Decline of modern society, chapter 1,402:

I want to badly to throttle these morons who can't speak English, despite being natural-born citizens.

Example:
"How y'all plam widda pone?"
Enunciated, this would read "What are your plans on phones?"
With proper manners, this would read "Could you please tell me about the rate plans on your cellular phones, sir?"

One day I'm just going to scream bloody murder and shout "This is not the fucking jungle! Pointing and grunting will not be tolerated! E-FUCKING-NUNCIATE!"

Be Prepared

I think that especially in this time of danger that everyone should wear a utility belt.
Yes, a utility belt. Just like Batman.
It should be issued to every American by the government. Along with their government-issued handgun.

Clipped to the belt should be the following items: A handgun, a Leatherman or equivalent multi-tool, a mini-maglite, a canteen, an air horn, pepper spray, and a flare gun. It should also include a bag or "fanny pack" with the following items: 48 hours worth of preserved rations (MREs come to mind), an eyeglass repair kit (even if you don't wear glasses), a windproof butane torch, some zip-ties, and a roll of duct tape.

Other items would be optional, such as a spare pair of glasses, a wireless communications device, backup supplies of medication, a spare pack of cigarettes, whatever strikes your fancy.

A word of warning:

If anyone I know ever gets married, and subsequently sends his wife/wives out on an errand to any electronic store to pick up anything without a specific part number, and I find out about it, I will tear out his throat.

A reminder.

Hello, friends... Care for a scone?
A scone of DOOM?!?

Photochopping

This is what happens when The Kip gets bored...

Remember these guys?

Evens and starts...

(I don't like endings and I never want to know the odds.)

How many times to I have to tell people that we are not Sprint? Sprint cannot definitively quote you our store policy, Sprint cannot tell me what to do, and Sprint is usually wrong about our rules.
We can take Sprint payments in cash only. Period. Exclamation mark, in fact. I don't care what the operator said. The operator was blowing you off to up his call count. The Sprint® Store can take payments in cash, check, livestock, money order, blood donations, credit, debit, and Flainian Pobble Beads. We can't.
So bite me.


Tell me if this is a weird idea: I want to burn a mix CD from my collection. Of instrumental, soundtrack, march, and classical music. All designed to induce or exacerbate a headache. '1812' overture, Polovtsian Dances, the Imperial March, et cetera.
Is that weird?

Here's one I thought of last night, and I've been holding onto it...

We need to officially define one of the fake numbers, like "zillion" or "grillion" or "gazillion", as an operator rather than a number.

That operator would have the effect of -100(n). So a zillion billion would actually be negative 100 billion.

Then we have a sweepstakes in which the top prize is a zillion million dollars. And everybody wins.

Now they each owe us 100 million dollars.

Serious musings (for once.)

For many people, the law is, in fact, the only deterrent against crime.
If not for the threat of going to jail or being executed, I'd have killed several times by now. I honestly believe the world would be a better place if I had unrestricted postnatal abortion rights.

Kipism of the day:
"I work in retail because I hate everyone, I just didn't have the patience to study dentistry."

Before I forget...

I have to remind myself to thank Bank of America for the excellent job they did clearing their drive-through for their commercial customers who still had to make bank drops on Presidents' Day.
(That was sarcasm, in case you couldn't tell. More to follow.)
Yes, it's just the kind of service we've come to expect from a bank that discontinues drive-through banking for commercial accounts. The sort of attention to detail customers demand from a bank that recycles rolled quarters that look and smell like the customer who turned them in just pulled them out of a sewer trap. Just the kind of extra special care we expect from a bank that stiffs us on change runs.

Mozilla rocks.

Mozilla 1.3b is awesome. Blogger renders beautifully. My blog looks fine. I'm annoyed that they haven't implemented CSS "filters" yet, and yet they still support the dreaded <BLINK> tag. But all in all, a good replacement for Internet Exploiter.

I'm not even supposed to be here right now!

