Yahoo! News Photos presents: Latest Sign that Things Generally Aren't Going Well

I stole this one from Dale (sorry, Dale), but adding this to the blog has been on my mind, and how better to start it off than this totally cool animal abuse?

Feel free to caption these, by the way, because I know I'm going to!

how not to be original

Something I’ve noticed lately that deserves attention (and ridicule) is the cliché conversation. There are many of them out there, and right now I can only think of two off the top of my head, but they are basically a conversation or perhaps a monologue that people have entirely too often, arguments and reinforcements that are so outdated and stupid that they aren’t worth having ever again by anyone. Ever.

The first was first pointed out as cliché by Stella, which I regard as one of the funniest entities in humor and comedy today. Their show on Comedy Central was highly censored, which arguably hurt their effectiveness. Either way, here’s my shitty memory of the conversation in question:

Guy 1: So, do you believe in God?
Guy 2: I dunno.
Guy 1: Like I believe in something, you know?
Guy 2: Right, yeah.
Guy 1: Like I don’t know if he’s an old man with a beard (they share a small laugh)…
Guy 2: Right, like he might be a gas cloud or who even knows but I think that something is up there!

Yuck.

Another example is one I’ve heard so many damn times that it puts me in kill mode as soon as I hear it.

Guy 1: Languages can be totally misleading.
Person unfortunate to serve as audience to Guy 1’s verbal excrement: Yeah? Give me an example.
Guy 1: Like with French you can say something totally disgusting but it still sounds romantic and beautiful. Like “(something in French, said with a dramatic, passionate, soft tone)”.
Person:Well what does that mean?
Guy 1: It means “Did you throw up in the toilet this morning?”
Person: -feigns laughter-
Guy 1: But German is the exact opposite.
Person: -chuckles-
Guy 1: You can say anything and it sounds like you’re cussing someone out: “ACH BRACH UN STEICHEN BRACHEN STEIN FRACHEN!”
Person: But you’re saying something nice but it sounds like it’s mean! Ha ha!
Guy 1: Heh heh, yeah. -sort of pissed that the other guy caught on so fast and he couldn't say it himself-

Let this serve as a notice: You are not funny if you say this. If you say this, you are stupid. Now no one else has to tell you and you can get on with your life by trying to rebuild your now-destroyed integrity.

So like I said, there are more examples of this, so if you can think of any let me know and we can collectively laugh at others' monotonous excuse for conversational endeavour.

cry josh cry

This story halfway reads like an Onion article. There's an air of sarcasm in every quote in this story, in which everybody wants to make the big baby stop crying (read like the stereotypical bully would when trying to pick on the nerdy kid in far too many movies). I especially got that feel from the superintendent's quote at the end that they'd try and make Josh comfortable.

The real story here is that Josh is a great big blubbering vagina. He's got the Bill Clinton "I'm-sorry-but-will-you-please-stop-asking-questions-regarding-that-woman-I-didn't-get-a-blowjob-from face, probably on his way to play X-Box, holing himself up in his room so his teacher cannot get "revenge" on him.




Josh is probably drawing wizards, imagining dialogue from his teacher:

"That's it, Josh. Go home to your PRECIOUS BRONCOS. John Elway can't save you now, even with his fiery touchdown pass of vengeance. What? What's that? No, Josh, don't destroy me and Principal Karczewski with your Level 5 Bronco Blade! It's a "Mile-High" avenging force of justice! NOOOOOOoooo!"

I cannot figure out what the big deal is with Windows Live Local. It's like Google Maps, but a little more jerky and less graceful, and run by a less charismatic multinational conglomerate. If you can figure out the answer to this myth, please enlighten me in the Comments Bar.

In other news, people in my hometown (99.9% caucasian) are still struggling with their reality and trying to find ways that they can turn into the Yankee suburbanite dystopia from which they came.

good news

The Hideaway is finally under the surveillance and searchability of Google. That means if you search for "totally cool badass awesomeness", you'll always be able to find your way home, hepcats.

yow!

Either you love advertisements from the 40's and 50's, or you're another goddamn communist.

