The Tuesday after a Monday holiday always feels like a Monday. Which of course makes sense because no matter what day it really is, it’s your first day back in the office with the rest of the world and everybody is playing catch-up from the long weekend. It’s a short week but stuff still has to be done.
This week is especially short for me though. Not only did I have yesterday off as a holiday, I am taking Friday off as a vacation day to go on the float/camping trip. Some vacation day that will be too. I will have to get up before the sun even wakes up to get my kit together and drive to my friends house. He offered to come by and pick me up but honestly that is a BAD idea. The dogs go crazy when anyone comes around the house. If Kira was startled awake at 5:30am by insane dog barking, I’m afraid that would mean a very long and unpleasant day for both her and Michelle. And she thinks I don’t think about her. Pbbpttbt….
Did you see this article? A guy in Arizona wears animal masks to and from work every day in order to get out of paying tickets from the photo-enforcement division. Clever I suppose. Well, until they start staking out his house. Hehe. Read the article. It’s funny.
This picture just cracks me up every single time I see it. Ha! I am partial to monkeys though so maybe that has something to do with it.
Now there’s strange headline for you. Venezuela… land of tropical beauty, drug lords, corrupt governements, rebellions, murder, more guns than Mexico City and one of the more violent places to try and take a liesurely stroll down the street on any given day. And how did this paradise become such a haven for crime and death? The answer is obvious: Video Games.
Yes, the long-running president of Venezuela – Hugo Chavez – is pushing through legislation to fully ban violent video games in his beloved country. This makes sense of course. I mean it has to be the fault of violent video games that put poor Venezuela into it’s current situation. Just because drug cartels have been murdering each other and civilians since long before Pong was created is no reason to look at this rationally.
In addition, this new legislation would ban toy weapons. Which is a smart economic move when you think about it. I mean, why let your people buy cheap toy guns from China when you are building the largest machine gun factory* in all of South America in your country? Keep that money in country and sell those kids real weapons instead. Besides, that will keep them safer on their way home from school than that old toy would have anyway. ( * This is an older link but this still seems to be on-going. I just can’t find any articles online.)
In related news, the Vatican is also calling for an end to all violent video games. According to the Pope, the Crusades were not the result of theocratic greed and corruption but by early video games. It seems that demos of Grand Theft Carriage caused quite a stir with peasants and drove the knights to slaughter. A lesser known but more revolting game called Messenger featured a messenger who had one too many bad days at the Messenger Office and started shooting all his co-workers with a cleverly hidden crossbow. It is said that this game was an allegory to the Muslims and how mean they were for not giving back land to the church that was never the church’s in the first place. The rest, as they say, is history.
Telepathic requests for comment to the Pope were not returned by the time I posted this entry.
In an age when even Ameren UE is using TXT speak in it’s new energy efficiency billboards, it’s hard sometimes to even remember what grammar is much less what good grammar would look like. People spend a lot of time “typing” on their phones and unless you keep up with such things, that TXT you just received from your son or daughter may look like another language or a system error instead of a message.
But grammar – and good grammar – are still important. That’s something that I hope the kids today will still understand when they grow up texting their term papers into their robotic professors. Writing is something that can make or break you in certain situations. I dread the day I see a resume come across my desk written in a hybrid of 1337 and TXT.
Here’s a perfect example I just saw on Facebook. I notice more and more often that people are skipping capitalization and punctuation in their posts. I see the number 4 replacing “for” and the number 2 replacing “to” all the time. But sometimes, you really have to go back and make sure what you wrote is actually what you meant.
Here’s a post from a Facebook friend taken word for word:
My good friend dave brockett was killed lastnight in a motrcycle accident. Please pray 4 his family. Ill let everyone that knew him know when the funeral is gonna be.
This is tragic, of course. I don’t know him personally but I feel sorry for those that did. I would have capitalized his name… but maybe I’m just being picky. Good grammar and writing – no, but it gets the idea across properly.
Now here’s one of the comments to this same post:
let me know when he was a good friend
Where to start? Ignore the lack of a beginning capital letter and let us jump straight to the punctuation. Go ahead and read that again and think about what that says. Now I am assuming that this person was not trying to be an insensitive jerk by asking “When was he a good friend?“ That would just be rude no matter how you feel about someone.
What this commenter must have meant was exactly what he wrote but without punctuation. Here’s what it should have said:
Let me know when. He was a good friend.
Big difference, right? That one period between when and he make all the difference in the world. All of the sudden you go from being a well meaning sympathetic friend to a hateful asshole when that one character is left out. Keep that in mind next time you decide to write something in a hurry.
One day a white lady was making a chocolate cake, her 5 year old son comes around from behind her and rubs some chocolate icing on his face and says, “Look mommy – look mommy! I’m black!” His mother slaps him across the face and tells him to go tell his father what he said.