I'm bored. But I'm not alone today, at least. It's still yucky out. The various departments of public works are doing a craptacular job.

My mother, as I may have mentioned, is way cool. She got me a leather jacket. Flat-front, button-down. It looks evil. It took me a while to get used to it, but now I am loving the warm embrace of dead cow. It's a 6X, and it comes down well past my waist, so you know more than one cow died for it. I hope some animal-rights fuckwad gets mad at me about it.

I woke up unnaturally early to get to work in time to open, only to find out that I wasn't scheduled to open the damn store. I just fought my way out of the bowl for the thrill of it. Geoff says that whenever he sees my parking lot he thinks of a demolition derby. He's not far off. Now think of a demolition derby arena covered in slush. That's what I've been fighting every day.

So not only was I up abnormally early, because I believe the idea of opening our store at 9:30 is not only stupid but contrary to the very laws of nature, but I couldn't go home. I'm not plowing myself out of there twice in one day.

So I wander. I go to Books-A-Million for some coffee, then I go to Waldenbooks to actually buy books. Funny how that works.

There's a new New Jedi Order book out, in which the Imperial Remnant gets its ass handed to it by the extragalactic invaders. This pisses me off. The Empire is badass. I'm constantly annoyed by the way they're treated. A fleet of ten thousand mile-long starships beaten back by some squids and their human lapdogs just because they're allegedly "evil." Bah!

I was amused by the fact that the plows in the Southpark Mall lot shafted the cripples by not properly plowing the handicapped spots. Good! Suck it up, you worthless wasters of oxygen!

I miss McDonalds' fried pies. But at least they put the retards to good use.

I hate mall walkers. Oh, how I hate mall walkers.

K-Mart is pathetic. I mean, SO pathetic. They have banners up proclaiming "Hey, look at us, we're not really crashing and burning!" but they don't plow their fucking parking lot.

You may have forgotten, but ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.

By the way...

Target is run by bastards. They're our "anchor" store, so if they weren't open, we'd have stayed closed today too.

BASTARDS!

Evil Daydreaming.

I just need one superpower. Just one. Virtually any one will do.
I'm certain I could take any power and turn it to Evil.

The Backward Beast didn't want to leave the parking lot this morning. I don't blame it. Fortunately, a good samaritan dragged it out kicking and screaming.

I still need a haircut. I should take a picture of myself with my current Mushroom-style hairdo. I could be in a Super Mario game.

I've been reading some of my old ramblings. I mean, really reading them. And you know, I'm one weird son of a bitch.

Would you be alarmed if all the channels on your TV suddenly said: "This is a public service announcement: Everything is fine. That is all."

"And I walked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, 'Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604.'

And I went up there, I said, 'Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL.' And I started jumpin up and down yelling, 'KILL, KILL,' and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, 'KILL, KILL.' And the sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, 'You're our boy.'

Didn't feel too good about it."

-- Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"

The Return of the Retail Avenger!

I love my job.

So this ugly fat man walks in. He is ugly. And fat. Imagine The Kip, only fatter. And uglier. And he doesn't even carry himself as well as The Kip does.
And his wife is with him. She is hideous. Strike that. She looks like a mummy. No, worse. She looks like the 4,000-year-old mummy of an already amazingly ugly woman.

Stupid Fat Man refuses Geoff's help. He goes rifling through the parts drawers. Meanwhile, Mrs. Mummy asks The Kip about a radio. What kind of radio, The Kip asks? Just a regular radio. Well there are about a hundred products that qualify, and Mrs. Mummy is too stupid to follow along with The Kip's attempts to narrow the field a bit.

Meanwhile, Stupid Fat Man refuses Geoff's help a second time.

Then a thunderous crash comes from the audio cable section. Stupid Fat Man has slammed the sliding door full of plug adapters right off its track. The Kip heads over and politely tries to inject himself into the situation to prevent further incident. This is where it gets FUN.

