I'm on a mental vacation.

I have come to the conclusion that living on an alternating cycle of NyQuil® and DayQuil® kills your attention span almost as effectively as blunt force trauma to your frontal lobe. Hopefully, though, the Nyquil-Dayquil thing will reverse itself after I stop.

Until then, though, I expect... Ooh! Shiny things!


Have I ever mentioned how much I love my mother's cooking? She has always been an insanely good cook, and I'm not just saying that because everybody says that about their mom. I hate the week before Thanksgiving, because I have to work extra long shifts, and I have to do so while anxiously waiting for one of three annual poultry-centric glutton-fests. Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Aside from my birthday and Fail To Suck Day (which I haven't forgotten aboot, don't worry), those are my favorite days of the year.

11:31 AM

Getting Tired.

I think I'm going to scale back my tribute to Things Which Fail To Suck, mainly because it's somewhat tiring thinking of them. I shall use the digital recorder to collect a list of them and do them all at once every week or so. But I have one today that I have to write.

Mocking something by saying it's name and then saying it again with "shm" as the first phoneme: Yes, I mean saying something like "cellular, shmellular," or "battery, shmattery." That Fails To Suck.

9:37 AM

It Continues...

More Things, Yada Yada.

Waffles: This is the scene I imagine when I think of the invention of waffles: "Hmm... Pancakes are great, but how do we get them to hold more syrup? We'll invent a completely new cooking device for the sole purpose of giving them onboard storage!"

8:29 AM

Clear the deck

I'm not in a "Fail To Suck" mood today. So here are some tidbits from the memo recorder:


Was Barbara Bush ever actually attractive?

I want to invent a new type of salad that consists mainly of different types of pork products.

We need more major nightclub fires.

Would it be possible to wipe out the ENTIRE California condor population before being stopped by the government?

Someone in a Star Trek episode or book needs to mention how so many terrible things always seem to happen in November or December.

6:24 PM

After a brief hiatus...

Rollin' rollin' rollin'...

STILL MORE THINGS WHICH FAIL TO SUCK


Stimulants: Yes, I mean caffeine. And Sudafed, and Dayquil, and Excedrin, and all those other drugs we take to keep going while telling ourselves we're better than common junkies. LIES! ALL LIES! Every red-blooded American, except religious freaks and health nuts, none of which count, is addicted to something.

The Stapler: The man who invented the stapler is a fucking genius. I use profanity for emphasis because he deserves it.

Internal Combustion: Controlled explosions in specially-designed fireproof chambers for the purpose of propulsion. Make cars go zoom! Much better than external combustion (steam power).

11:47 AM

Non-Specificity

I'm trying to recognize things here that don't get a lot of special attention. Things we take for granted. This is not an award show, and things like "Toilet Paper" aren't going to be giving long-winded speeches.

Anyway.
More Things Which Fail To Suck

The Moon: I'm not just mentioning this because of the eclipse. OK, you got me, I AM just mentioning this because of the eclipse. But that's the point. The Moon is awesome. It spent billions of years hanging up there, absorbing extinction-level impacts so Earth didn't have to. Now it provides reflected light like one of those mirror things TV surgeons wear on their heads (those also don't suck).

OK, not "things" plural, but I'm tired. Shut up.

6:04 PM

More things which Fail To Suck.

It continues.

Books: No, not any specific books. Book reviews are for another time. I mean books in general. The existence of bound pages of printed information.
Here is an idea that has been largely unchanged for centuries. The book just... works. And it's ever so much more convenient than, say, scrolls.

The Toilet: I touched on an aspect of this already, but the toilet itself is a marvelously Un-Sucky thing. Indoor plumbing is what separates man from the animals. And the design of the common toilet is another one of those things that Just Works.


More Things Which Fail To Suck will be added as time allows.

7:36 PM

Things that fail to suck.

Fail To Suck Day is fast approaching, and I think it would be a nice idea to have a month-long tribute to things that Fail To Suck.

What is a thing that Fails To Suck?
It's something that not only doesn't suck, but avoids sucking in a very powerful and meaningful way.

Every so often (meaning whenever I remember to), leading up to Fail To Suck Day (which, you SHOULD know, is December 1), I will post a little bit about one or more things that Fail To Suck. Starting today.

THINGS THAT FAIL TO SUCK!

Toilet Paper: Think about it. Can you think of a more practical way to do what toilet paper does? And it's so versatile. I have a roll in my backpack right now, to provide hazmat containment for my powerful head cold. Not what T.P. is designed for, but it does it well.
Toilet paper is rarely recognized any more. We take it for granted. But it Fails To Suck. And until we reach the level of technological aptitude where we can come up with something more efficient, it will continue to Fail To Suck.

Shrimp: Once upon a time, there was a fisherman, who caught hundreds of tiny creatures that looked like evil swimming bugs. And he didn't throw them back.
No, this man was a pioneer. He ate the evil swimming bug. And it was good. And now, in the United States, the average person eats 2.7 pounds of these hideously ugly creatures every year.
Shrimp, and the intrepid man who first consumed them, Fail To Suck.

Seedless grapes: Seedless grapes were, prior to genetic engineering, the one of the greatest expressions of man's dominance over nature.
Plant life exists for the sole purpose of multiplying itself across the land. Not so with seedless grapes. Here is a life-form which only lives to feed mankind. Incapable of reproducing on its own, one would think there would be one seedless grape vine, then none.
But Mankind would have none of it. And by using ancient techniques of cutting and grafting, or planting the sterile offspring of forced hybrids, or other methods dating back millennia, Man has mastered an entire family of life-forms for his own selfish ends. Some strains of grapes we still eat today are genetically identical to those grown 2,000 years ago.
Seedless fruit Fails To Suck.


See? When you think about how horrible life is, or how crappy everything is, or how much you hate everything, take a moment to think about things that Fail To Suck. They're all around you.

This message brought to you by the Scorched Earth Party (the political party that Fails To Suck) and Mountain Dew (the beverage that spectacularly Fails To Suck).

6:54 PM

Mountain Dew: The Re-Animator

I am firmly convinced at this point that if one were to substitute Mountain Dew in place of formaldehyde, corpses could be resurrected as caffeine-powered zombies.

I know this because... I AM ONE! HAHAHAHA!

4:40 PM

I thig I need a new doze.

It's so hard to describe the kind of f'ed-up-ness I'm experiencing.

Suffice to say, I have some kind of evil virus intent on ejecting my brain through my ears and eye sockets. What it plans to do once that is accomplished, I know not. And I don't think I want to know.

Vitamins don't help. That's a lie perpetrated by the vitamin industry. I take vitamins daily to supplement my diet, since there are days I may eat nothing but a pound of Doritos® and some nectar of the gods, a.k.a. Mountain Dew.

But they didn't prevent this evil virus from penetrating Fort Cranium in its plan to dominate the world.

I'm going to have to have billions of "Fail to Suck!" buttons minted and then shrunk to microscopic size, to pin on the chest of each individual soldier in this virus army. Because it's failing to suck at its job of making me miserable.

I think I shall find some new ways to make innocent people suffer.

5:52 PM