Ruminations for the afternoon.

-Weather men have the best job in the world. They can be wrong ALL THE DAMN TIME and not only keep their job, but still be popular in their market.

-The time to wash your car is when you can actually get things off your paint that seem to have been placed there in the Cambrian era and cemented in place during the apocalypse that ended said era. Today is not, it would seem, that day.

-Sublime is ALWAYS a good idea for sitting in the sun.

-Cup-holder money is gross.

-People who have a “hang up and drive” sticker on their car and are still talking on their cell phone while attempting to play Plinko with the big-rigs muscling their way down I-5 need to be taken from their car and summarily executed, preferably by having them hit with a car whose driver is talking on their cell phone.

-People often use the phrase “go kick rocks.” Don’t actually do this.

-I may have just broken my toe.

-Birds that make noises that sound like two pieces of metal being banged together are really, really, really weird. Not as weird, however, as the squirrels that watch whoever is in our living room with intense interest. I hate those squirrels.

Typhoid Mary…er…Jeremy. Typhoid Jeremy.

Its funny when you walk around with a cold. Odd things happen. I just went to the bank, to the store, and to rent a movie, and different things happened at all three sites which both befuddle and amuse me.

Upon my arrival to the store, wherein I figured I would find a reasonable supply of my favorite microwave popcorn (A) I am a glutton when sick, get over it and B) I did not find my popcorn), I was fresh faced. At the moment, that means that I had blown my nose within the last 5 minutes. For some reason the bleary eyed man wandering around the “this food will kill you” section at 8 at night, hood up and hands in pockets, aroused the suspicion of the employees, who saw it fit to follow me around the store. This is odd, since if I saw someone like that in my store I would be more concerned with checking the nicely displayed and easily grabbed newspapers for any information on recent zombie activity.

After I purchased a rather substandard brand of popcorn, I had to go to the bank. At this point I had been off my couch for over 5 minutes for the first time since this morning, and was beginning to feel it. My unsure footing, half closed eyes and shuffling movements must have alarmed the older woman at the ATM, as she did a classic Loony-Tunes double take after glancing over her shoulder to investigate the sniffling, coughing, raspy-breathing and hooded apparition slowly sauntering across the parking lot directly at her. In her defense I would probably have been afraid if I saw the monkey from Outbreak coming right at me like some kind of virus-tipped bullet.

Just to clear thing up I’m talking about the monkey that bites people, not Rene Russo; that distinction isn’t necessarily as clear as I thought it might be.

Once I had finished my business at the magic cash box, I went to the video store. This is where the funniest thing happened. I found myself the object of rather annoyed and often exasperated looks as I attempted to get help finding a movie. Upon reflection I see that I cant hear anything due to my head being filled all the way through with snot, including my brain cavity and, I think, my eyes. This caused me to ask for the guy behind the counter to repeat himself several times in what I can only imagine was entirely to loud of a voice (not only because my ears are plugged with the same substance that destroyed my brain but is also because these were the first words that I had spoken out loud to since roughly the same time yesterday). Thus hopefully the reason for their consternation was my lack of auditory ability instead of the fact that I looked like my face was melting all the way off my head, from the inside, through my nose.

Indeed, being sick in public is one of the more humiliating things that I have had to go through, this despite past women I have dated and that short time with the bright aqua-marine hair. If your body is ever ravaged by the Flu/Cold/Ebola/what ever the hell I have that makes me feel like death warmed over, and you have the opportunity to go out in public and show it to the world, pass.

Animals and earthquakes make good lovers.

My friend Jessica “I drink whiskey and dance” Pace sent this to me today, and I find it interesting.  Read it, fool!  I find this kind of stuff amazing.

BEIJING – First, the water level in a pond inexplicably plunged. Then, thousands of toads appeared on streets in a nearby province. Finally, just hours before China’s worst earthquake in three decades, animals at a local zoo began acting strangely.

As bodies are pulled from the wreckage of Monday’s quake, Chinese online chat rooms and blogs are buzzing with a question: Why didn’t these natural signs alert the government that a disaster was coming?

The fact that many of these signs were ignored boggles my mind.
I whole heartedly believe that animals can predict earthquakes.  I have been in several earthquakes and have observed crazy animals.  During the last big earthquake in seattle, about….8 years ago, I was sitting in my house and all of a sudden molly started barking really loud, ran down the stairs and right into the back door.  She started whimpering and pawing the glass.  I let her out and she ran into the most open part of the lawn and laid down.  About 2 minutes later the earthquake hit and shook all of the water out of my pond.  Molly kept laying on the lawn for about 5 minutes after its over.

Just so you all know, Molly is my dog.