"Can we help you with anything, sir?"
"No, I'm fine. "
Obviously not.
"Alright. Just try not to slam the sliding walls any more."
Stupid Fat Man gets up in The Kip's face. As an aside, he also smells bad.
"Shut up! I didn't slam anything, so shut up! "
The Kip is momentarily stunned. A force of great evil power creeps up from the recesses of The Kip's brain. The Kip shakes it off and tries to salvage the situation.
"It's not necessary to tell me to shut up, sir."
Stupid Fat Smelly Ugly Man steps even closer to The Kip. The Kip is repulsed.
"I'll tell you to shut up if I want, so shut up! "
That was not a good idea.
"Please leave the store, sir."
"How about you just shut up! "
Ooh, how creative. At this point, the Evil Power takes over. The Kip stands ramrod straight and appears to gain about six inches in height. The Kip's voice lowers an octave or so, and gains an air of command. The Kip's eyes bore through Stupid Fat Smelly Ugly Man's empty skull.
"YOU CAN LEAVE THE STORE, NOW, SIR."
Stupid Fat Smelly Ugly Man throws down the parts he was clutching in his little piggy hoof-hands. He is visibly shaking.
"Fine! Whatever! "
"LEAVE NOW."
"I'm gonna report this! You better believe I'm gonna report this! "
"PLEASE DO."
"What's your name? "
"Kip. K-I-P Kip."
"Fine. I'm gonna call and report you, you know. "
Whatever.
"Have a nice day, sir."

I hope he does call whoever in the fuck he wants. I'm proud to have acted in defense of company assets AND my own personal safety.
And I hope he tells all his friends never to shop here again, because I don't want to see anyone who would associate with him.

Another victory for The Retail Avenger!

Randomness

We should make a big show of building up to invade Iraq, then invade Belgium. It's win-win. We get the Belgians' superior chocolate and waffles, and we piss off everyone in the EU except The Netherlands. Then we should insist that everyone call them "American Waffles."
And THEN, we send the stealth bombers to drop leaflets over Paris saying "Soon everyone will be having American Fries, you cheese-sucking drunks!"

The fat that they take out of 'fat-free' food should be available for sale separately.

I'm losing my hair. It's undeniable. My maternal grandfather and grandmother, and paternal grandfather all lost tremendous amounts of hair, and my dad is clearly well on his way. Every morning there is hair all over the walls of my shower because I whip my head back and forth to pre-dry my hair before I get out. (This is probably not good for my neck, or my brain, but it works. And the dizziness is one of the things that helps me view the world with such a unique perspective. Anyway.) My evidence beyond this is my driver's license picture. It was taken in 1999. I had my hair slicked back because I had a rash on my hairline (which, incidentally, is why I have the Worst Driver's License Picture in the Universe) so it's easy to compare. I've gained about 2 centimeters on my already high forehead.
Oh well. Humanity is doomed anyway.

Coordinated Irritation

The entire history of the universe is actually a coordinated attack against me. Well, not specifically me.

You see, I have a theory that certain individuals are what I like to call a "Nexus of Annoyance." All the people who have ever lived or will ever live, all the forces of nature, and every everything and everything else is coordinated in such a way as to irritate certain special people. And I'm one of them. I imagine I'm in good company, too. I have identified Lewis Black, George Bernard Shaw, and Ambrose Bierce as current and former Nexii of Annoyance.

If you are the type of person who thinks this theory is even remotely possible, then you may be one too. Many famous and infamous comedians, musicians, pundits, and other cynical types are potential Nexii of Annoyance.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. And just because you're cynical doesn't mean things really don't suck.

Mindless Link Propagation

Customers Suck! - http://www.customerssuck.com/ - Where people from all walks of life, from every corner of the service industry come together to bitch about duh-stomers and other in-duh-viduals. We all hate you, you know. Don't delude yourself into thinking that "have a nice day" is in any way sincere. It's just Retailese for "fuck off and die."

Ask Doctor Science! - http://www.drscience.com/ - He knows more than you. Really. "There is a thin line between ignorance and arrogance, and only I have managed to erase that line."

