sexy, and most men can't resist them when they start to spin. So your reaction is perfectly normal. No, I'm kidding. The actual answer is "because you are fucked up, that's why."

sportsman's hernia - I'm not exactly sure how this differs from a normal hernia, unless it has something to do with the activity that caused it. I'm figuring that if you get one moving the fridge to reach the dead chipmunk that wasn't completely dead when your cat dragged it in but is now, that's just a hernia. If you're hauling 500 lbs of grizzly bear meat out of the woods after killing it with your knife, and part of your small intestine is hanging out because the bear got a lucky swipe in just as you were finishing him off, that's a sportsman's hernia.

what do naked women look like? - Welcome, innocent child, to the internet. A wondrous world awaits you, and is in fact only a single click away. Before you click that mouse, however, I have some very important information to share. Here's a little tip from your uncle Johnny - You will not go blind, and you will not grow hair on your palms. Oh yes, and girls do it too. You can thank me later.

what is the scientific reason that mayonaisse gets gum out of hair? - It's quite interesting, actually. While in the same chemical family as mayonnaise, mayonaisse is much more caustic, and can easily and quickly break down the synthetic latex that is the major component of chewing gum. In fact, until it was pulled from the market by the FDA, mayonaisse was the cause of many horrific and unnecessary deaths in the 20's and 30's because people were spreading it on their sandwiches by mistake. That's why I always go with the mustard. You never know when a typo could do you in.

what's bugging gilbert grape? - The fact that you fucked up the title of his movie, that's what. Actually this is the lesser known, straight-to-video version starring Barbara Streisand as Leo Dicaprio, and Bob Saget as Johnny Depp.

monistat 3-day, WHEN to RESUME oral sex - If you mean giving, then you're good to go. If you mean getting, then the only possible answer is day four, or whenever the infect -- GAH! The answer is NEVER, EVER AGAIN AS LONG AS YOU AND YOUR RANK, DOUGH-INFESTED CROTCH ARE ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH. Wait, maybe that was too harsh.

I'll admit that I was too afraid to fold my body into a box, ring your doorbell, and let the words "Take ME" spill from my lungs because everything else were really just ideas I wished -- Your problems here are many, not the least of which is your complete lack of knowledge regarding how to use a search engine. As to your other problem - First, you can't expect to fold your body into a box, and THEN ring the doorbell, because you won't be able to reach it. What you have to do is ring the doorbell and then quickly fold your body into a box. I have to say that I have serious doubts about this whole strategy, regardless of the order performed. If I answered my door and there was a box there and someone inside was screaming "Take ME!" I would wonder if the person inside meant "to the post office," or "out of the box," or "to your leader." Regardless, you're probably getting kicked off the porch.

instructions how to suck a penis and swallow - Now I'm no expert, never having actually done this, but I did a little research on the internet and the basic instructions seem to be:

(1) Suck penis.
(2) Swallow.

Fly by night away from here

By request, here's the story about the weirdest boss I ever had. I would say "the weirdest boss I ever had in my professional career," but I don't really have much of a "career" per se, and I'm nothing if not unprofessional.

Once upon a time, I got a new boss. I knew something was up the first day we were introduced. He seemed like an OK guy. He had a good work history and a pretty impressive resume, so everyone figured he'd be good. But he introduced himself using his first name, middle name, Last name and then added a "Junior" for good measure. OK, I thought. That was a little weird.

I introduced myself as Johnny, and we were off. Little did I know how weird things would ultimately get.

It didn’t take me long to realize that every time he answered the phone, he gave the full boat - "FirstnameMiddlenameLastnameJunior - how can I help you?"

He even requested his e-mail address be changed the same way. It had to be the longest e-mail address in the history of the company. In addition to the annoying name fetish, he would end every e-mail and every phone conversation with the phrase "Keep Smilin'!" and we didn't know what to make of that either. We weren't sure if it was a command, a request, or simply a reminder to himself. Maybe it was all three.

At any rate, the whole name thing was the first indication of the serious amount of crazy that lay just below his thin veneer of normalcy. I asked him about it, and he told me that your full, proper name was your legacy and it was the most important part of your identity. You had to let people know your exact, full name, so that no identity theft could occur. I was pretty sure this theory had some crazylegs, but I never got a chance to discuss its finer points with him.

The more you got to know him, the more freak flag you saw flying. As he started to feel more comfortable around you, he loosened up a bit, and let more things slip than he probably should have. You began to see an alarming amount of nutbeam shining through the slats of the closed blinds.