An Education in Farts

Growing up, I had some pretty bad teachers. One, for instance, would time us to three seconds at the water fountain. If we had to take a bathroom break, she would take it out of our recess time. Once, she threatened to take away recess for the rest of the year if we kept talking. We kept talking and she stayed true to her deal.

Another teacher, in fourth grade, ran the study hall for students who didn't bring permission slips for field trips. There, I sat in her class with her miscreant, apathetic, and ignorant students. I tried reading or drawing, but a girl at my table held up a crude sign that said, "HEATHER FARTED", and laughed and pointed at the girl next to her. "Shut up, shit." replied Heather in response to the sign. "You girls STOP that right NOW", said the teacher, and the girls put the sign down and resumed jiggling in their giddiness. I hung my head and pretended not to notice.

My fifth grade math teacher always challenged the students to figure out simple arithmetic in their heads faster than he could. Since we were in fifth grade, we weren't as good as he was and he would always chuckle in self satisfaction afterwards. One time he mentioned the novel Moby Dick, and two students giggled. He stopped everything and asked them what they were laughing at. They shrugged. We sat there for ten minutes while he stared at them, trying to get them to say that "dick" is a funny word. They never did, so he cancelled our reading/game period that afternoon.

In kindergarten, my teacher (who I later heard was an alcoholic, which makes total sense in some ways) would give us a daily nap time. If we slept, we got a sticker. My best friend could hypnotize himself into falling asleep instantly, while I never could. Kindergarten teachers must love their job because of this nap time, because everything is serene for about an hour. My teacher took advantage of this period and made one of the students give her a neck rub during nap time while she graded our papers. Everyone but the girls hated doing this, so teacher/teacher's pet relationships were quickly determined. We hatched a plan to retaliate, and during the time one day we tied her shoes to her desk. This same teacher later gave us a paddling for drawing a naked woman, a decent one at that, on the back of a worksheet. She got another teacher to witness the sentence, but I thought she was doing it like "Hey, check this out. I'm totally going to wail on this kid's ass." I didn't like her much after that.

In sixth grade, we had a teacher who was "just a bitch", as my dad explained to me. Both of my brothers had had her before and she did the same thing to them. After leaving her class, she immediately forgot my name, out of spite of my creativity and self worth. She taught General Science, and for entirely too many illustrations used her MRI results she brought in from her doctor visits. We could see the details of her brain and head while she pointed out the different parts of the brain, nasal cavity, the mouth and throat and eyes. It never occurred to anyone why she actually had so many x-rays of her coconut's interior. During some student presentations one day, she closed her eyes and sat for a good five minutes silently. Someone whispered that she was asleep, after which she leaped up and said, "I am NOT asleep, unlike the rumors that CASSIE is trying to spread!" Cassie, needless to say, was disproportionately punished.

Different points in time, though, allowed the trickling of some very special people into my education. The substitute teachers of Cumberland County were really something. We loved getting these people into the rooms with us, not only because of their ignorance to our schedule, but because they were so fucking interesting and laughable.

In high school, there were so many to choose from. The same nine or ten people substituted regularly for all teachers, and they were all gems. Mr. Lovingood was gay. We all called him Mr. GoodLoving, and he was frequently made to cry and run out of the room. There was another whose name I never knew, because I was too distracted by her amazingly strange appearance.

We called her Quay Quay, because she was always trying to be an Indian (woo-woo, not red dot). She had a mullet that she called a "wedge" haircut, and wore those shitty black t-shirts with a picture of a sad looking Indian mixed with a coyote howling, a full moon, and an eagle thrown in for kicks. She had dreamcatcher earrings, and brown tinted glasses. She would pace around the room and use that stuff that makes "smoke" come from your finger tips, citing it as Indian magic. If you told her that she wasn't an Indian, which she was not, she would hiss like a cat and scowl at you. Best of all, though, she would draw portraits of Indians that looked like they were done by an eight-year-old, giving them to people around the school and doing her best to get a reputation as the resident Indian. She told everyone about ghosts that lived in her house, and how they didn't do much of anything but walk and poke about the house at random times. They were pretty boring ghosts.