The CIA World Factbook - http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html - If the information they RELEASE is this detailed, do we even want to imagine what they keep secret?

The sky is falling!

Tarps and duct tape! Is MacGyver at the Department of Homeland Security now? Duct tape fixes everything! Duct tape will save us from anthrax and dirty bombs!

Actually, dirty bombs aren't as bad as everyone makes them out to be. You can make a dirty bomb out of smoke detectors, you just need patience.

Incidentally, has anyone noticed that Department Of Homeland Security can be abbreviated as 'DOH's? Doh!

Emptying the digital recorder

And off we go again...

"Twinkie filling should be available as its own separate food product."

"We need to put linear magnetic accelerators at the head end of every stoplight lane. They would launch the first car in each lane as soon as the light turns green. If you're not paying attention, you just die."

"Did you ever notice that when you add the word 'fucking' to an existing word, it has to be before the word or just before the last syllable. So 'fucking y2k' works and 'y2-fucking-k' works but 'y-fucking-2k' just doesn't seem to flow right."

Did I mention that we're doomed?

Because we ARE doomed. DOOOOOMED! Like I've been saying since, oh I don't know, 1991.
It's Y-two-fucking-K all over again, except this time the enemy has a face.
Well, fuck it. If I die, I die.

Sprint PCS is now a member of the Universal Conspiracy Against The Kip. I'm surprised they held out this long. The UCATK is an unstoppable force.

Further Expansion.

Today's site upgrades:

A links page.
A new "Legal" blurb on the sidebar. --->
The replacement of offsite image links with locally hosted files, and the elimination of GIF files.
THE TRIUMPHANT RETURN OF THE KIPISMS!

And finally...

HTML validators need to be less anal about the "&" character in hyperlinks.

Why digital TV will be less fun:

I like analog TV better than digital for one big reason - I'm highly amused by the text in a corrupted closed captioning signal. I don't know why. But here's an example...

The closing credits song from "GoldenEye", in the language of the bad Closed-Captioning signal:

I KNOW YOU DREAM A LOT
O NDOUOU
FNEO WHHI ND UGEPT IN
Y Y HE Y A
AXPIEOFKETHPA USTAINR T
W I HESLI
YR ATHE OUBENGIFRYY
EERG TAL Y
JRSND HAEL LO Y XPE ER
SIF
EER IR
S ILL XPOF NDKY HESOU HE E. NIPO OMAIEN CA PFO TIIN
T EE 5gé

Ax pie of Keth pa! Athe ou bengi fryy!

If you didn't know me, would you believe I never do drugs?

Weekend thoughts:
I'm not a dog person, not by a long shot. But all puppies are cute. If you don't think puppies are cute, you clearly don't have what we would commonly call a "human" soul.

The North Korean army is dressed funny and they march like pansies.

It's odd, I've never smoked pot once (though I may have gotten some second-hand exposure 8-]) and I sound stoned a good deal of the time.

"Purportedly important life decisions"

A wonderful phrase stolen from someone who stole it from someone else who has yet to be recorded saying "give me your peanut butter."

Circuit City just fired all its commissioned salespeople.

Here's why it's related to a P.I.L.D.: Circuit City offered me a job as, you guessed it, a commissioned salespeople. Person. HA! "People person!"

Anyway, here's the story. Just before the "Golden Quarter" last year, Circuit City human resources had the nerve to actually call this store to offer me a job.
So answer me this: If you were in the CIA, trying to get a Russian to defect, would you call them up at their office at the Kremlin to enumerate the benefits of changing sides?

ANYWAY, I told them no. More out of loyalty to my manager and cow-orkers than anything else.

And now it seems I made the right choice. That's rare.

Googling

Fascinating stuff out there... A Google search for "The Kip" turns up some funny stuff. Here's my favorite:

http://lnweb28.worldbank.org/hrs/careers.nsf/key/kip
"The KIP is intended as a learning experience."
"The KIP does not provide visas and does not cover travel or living expenses."
"...read about the experiences of the KIP Alumni..."


