Halloween Sucks.

They should ban Halloween.
The police, and the National Guard, and the Army Reserve, and the Civil Air Patrol, and other miscellaneous enforcement agencies should go out and enforce a ban on Halloween-related activity.
Anyone found carrying eggs will be shot on sight.
And then on November 1, they should pretend like it never happened. No press releases, no comments to the media, nothing. In fact, everyone who was involved in enforcing the ban should claim to have had a great time partying and/or trick-or-treating.


Barring an outright ban, they should at least make it a floating holiday, like Thanksgiving.
Halloween should always be the last Sunday in October. That way, the next day will always be a school day.



On a totally unrelated topic, why isn't there such a thing as a tooth massage? I think it would be enjoyable.

Why do I have to keep telling people I'm not crazy?

Wrong side of the counter.

I make it a point to do my job. I'm only mean to people when they deserve it. And I never ignore people who need help. Sadly, this is not the case everywhere.

Every time I go to Books-A-Million, I'm reminded of why I almost never go to Books-A-Million.

4 out of 5 times I go into a bookstore, I know what I want. Usually, I even have the ISBN number. And if I can't find it on my own, I go to the desk and get an employee to look it up for me.
At a real bookstore, like Waldenbooks, this takes seconds. At Sucks-A-Million, it generally takes several minutes, if it happens at all.

Today, I go to the service desk at Sucks-A-Million and it's deserted. No nametags in sight. So I wait. There's no way to summon help there, and on the incredibly rare occasion you manage to hunt someone down, they're helpless. Usually they tell you to go to the service desk and they'll get someone, which they don't.
So I wait, and wait, and wait. After ten minutes, I give up.

This is not "ten minutes" as in "FELT LIKE ten minutes," this is ten minutes as in "felt like twenty minutes but was actually ten."
I work in retail, and I can tell time. I don't need to exaggerate in this instance.

I leave, and go to Waldenbooks. I already know they don't have what I want (they're getting it in on Wednesday, or so they said on Friday. And I believe the people at Waldenbooks), so I go to buy what I was going to buy at Sucks-A-Million as a backup plan if they didn't have what I went in for.

Why don't I remember NOT to go to sucky places? And why do some places suck so incurably?
The world may never know.

Things that suck.

We just upgraded our POS terminals. They're better than my personal computer now. I'm a bit pissed. And not "pissed" as in "drunk," but pissed as in "let's commit random homicides for recreation."

Just a few minutes ago I was bored, and I opened up our old POS terminal box, before we ship it off to become nonbiodegradable garbage. We have two, and this was the model that sucked the least.

It was like a case study in how NOT to build a computer. It's like in a Compaq brainstorming session one of the eggheads piped up and said, "Hey! Let's build a computer that sucks!"
"A computer that sucks? On purpose?"
"Yeah! A really, REALLY bad computer - so our other computers all look better by comparison!"
"But none of our computers are really that good... So this computer will have to suck a LOT."

Then someone went and did the unexpected by BUYING thousands of them.
Corporate Buyer: "It's perfect! We'll take three thousand!"
Compaq Guy: "But... It sucks!"
Corporate Buyer: "So?"
Compaq Guy: "I mean, on purpose!"
Corporate Buyer: "Sounds like EXACTLY what we need!"

Evil Idea Number 546-B.

The pet fish industry is essentially based upon fish mortality.

If we find a way to make fish immortal, the industry will be thrown into chaos.

The economy will follow, and we take over in the confusion.

This idea is adapted from Douglas Adams' "Restaurant at the End of the Universe." It's a scaled back version of the "shoe event horizon" phenomenon that destroyed Frogstar World B.

Lalalalala I'm not listening lalalala

Stripperella stole my idea a few months ago, about plastic explosive breast implants. But nobody has stolen my idea for the "tactical nuclear device, ambulatory."
Specifically, we take a fat guy, take out all his fat, take out the organs necessary for long term survival, and fill his torso with a suitcase nuke.

I AM NOT CRAZY!


A few days ago, a voice was talking to me in my head and it sounded like a cross between myself and Pauly Shore.
It kept calling me "buddy." I AM NOBODY'S BUDDY!


Here's a phrase that sounds funny out of context: "Firmly lodged."

And a phrase I have all too few opportunities to use: "I have to go blow something up now."


The other day, I decided that banks need trapdoors in front of each teller window. Because about 90% of robbers go to a teller window. Plus, it could be used to dispose of old people with jars of change.
Today, I decided that idea needs to be expanded to all areas of business-to-customer relations. Except the DMV.
The DMV should have trapdoors under the tellers. The customer has the button. And they should have dozens of replacements on standby.
Somebody gets that snide, superior "government employee" attitude that we all hate, and suddenly they drop through the floor and get replaced with the next cashier on the bench.

I swear I'll never do this again.