The idea that animals can perceive things that most of us lowly humans cannot should be nothing new to anyone.  From a wide assortment of animals using the earths magnetic field to navigate to insects seeing in the ultraviolet or infrared spectrum to super hearing or smell to spider-mans lack of ability to perceive the crappyness of a script, animals have us beat in the sensing department in almost every instance.  I have no problem believing that animals who are sensitive to these things can perceive the mild electromagnetic fields created when rocks are compressed or broken, or the mild shocks that are far to weak for us to feel that would normally precede an earthquake.

Unfortunately modern science is so pig-headed and stubbornly stuck on technology as a means of deduction they fail to realize a source of insight that is right under their nose.

What the thumbs?

Just exactly how lazy can we, as Americans, get? I mean, we are already recognized as the laziest, most gluttonous country that isn’t France, but this thing that I saw on the television while eating my 1 pound pineapple-topped burger and giant steak-fries takes the cake, so to speak. There is now a bicycle that shifts itself.

a bike with an automatic transmission.

Now, I don’t know how how much exactly you people know about riding bikes. On a mountain bike there are shifters that are operated either through manipulation of a lever with your thumb (something that can be done without even repositioning your hand) or twisting a part of the handle-bar (something that can be done without even moving your thumbs). This shifting is done by a derailer that switches the chain from gear to gear.

SO

Seeing as how shifting gears on a bike is something that is done without moving more than two or three muscles, I ask again, what is the point of having a bike that does this for you? Kids do nothing more than play video-games these days, so one would think that their thumbs are more than up to the task and if you cant be bothered to even twist your wrist slightly forward or back there is little chance that you would be out riding a mountain bike around.

My friend brought up the idea that maybe they could be used on those bicycles that have the little motors that push you around on your Schwinn. And hes right, they have those. They are called motorcycles and they don’t shift themselves either (mostly).

Abject laziness and technological innovation make strange bedfellows indeed.

“Peoples” rant

I have come to the conclusion that there are a great and many varied personalities on this planet. No doubt you are thinking “that Jeremy, he’s a quick one,” and you are correct, but the truth is that very few of these personalities are ones that make any sense to me.  Let me give you a couple of examples:

I am willing to bet that at some point you have come into contact with the people who talk.  These people are all around us, and make up a vast proportion of the peoples that I can’t really abide for very long.  Odds are you have a friend like this that you only kind of put up with.  I am talking, of course, about the type of people who do not partake in conversation.

They own it.

These are the people that do not contribute meaningfully toward any type of mutual communication, opting instead to simply wait until you are done with WHATEVER you are talking about, then blurt out the thing that they were/are/going to be thinking about. This can be either their part of the conversation you are having, disjointed and out of turn in the shared stream of consciousness, or something that has nothing to do with your subject matter; instead moving on to whatever this rather obtuse individual had pop into their head while they were paying no attention to you.

Now being a bit of a conversationalist myself, I believe that in order to have said conversation both sides must be actually listening to each other and playing off of each other’s ideas. Call me old fashioned, but a conversation should be a two-sided thing. When it is not, it is called a lecture or a speech, and it is so annoying that it makes me want to stab myself in the neck just to have a reason to recuse myself from the situation.

Another person is one known very well to those of us in the service industry.  These people are the bane of any barista’s existence, and many of the food-servers out there as well.  These are the people who have turned my job, which I used to love so very much, into a daily ordeal consisting of barely repressed rage and deeply buried homicidal imaginings.  Indeed, these people are the subject of a great many sneering and exasperated looks and are subject to the full brunt of wit that they can not understand is directed at them, but makes me feel morally and intellectually superior (thus makes me giggle).  These are the entitlementists.

I know, I know; this word does not really exist. Well it does now, as I have the power to summon forth from the ether collections of letters that make perfect sense when taken in context.  Unfortunately, these people are very real, and are a very real threat to my sanity.

These are the people who, through some combination of money, privileged upbringing. social retardation or the lack of a swift kick in the skull, feel that they have some sense of entitlement to the labor of another based upon a paltry sum payed to a business for the constrained actions of its employees.

Yes, you may purchase that meal.

No, that does not allow you to assume that I will be going out of my way in any way, shape, or form in order to meet your needs.

The belief amongst these people is that paying for a good or service entitles them to forgo the normal morals and common sense behavioral rules of civilized society, allowing them to degenerate to the level of common swine: discarding refuse, creating unholy messes and basically stinking up the place with their fundamental lack of concern for the repercussions of their actions.

These people are also the most likely to end up with a burned-down house in the event of a psychotic break suffered by one of the disenfranchised laborers whom they have wronged through their egregious disregard for social more.

These are but a couple of the peoples that inhabit the world which I navigate every day. I am sure that they are familiar to you. If not, be on the lookout, for they are residing in a bar/restaurants/coffee house near you, waiting to foist their superiority complex on the unsuspecting populace of their local watering hole/social gathering place.

Have you run across other people you would like to vent about? Leave me a comment and let me know! (see that? Audience participation.)