On a related note, I've been pretty happy with Blogger support and reliability lately, but why did it take a Google search (in which I was on page 6, oddly. Must do something aboot that) to find out that the server has apparently eaten my archives?

This is weird. Somehow, somewhere, I gained an hour this morning.

I woke up, by my clock, at 8:20. Took a shower. Had a donut. Left the house, by my clock, at 8:56. Everything felt fine.

I get to the Shack and all the clocks say 8:12. 8:12. I'm like, what the fuck is going on here? So I look at my Sprint® PCS Phone and it agrees. So I go around the T-Wall to see the atomic clocks. They agree.

And here's where it gets weird. I call Verizon Time and Temperature, it agrees on the time but instead of the greeting I expect, the greeting I have to make a lame joke about every time I use Verizon time to demonstrate the speakerphone on a Sprint handset, it announces itself as "Bell Atlantic" time. There hasn't been a Bell Atlantic for about, oh, a fucking decade now.

Something's not right here. Something is just not right.

Expansion...

See the new box on the sidebar? First of many new pages.

Hoorj for caffeine!

Caffeine prevents skin cancer! This news hot on the heels of news that it reduces the risk of Parkinson's and alleviates suicidal tendencies in women.

Forever under construction.

Tomorrow at 8:43 PM will mark the one-year anniversary of this blog.

I'm amazed. Specifically, by the following facts:
a: I'm not dead, and
b: I haven't killed anyone.

I launched "version 2.0" of this site prematurely, because my wonderful mother paid for my Blogger and Blogspot upgrades on my birthday. What is version 2.0? Version 2.0 is what you've been seeing for the last two months. The post-upheaval blog, with less whining about personal problems and generally more fun.

"One day scientists will prove that tofu causes cancer." -- The Kip

Version 2.0 is also the return to this Blog template. This is the template I started with, which I customized for my own purposes a year ago and then lost to a Blogger server fuckup. Recently I rebuilt it, made it prettier and more standards-compliant. It looks a lot like Status.Blogger.com except BETTER.

"Less Evil! Tastes great!" -- The Kip

And Version 2.0 is the domain of the brain monkeys! -- The brain monkeys being the collective name for my Whole Sort Of Mental Mish-Mash. I have finally come to the conclusion that I do, in fact, have serious mental problems. And I embrace them. I have fun with them. And thanks to my easy access to this page through email and at work, and thanks to my phone's digital voice recorder function, you can have fun with them too!

"A lot of things suck because they AREN'T boring." -- The Kip

Soon, I will be expanding this site even further. I have so much to share with the world. My old page is going to be re-jiggered into something more in keeping with the style of this site. The quotes, essays, graphics and sounds of my old site, plus what I've been building offline for months and months, will become a coherently incoherent picture of my worldview.

"How stupid can people get? I mean, without being legitimately retarded?" -- The Kip

Yes, a bold new day is coming. I'll be damned if I know when, but it's coming.

"You know what I am? I'm the EVIL Drew Carey." -- The Kip

You say piezo, and I say piezo...

Could somebody please give me a definitive answer on how to pronounce "piezo"??? I've heard "py-zo" and "pee-zo" and "pee-ay-zo" with almost equal frequency.

Maybe with a little better self-discipline...

I'm certain that I could get away with murder just once. The problem is, I'm afraid it would be like the criminal equivalent of "Lay's" potato chips - "Bet ya can't kill just one!"

Troubling...

The voices are starting to agree on things. The one I call "Rage" is the loudest right now. He says I need to stop repressing him and just kill these irritating in-duh-viduals. Usually "Reason" and "Calm" manage to put him back in his box, but "Calm" is nowhere to be found and "Reason" is agreeing with Rage. Instead of explaining how the morons will eventually destroy themselves and become each others' tormentors in Hell like he usually does, he's starting to think that we need to make the world a better place by just getting rid of them now.