In geometry class, we once had a guy in his late twenties wearing a suit. We asked him about what he was like, and he said "Well basically, gospel music is my life." He went on about how he like to sing gospel music, produce it, probably jerk off to it. Someone said, "I don't like gospel music very much." The teacher stood up, and shouted over the desk, "WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?! YOU WANNA GO?! LET'S GO PUNK, LET'S DO THIS!" We didn't say anything else.

Elementary school had the best substitutes, though, because they felt superior to the children, probably some kind of satisfaction they couldn't get elsewhere. Miss Combs, for example, tried to fool us fifth graders. She weighed at least three hundred pounds, and had to do the characteristic sitting stance of someone that fat, wherein you have to spread your legs so your gut can hang between them. She had a yankee accent and talked during the whole period about what we kids were learning these days, and what our real teachers were like. She tried to make us laugh by dumbing down her humor to what she thought could match our pitiful IQ's, but wound up sounding like she was retarded. Miss Combs farted mid-sentence and was totally busted. Instead of ignoring it or playing it smooth, she blamed it on a boy on the other side of the room who was reading a book. She then made fun of him for farting and tried to get us to join in. "What's the matter, did you have to let one rip in the middle of class? Ha ha! Hey everybody, Chris just farted! What a dork!" A girl then looked at Miss Combs square in the eye and said, "Miss Combs, we know you just farted. Why can't you just admit it?" "I didn't fart, huh huh huh." said Miss Combs as she looked about nervously.

The queen of substitute teachers, though, was Miss Bilbrey. She was the mother of a teacher at the school who herself was in her mid-fifties, and Miss Bilbrey was about 85. She made this face at all times, even at rest:



This woman had been an elementary school teacher until they told her to go home, at which point she became a substitute teacher and started right where she left off. She was crabby, cantankerous, and stubborn. More entertaining, though, was her drowsiness. Bad things happened to Miss Bilbrey in her sleep. She once fell asleep in class and was stapled to her desk. Another time, the students took her purse and put it above the ceiling tiles. Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned, but I only tripped the woman (on accident, but isn't it more interesting to end the sentence there?). She would always come in and tell us to start on our "readin' and writin' and lessons!" She was a total stereotype which we, children raised by television, immediately realized and were overjoyed with. It was like watching a cartoon old woman walk around and talk, a Nickelodeon hologram lady sent from Orlando, Florida directly to us.

Yes, it was people like Miss Bilbrey and those mentioned above that have made me who I am. They provided the margin of error in the teacher's population that makes students into more interesting, character-driven, and well-rounded individuals, and for this I really am kind of thankful. Had I gone to a better school, I wouldn't have so many laughs at other people's weirdness, but I also wouldn't have seen what I might turn into if I didn't work hard in school. Some of these folks, for all I know, may have been planted by the Superintendent of Schools to teach us a "life" lesson that our regular teacher could not have done. They may have been instructed to say "Duhh, I love methamphetamines and those damn video games. When I was in elementary school all I did was fail spelling tests and talk during study hall. I didn't share when I was a child. I love teen pregnancy. Duhhh. But look how I turned out. Duhh."

But then again, I probably would have laughed at them all the same.

PSA

Necrosatanica has a new re-release of our epic, Neopentagramiticon. Here's the playlist.