Let me give you some examples of the awesome crazy:

Early on during his tenure, I walked into his office, and he was sitting at his desk with expensive looking headphones on. "OK," I think to myself, "The man is serious about his music."

But that was not the case.

As it turns out, the man was serious about his silence.

He saw me eyeing the headphones.

"Noise cancellation," he said. He gestured toward the drop ceiling. "You hear that white noise generator up there?" he asked, referring to the sound I always thought was just the heating/cooling system. "Drives me insane," he said. "I can't stand it -- it's all I can hear. They put those up there to block voices, but it makes it hard for me to think. With these on, I just hear the voices."

I hoped he was referring to the voices of the other employees, but I wasn't completely sure.

He looked thoughtful for a second, then said, “I wonder how these things would work with louder noises, like gunshots.”

I told him I thought they only worked on constant noise, since it was just reversing the waveform and playing it into your ear and he agreed that was probably the case. I excused myself and went back to my desk and planned multiple escape routes, just for fun.

The other odd thing that came to light during his first week or so was this: When you were talking to him, he would periodically just stop talking, get up and stand by the window, then about 30 seconds later, he would come back and sit down, continuing the conversation like nothing at all freaky had just happened. I had no idea what was up with that, until about a month or so in.

One day I was talking to him and he just stopped in the middle of a sentence and his eyes did this weird "snapping window shade" thing in their sockets and then started oscillating from left to right like he was trying to watch the world's fastest ping pong tournament on the inside of his own forehead. Then he reached up and pinched his thumb and forefinger together like he was holding a fly by its wing and started humming.

A second later, he was fine.

In this case, by "fine" I don't mean "fine" in the conventional sense of the word. In this case, I mean "fine" as in "no longer acting like he just got cut off from the Borg collective," which is not really the same thing.

I think he must have noticed the odd look on my face because he said, "I have small seizures some times. They're nothing to worry about. I know they’re coming about 15 seconds before I have one, and pressing my fingers together and humming helps me recover from them quicker."

I wasn't sure what to say to that, so I said, "Um, Do you know what’s causing them?" which was a pretty stupid question, really. If the guy was short circuiting 10 times a day, you have to figure he'd make some time to go get his melon looked at. But maybe not. Maybe he just grabbed imaginary flies and hummed.

He said, "Yeah, I have a benign brain tumor."

"You getting it taken out?" I asked. I'm not very tactful in awkward situations.

He replied, "No way. I don't want them messing around in there. Messing around with my brain. It changes your personality, like flouride toothpaste."

I nodded knowingly, as if in full understanding. He continued.

"You know that flouride is rat poison, don't you? They add it to your toothpaste and your water to make you dumb, and make it harder for you to think. A dumbed-down populace is easier to control. That's why I only use natural toothpaste, and bottled water. No flouride."

"Interesting," I said, nodding some more. "What about all that preventing cavities stuff?"

"It's all bullshit. You don't need flouride. I've never had a single cavity," he replied.

I absorbed this little tidbit, then explored a theory and asked him if he had ever been to the dentist. He said yes, of course, but he never let them take x-rays because he didn't want to “aggravate the tumor.” (Until that precise moment, I had no idea that x-rays could piss off tumors.)

Then he said, “Besides, the dentist just fills your mouth with toxic heavy metals that slowly leach into your body and poison your internal organs over time.”

I had heard there might actually be something to that whole mercury thing, but before I could say anything the second half of the ping pong tournament started and I got the hell out of dodge.

One day soon after that, we got into a discussion about how he didn't want to register a car in New York because it cost too much, and they made you pay taxes on the car when you registered. This evolved into a discussion about how registration is nothing more than the first step on the road to governmental control and the loss of personal freedom, which evolved into a discussion about income taxes, and how they were unconstitutional, and how -- yep, you guessed it -- he had never paid them. Ever. He had gotten all sorts of warnings and fines and summons to appear in court, and he had ignored them all.

He had no credit cards, and at the time we could still get our paychecks as something other than direct deposit, so he had no bank accounts either.

He was basically a fugitive from justice.

After this little conversation, I had no doubt whatsoever that he had an up-to-date manifesto tucked away in a desk drawer somewhere, and it was probably even more detailed than mine.

Also in the course of this same discussion, the following Ripley’s-Believe-It-Or-Not facts came to light:

(a) He was currently driving an unregistered car, with out-of-state plates that he had "found."

(b) He did not have a valid driver's license.

(c) He had absolutely zero insurance coverage.