Promise. Honest to Bob. I'll never do this again. But I have no choice this time.


Dilbert, 10/14/2003. I would just link to it like a good little mindless link propagator, but they only keep them up for a month.

Ninja midget zombies

I woke up this morning at 4:48, and I had a phrase stuck in my head. Ninja Midget Zombies. I have no idea where this came from, since I wasn't dreaming about ninjas, midgets, OR zombies.

Uckfay Ooyay.

I was just thinking about mow much I don't want to be here at work. Then I realized, I really don't want to be anywhere. I don't really want to be. But I am. Why is that?

I think what I really need is a change of scenery. Spending fifteen minutes on the damn phone explaining television antennae is stressful.

On a somewhat related note, wouldn't it be neat to live in a society where it was possible to vaporize people? Like with a phaser? Just ZAP and they're gone. Molecules returned to the atmosphere from whence they came.
After a while, disappearances would become routine. And population control wouldn't be an issue. I think that would be cool.

How hard is it to get a flamethrower? I don't mean the pussy hardware-store flamethrower you use to burn brush piles and crap. I mean a military flamethrower, that shoots jellied gasoline all over a person.

The Daily Show brought up an interesting point yesternight. Is there a limit to how often an office can be recalled?

"History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man... GODZILLA!" - B.O.C.

Doom doom doom doom DOOOOOOOM.

We just got the most tangible proof yet of the impending doom of human civilization. I'm referring of course to the Governator.
California just elected a man with no political experience and no specific plans, just for the sake of change.

This should be fun to watch. Never before in American history has a populace elected a Nazi-loving sexual-harasser to a serious office. At least, not one they knew about beforehand.

The sooner California slides into the ocean, the better off the human race as a whole will be. In hindsight, I think we should have blown the fault lines as soon as we invented the A-bomb.

Maybe his plan to save California is to build a race of machine warriors. This would create jobs in the short run as the machines were constructed, and then everyone would die, so that would solve the long-term problems.


On a totally unrelated note, there are two new Pokeys since the haircut one. I didn't know until this morning. Yes, I admit it, I had almost given up hope for the future of Pokey.

I pronounce FAQ "fah-cue."

Why is it that I so frequently try to log in to Blogger with one of my normal, eight-to-twelve character passwords, when I KNOW my Blogger password is twenty-two characters long?


There should be a government-subsidized pornography company. It would be like the Postal Service, but for porn. They'd compete with the private-sector porn companies, just like the USPS competes with UPS and FedEx. The only difference is that the porn would be distributed for free or reduced-cost to underprivileged men, and also they'd be able to draft people.


Why don't they use decompression against boarding parties on Star Trek? You'd think it would be easy enough to put airtight doors on the cabins, given their level of technology. So when you detect a beam-in, everyone gets the hell out of the corridors, and then the corridor gets depressurized. This would have stopped the Kazon and Vidiians on about a dozen occasions on Voyager, and would have stopped the Xindi on Enterprise last Wednesday.
Sadly, nobody has ever consulted me about 22nd to 24th century military strategy.

On a related note, I didn't think it was possible to make the Enterprise theme worse. Boy, they sure showed me. Now it's painful to hear. It makes me want to smash my TV into 565,000 pieces and jam them all into Rick Berman's colon.
565,000 pieces is not an estimate. The television set would be deliberately processed into that many components, each designed for maximum sharpness.


They say the Pope seems more energetic lately. That's because the Cardinals are giving him drugs. They're going to run him to the red-line until he burns out, then they're going to replace him with a robot.
They won't even necessarily need a GOOD robot, either. Maybe even a Muppet. Pope Kermit the First.
Or a monkey. I want to be canonized by Pope Koko.
This is not a bad idea. And I am not insane.

Humph.

I forgot what I was going to post here. Doesn't that just suck?

Nuke the gay whale fetuses.

I'm bored now. I just spent hours restoring one of our POS POS (that's repeated on purpose) terminals to health, and now that I'm done I'm bored again.


Wouldn't it be weird if something we take for granted suddenly and mysteriously disappeared? Like, calculators?
"I need a calculator."
"Don't you remember? They all disappeared last month!"
CNN would have a field day: "Calculator Crisis!"
So would the various organized religions: "GOD took the calculators from us, for they made us weak! We must boycott the wicked calculator-mongers lest God punish us!" (Imagine the two preceding sentences were spoken with a "Reverend Lovejoy" voice.)
And the conspiracy nuts: "Big Calculator stands to make BILLIONS replenishing the world's calculator supply! Congress is controlled by the calculator lobby!"


I like living in Virginia. And, strange as I am, I think it's good for my sanity. Because I couldn't live in a state that's completely surrounded by other states. I could only live in a coastal state. Because you always have an escape route. Three directions you have other parts of the U.S.A., but in the fourth direction, international waters. Yeah, baby.