1. NECROSATANICA - Foreskin Shadows (1:46)
2. NECROSATANICA - Procession of Suffering (1:31)
3. NECROSATANICA - Opening of the Rift (In Hell) (0:15)
4. NECROSATANICA - Pain Train (2:13)
5. NECROSATANICA - Procession of Angelic Suffering (2:08)
6. NECROSATANICA - Blood of a Thousand Cunts (1:23)
7. NECROSATANICA - Endless Drone of Damnation (3:49)
8. NECROSATANICA - Tsunami Song (2:05)
9. NECROSATANICA - Bladerunner (1:15)
10. NECROSATANICA - Satan the Dark Lord (You Will Worship the Prince) (0:43)
11. NECROSATANICA - Satan, He is a Dark Prince (1:23)
12. NECROSATANICA - Story of Man (Pt. 1) (4:08)
13. NECROSATANICA - Runnin' Through the Forest (Pt. 1) (1:22)
14. NECROSATANICA - Runnin' Through the Forest (Pt. 2) (2:14)
15. NECROSATANICA - Jubilant Suffocation (3:32)
16. NECROSATANICA - Story of Man (Pt. 2) (2:30)
17. NECROSATANICA - Infinite Tribulation Simulation (4:13)
18. NECROSATANICA - Negro Satanica (2:36)
19. NECROSATANICA - The Song of Love (1:38)
20. NECROSATANICA - Ghost of the Damned (Marty McDaniels) (3:50)
21. NECROSATANICA - I am the Wind (The Legend) (5:54)
22. NECROSATANICA - Don't Forget the Pink Tuxedo (2:08)
23. NECROSATANICA - More Cheeba? (1:38)
24. NECROSATANICA - Final Epic of the Judgement of the Demons (End Times) (5:40)


http://www.necrosatanica.com/

I think an excellent collection to have would be the pre-made championship t-shirts for the losing teams in sports. When I was a kid, I saw a Braves World Series Champs sweatshirt in Big Lots, although the Braves had lost that year. My dad and uncle laughed at it, and I didn't realize that it had been made in advance, so I wondered for a while what kind of caveman made that stupid shirt.

Of some relevance, Where Are the USC Championship T-Shirts?

yay, sports

"Ow, watch it, fucker!"


Tennessee basketball is the only sport for which I would call myself a die-hard fan. When I was a kid the team was always bad and had cheap tickets to games. My dad would get season tickets because basketball is fun, and we'd go every once in a while. Good times.

This is turning out to be a good season, though, largely due to our new head coach Bruce Pearl, whose bobblehead doll was dispensed at the Georgia game, which was last night. It was the best turnout I've ever seen for a men's basketball game, with something like 22,000 people there. It was nothing like when I was a kid, with few people there, the team screwing up, and the drunkest and loudest man in the whole arena sitting right behind us, sharing with the team (even at exhibition games and preseason crapfests) gems such as "Get the ball", "Way to pass it to the other team", "Go", "Shoot the damn ball", "Goddamn", or my personal favorite, "You're a fuckin' disgrace."

But no, the Vols are doing fine this year, and if they keep things up, could be on their way to the playoffs, which would make Knoxville very happy.

But in the midst of all of this optimism, a peculiar and humorous phenomenon is emerging. UT is a football school. It just is. But last night at the basketball game, the student blocks were full and supportive, but without direction. If you've seen really good basketball on TV (i.e. Duke, UNC, probably Kentucky), you see student sections who have a solid repertoire of chants, dances, songs, hoots, and any other number of obnoxious things to do. We don't have that. Sure, we say "Sucks" really loudly when they call the roster of the other team out and do the newspaper thing, but other than that, we're sort of lost. When something happens, most people scream and cheer, but then look around at everybody else for a cue or something to due uniformly. How funny.

Q.E.D. : Go Vols.

looks like someone has figured out a way to photograph my nightmares

Zydeco a Go Go: the deep south through a t-shirt perspective

For New Year's, my friend Paul and I took a trip to Louisiana. Yes, we saw Katrina damage, and yes we saw obnoxious abortion protest, and yes, we fought gators with bowie knives after diving out of our fanboat full of crawdads and Tabasco sauce.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We had gone down because I have some family there, and because it is nice to get out of Tennessee when possible. The trip wound up being cautious because of rampant intestinal influenza (or maybe just too much gumbo, hoowee!) which made us go through a lot of Germ-X. For New Year's itself we had a Bottle Rocket War which I lost because of a shoddy fuse on some Jumping Jacks*, leaving me with a decent burn on my hand.