So the little boy goes to his father,rubs more chocolate on his face and says, “Look daddy – look daddy! I’m black!” The boys father gives him a beating and tells him to go tell his grandfather what he just said.
So he goes to his grandfather, and once again with chocolate on face repeats the words “Look grampa – look grampa! I’m black!” The old man whips the child’s ass with his belt and tells him to go back to his mother.
He goes back to his mother and his mother asks him, “Now, what have you learned?”
The boy answers, “I learned that I’ve been black for 5 minutes and already I hate all you white people.”
Sick of hearing about Swine Flu or H1N1 already? I know I sure am. But that doesn’t mean it’s too early to start mocking the panicky world. Have a look at this site for some fun Swine Flu shirts.
Thanks to Juan for the link!
Cows, gay monkeys, birds and now pigs… when will the animal kingdom stop trying to kill us off with their diseases? Hmm… well, I suppose it’s fair after all. Maybe they are just fighting back. Oh if they weren’t all SO tasty!!!
Sigh.
Click for larger version
Yes this is a little late but what do you want? I had to post the pig joke yesterday. But today I catch up.
Here’s a little pictographic treat for everyone. A bit of inspiration based on the now complete NCAA basketball hoopla known as March Madness and of course the bizarre day known as 420 that is almost famous as Hitler’s birthday. Yeah… my mind is a strange place.
So what did the term March Madness mean 70 years ago in the year 1939? Something quite a bit different than it does now I’d wager.
You have to hand it to the Nazis. They may have been the scum of the universe but they sure could march. My apologies to the websites that I snagged these pictures from.
A farmer was worried that none of his pigs were getting pregnant. He called the local vet and asked what he should do if he wanted more pigs. The vet told him he should try artificial insemination.
The farmer, not wanting to appear stupid, answered “Okay,” and hung up the phone. Unclear on what the vet meant by artificial insemination, the farmer decided it must mean he had to impregnate the pigs himself, so he loaded all the pigs in his pickup and drove down to the woods and shagged them all.
The next day he called the vet again, and asked how would he know if the pigs were pregnant. The vet told him they would be lying down and rolling in the mud, but when he looked out the window not even one was lying down. So he loaded them up in his pickup again and drove them to the woods and shagged them all again.
To his dismay they were all standing the next morning. So, again he loads the pigs in his truck, drives them to the woods and shags them for the third time.
By the next morning the farmer is beat, so he asks his wife to hop out of bed and look out the window to see what the pigs are doing. She says “Well – that’s odd! They’re all in the truck and one of them is honking the horn”.
Link to Wired.com
Izzard Gives Private Performance to Terror Victim
How freaking cool is that? I’ve been a huge fan of Eddie Izzard for a long time now but that is just icing on the damn cake. He is truly awesome. Good on you, Mr. Izzard.
It’s nice to see somone doing something nice for a change….
For those of you who can and desire to do so, Henry Rollins is live at the Pageant tonight in St. Louis, MO. I would love to see him live but with the baby coming at any time, it’s just not gonna happen. But for anyone else who can go, you should. He’s smart, funny and not afraid to speak his mind about anything and everything.
If you do get to go, please leave a comment and let me know how it was. I bet he’ll have lots to say on the recent elections and the state of the nation in general.
On Monday, A Little Scary posted comic number 60. Not a bad mile marker if I do say so myself. At the end of the month I am shooting for another goal… well, two goals actually.
The first is that the last week of October will feature three comics on Monday, Wednesday and Friday to celebrate Halloween. This is not going to be the new schedule for ALS but it is something I’ve been wanting to try to see if I can update on a more demanding schedule. I think I can but with moving into a new house and our first baby due to be born around that same time I don’t want to make any commitments I can’t honor.
The second goal is a bit trickier. ALS has, for the most part, been a pretty tame comic and I want to keep it that way. There’ve been some bizarre or gross things from time to time because that’s just the kind of person I am. I have never felt like I was above a fart or poop joke or anything like that. I relish in the fact that the characters are who I want them to be and they have no shame in that. And this brings me to that second goal. The final comic of October will be posted on Halloween and it will be the most disturbing comic yet. It’s bad enough that it may polarize my meager audience and I may lose a few readers over it. I hope not, but with how people are nowadays you have to assume that someone will be offended. I’m hoping people will be shocked but enjoy it for what it is. I won’t say anything more about it than that. Even if I lose every single reader over the comic it will have been worth it. Because I think it’s funny and I am not ashamed of that.
That being said, make sure you tune in to A Little Scary today because I think today’s comic is particularly funny. And if you are worried about your delicate sensibilities… well… maybe you should just skip the comic on Halloween. You have been warned.
September 8, 2009 2:22 pm | 