Remember to add to this list the fact that he had multiple small seizures every day, each of which gave him about a 15 second warning that he had to pull over before his eyes rolled up in his head and he started humming like a studded snow tire. How this man never ended up on the six o’clock news mystifies me to this day. He was truly a traffic fatality statistic waiting to happen.

All this is nothing...NOTHING...compared to what happened next. Everything you've read so far is just filler to set the groundwork so you know that what follows is not something I am making up.

One day I was sitting at my desk and I heard this weird ACHCHACHACHACH noise.

I didn’t think too much about it, because people are always playing little media files on their computers, and sometime they have their speakers up too loud by mistake. A few minutes later, I heard it again.

It was coming from his cube.

I walked over to say good morning -- and more to the point, to see what the hell was up with that weird-ass noise.

I saw nothing out of the ordinary, really. Well, there was one thing. He had something that looked like a sock tacked to his bulletin board, and there was something in it. The something in it was thrashing around madly like a miniature tasmanian devil trapped in a burlap bag. As I watched, that horrendous noise happened again, and this time there was no questioning the source. It was the thing in the bag.

"What the hell is that?" I asked, pointing to the thrashing sock.

"It's my new joey," he replied. "He hasn't bonded with me yet, and they're nocturnal. When you bother them during the day, they get mad. He's just crabbing."

"Yeah, it sounds really crabby," I said.

"No, no," he said. "Crabbing. A verb. As in 'to crab.' It's the name for that sound they make when they're mad."

"Uh huh." I replied, staring at the bag tacked to the board. The thing inside had settled down.

"You want to meet him?" he asked.

"Who, Joey?" I asked.

He laughed. "No, his name isn't joey. A Joey is what he is. It's what they call baby male marsupials."

I knew what a marsupial was, cuz I ain't completely stoopid, but that little bag of his didn't look big enough to hold a kangaroo or koala bear. Not even a baby one. I was intrigued.

He reached up to the bag and grabbed it, and the thing inside let loose with the chattering again. He shushed the bag, then opened it up and this fucking thing crawled out:



It blinked its eyes in the light, made a hissing noise and then skittered up his arm and disappeared into his front shirt pocket, where it promptly took a big piss.

As the stain on his shirt grew, he fished the thing out and sat it in his hand.

“What IS it?” I asked, leaning closer.

“It’s a sugar glider,” he replied. “They’re small marsupials, very similar to a flying squirrel. This one is still a baby. They’re very social animals and I didn’t want to leave him home. I have a female already, and I just got this one to keep her company, but he’s still a little wild.” He dabbed at the pee with a paper towel.

I couldn’t believe it. He actually brought this thing to work. In a professional office. With hundreds of other employees. He put it up on top of his file cabinet and then walked a few feet away. The thing took one look at him, gauged the distance and then did this:



I yelled “HOLY SHIT!" and took a quick step back. This thing was not “very similar to a flying squirrel” – it WAS a flying squirrel.

It landed neatly on his arm and then crawled around behind his collar and hid. I could tell it wanted to get back to the pee-hole, but it was too scared to make a run for it.

He asked me not to say anything about it, and I didn’t. Even so, it didn’t take long for other people to hear the noise and stick their heads in his cube to see what the deal was. Over the course of a few days, almost everyone had seen it, petted it and had either been pissed upon or shat upon by it.

Even though it was weird beyond belief for him to actually pack this thing up and bring it to the office everyday, it was still kinda cool, because none of us had ever seen anything like it before.

Eventually though, word got around to upper management and there was a little sit-down and joey didn’t come to work anymore. It was fun while it lasted.

A short time after that, it was mutually decided that he didn’t quite fit in at the old home office, and he was either asked to leave or resigned depending on who you talk to. After he left, he continued to send me e-mail once in a while whenever he posted something worth reading on a privacy-rights discussion board or saw a good article on fluoride mind control, but after a while the e-mail correspondence slowed down and finally stopped. I found out later that he had moved back West and was supposedly doing some consulting work.

A few years later, his name cropped up again. I heard through the grapevine that he had passed away -- from his "benign" brain tumor.

Go figure.

He was as crazy as a shithouse rat and a really strange guy, there’s no denying that. He wasn’t a bad guy though, and I have to say I actually liked him. I wasn’t thrilled about working for him, but I liked him.

FMLJ, you crazy bastard...you were more honestly alive than most people I know, and you certainly made it hard to forget you. Rest in peace, man.

And wherever you are, don’t drink the water -- I hear it’s got a shit load of fluoride in it.