A couple of days later we headed to New Orleans. Most of the buildings didn't look too bad, but had suffered sever damage on the interior. Bourbon Street provided all that it usually does including a t-shirt that says "I stayed in New Orleans for Katrina and all I got was this lousy t-shirt, a new Cadillac, and a plasma TV", another saying "Katrina gave me a blowjob I'll never forget." At the Cafe du Monde, an old oriental lady was my waitress, and when giving the total she said "Seven dollar even, baby", winking at me. Sweetheart, that doesn't work. I almost ralphed my beignet and cafe au lait, which would be a damn shame.

The French Quarter was up and in full effect, but the drowned parts of town weren't going anywhere. They were bad. All of the cars were put under the interstate overpasses, and most of the houses were in the process of being gutted. Esoteric FEMA shit was sprayed all over the fronts of the houses, mostly involving pet rescue. If you are from East New Orleans, sorry. If you are not, I know where you can get a bunch of free stuff.

We stopped at Popeye's for some fried chicken on the way out of town. Man, did this rock. This was the blackest place I'd been in a long time. People's cellphones kept ringing, and all of the ringers were rap songs like "Shake your Laffee Taffee" and other shit rap. Leaving town, I rode as passenger and had some time to reflect on some questions.

1. If you wore a shirt that said "I love niggers", could people really get mad at you? I mean, you love them, right? What's the big deal?

2. Is there a shirt that says "Don't blame me, I voted for Pedro"? If there isn't, we should do all in our power to prevent it. Its proliferation of a long-dead joke will choke my retinas and make them fall out.

3. The people in N.O. all seemed to feel royally screwed by the government. I'm not just saying that because of the other t-shirts that reflected this opinion, but by all the interviews, conversations I've heard, and the faces of the people I saw sifting through their former neighborhood. Most of the people haven't moved back if they're even going to in the first place, making a surreal atmosphere of a big city with few people.Everyone there has realized by now that there are sections of that town that they're just going to have to say that it was fun while it lasted.**



*Some kids at the bonfire kept referring to these as Nigger Chasers. Or maybe that was the bottle rockets. Either way, it doesn't matter because they had nigger related nomenclature for just about every kind of firework imaginable, such as Nigger Bombs, Nigger Jumpers, and so on.
**Or maybe not that much fun based on Master P lyrics, but you get my point.

Let's hear it for codeine

The surgery went fine. I wish that I had a picture of the x-ray to show you, but let's just sum it up by saying that all of the nurses said "Ooohh", and shrugged at me when they saw it in the examination room. What a bunch of bitches.

After that, I was moved into a different room, where a tremendous needle was put into my arm and with saline and glucose. Another thing was put into that one, with something very magical inside. This was my first confrontation with general anesthetic and hopefully my last. I did not like this stuff. I remember coming out of it, however slightly, midway through the procedure, because I could hear the doctor plinking and rooting around in there. Then my big boobed nurse woke me up. My stepmom took me to get a Frosty, brought me home, and took care of me, and I had no clue what was going on. I really did not like having a near total lack of control, especially when I wound up with a lap full of Frosty due to a numb jaw.

Let me tell you, I like a fuckin' Frosty. Just not four of them. My diet for a few days was limited to them, along with painkillers and water. My first real meal back was grilled out, which rules the school. Do not take solid food for granted, because someday it may be the best friend you've got.

I'm getting my teeth yanked out today and am a little scared. One of my wisdom teeth is growing in sideways and rams into all the others, leading them to be upset and socially anxious. My main concern with all this is that they're going to have me be awake for the duration of the procedure. Granted, yes, I'll be on enough drugs to send me back in time, I just hope that I don't remember what they do and have nightmares or something like that. That and the pain. Surgery I am not accustomed to and don't want to occur frequently.

In addition to this I can't eat anything all day before I go, because if I do I might puke all over the surgeon, and he isn't somebody I want to piss off. I once sat in and witnessed this procedure done on someone else. When the tooth is too unruly to just come out on its own, they stick a chisel down in the middle of it, hammer it into the tooth, and twist. It makes a crunching, popping sound. When this sound was made in the OR, all of the other doctors and nurses winced. The shards were then pulled out with relative ease.