13 posts tagged “rants”
This post could be titled “Good Son/Bad Son”. Good Son because I drove to Houston and back twice so my Mom could spend Thanksgiving with me. Bad Son because I’m totally about to make fun of her.
“Black Friday” was originally so named because of the heavy traffic on that day, although most contemporary uses of the term refer instead to it as the beginning of the period in which retailers are in the black (i.e., turning a profit)
On that very day I was taking my Mom downtown to do touristy stuff (like see the Alamo, tour the Riverwalk, all the things I don’t do now that I live here), and one of the best places to park is the mall parking garage downtown.
I mentioned this and immediately retorted, “Ooh, wait. We can’t park there, it’s Black Friday. Going to be a madhouse at the mall.” (Luckily, nobody seems to like that mall so it was quite empty with plenty of parking.)
My mom, confused look on her face, says, “What does that mean?”
“Black Friday, ya know.” I respond, thinking she would understand the term by me simply repeating it. Why doesn’t that ever seem to work?
Pause, looking sheepish, almost whispering. “… is that when all the Black people come out?”
I laughed for a good minute before replying, “Yes Mom, that’s the one day they come out of their houses, but if they see their shadow they go back indoors for another 6 weeks.”
“Oh shut up,” was her only response. I <3 my Mom. XD
After 12 months, numerous phone calls, several weekend huntings, and in incredible amount of frustration, I have done what seemed like the impossible:
I now own my very own Nintendo Wii.
The adventure began Saturday afternoon.
I went to Best Buy to grab a Gaming Headset for voice chat on World of Warcraft (you’re welcome, Ack), and while in the checkout I got the fairly standard “Did you find everything you needed today?” question from the clerk, which I followed up with “Yeah, unless you have a Nintendo Wii stashed in the back somewhere.”
He paused, looked around, and then whispered “They’re getting in a shipment tomorrow morning. We’re not supposed to tell anyone but I overheard them talking about it.”
My eyes went wide with happiness, and I thanked him profusely. I left and immediately got on the phone to my neighbors and friends ML & X and told them about it, and we planned on a group effort to Best Buy at 9:30am Sunday morning.
At 9:45am we were in line outside the Best Buy when the clerk came out and announced “There are 14 people in line, and we have 10 Wii’s in stock. Sorry.”
Not ready to give up, we went across the parking lot to the Circuit City where we discovered (along with the crazy talkative lady that had been there since 5am or something), that they only had ONE to sell.
At this point we were getting frustrated and a little defeated, so we decided to make one more pit stop at another Best Buy across town, and lo and behold we were able to each grab one. I spent the entire day yesterday playing Wii Sports, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Metroid Prime 3.
The best? The three-person Wii Tennis tournament.
Any Daily Haggis readers have a Nintendo Wii that’s hooked up to the internet? Add me to your Wii Friends!
Here’s my Wii Console Number: 2491 3501 5181 4878
The following is what I have mailed to the City of Dallas, without the strikethroughs or italicized text. That’s just my own personal comments on the situation.
To The City Of Dallas Corrupt Dirty Shithole Joke of a City:
I recently received a collection notice on two unpaid parking tickets in your city that occurred on Sunday, 6/24/2000 within 9 minutes of each other, for “PARKING ON UNAPPROVED SURFACE”, which the lady obstinate bitch who repeated herself like a broken record I spoke with on the phone told me was a grassy area.
I am disputing the parking ticket on the following facts:
1. This is the most important of all: I have never been to Dallas in my entire life. Ever. (Seriously, your city sucks balls.)
2. The tickets are two different ticket numbers but contain the same information:
Ticket 1: Occurred at 9:07am on 315 N RAVINIA DR
Ticket 2: Occurred at 9:15am on 314 N RAVINA DR
You can see that the tickets are 8 minutes apart and occur what looks to be the same exact street, each with a $95.00 charge.
3. I never received any notification of parking tickets until last year around this same time, 6 years later.
4. The time and date in question is even more proof that it was not me or any vehicle I have ever driven. It was a Sunday morning, and I was still asleep. In HOUSTON. Seriously, get with the fucking program.
5. The vehicle in question was totaled in February of 2001 and I do not own it anymore. (RIP Pezmobile)
6. I have to repeat this, because this is the most important fact of all: I. HAVE. NEVER. BEEN. TO. DALLAS. The car in question, a 1997 Ford Escort, has also never been to Dallas, or if it did, was prior to my owning it in 1999 which is a year prior the tickets.
Please contact me to discuss this dispute, and remove these fraudulent charges from my record. After this is resolved, I do not wish to ever be contacted by The City Of Dallas ever again, and this incredibly ridiculous error is only cementing the desire to NEVER visit your city.
Thank You,
Haggis MacBastard
Apologies to B-Dogg McGee. No offense to you, but your city is stupid.
I’m off to Houston for the next four days to help spend my friend and sometimes-very-rarely-contributing editor Smokin’s 30th birthday!
No Flashback Friday this week, but normal schedule will resume next Monday.
Have a great week, and a great weekend!
While musing with a co-worker on integrating terminology and actions from constantly playing massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft, our conversation inspired me to create a comparison of real life versus MMO life, and what it would be like if the two were mutually exclusive.
If Real Life Were Like An MMO:
- While waiting for friends to show up, you spontaneously break into dance with no accompanying music, although it’s just the same dance move over and over.
- Every time you go walking, you are forced off your path every minute because you need to go dig up a flower or hammer at some rocks.
- You are constantly pestered by teenagers asking you for money or if they’ll take you through an area too scary for their age. Oh wait, this is called parenting.
- You can sleep anywhere, and stop right in the middle of the road for a snack or to read a book.
- The local mall will become an area for smaller groups yelling “Looking for more to shop at Old Navy! Please send text!” They may also walk around wearing a sign that says “LFG ON. PST” and you would know exactly what it meant.
- People will laugh and cheer if a random person decides to stand in a public area in their underwear dancing. Usually this is reserved for private establishments by the airport.
- Sometimes when you ask for a strangers’ help, they may just stand by the door and take credit for your work until you kick them out.
- You can fight someone until almost death, and afterwards they will only reply “good match!”
- Every few months the government will make a massive change to every profession, requiring you to learn all your skills over again–but for free!
- Any store you go into will buy anything you have to sell, but the really good and expensive items are sold on eBay. (Auction house, get it?)
Feel free to add your own in the comments section!
Five years ago I was just starting one of my first jobs in my field, working for a small yellow pages company. I was living alone but not enjoying it very much, and I was considering getting another apartment with a friend.
Ten years ago I was working for a telephone survey company and taking a year off before starting college. I made employee of the month two months in a row because I memorized the order of keys needed to advance to the next call without having to wait for the slow computer load screens, which brought my call rate to less than a second between calls.
Fifteen years ago I was nervous about going to high school, and probably spending my nights talking to strangers on BBS Chat boards (that’s pre-internet, folks). The irony is that I’d been telling online people I was 15 for three years, just so they’d take me seriously. At 15. What was I thinking?
Twenty years ago I was spending my time at the school park playing GI Joes and Transformers in the dirt, and throwing them off playground structures with makeshift parachutes. The rest of the time was spent riding my bike all over the neighborhood, or attempting to build tree forts in the woods next to my apartments.
Twenty-five years ago I was very excited about starting Kindergarten. Earlier that year I had gotten on the bus with a neighbor girl and went right into her classroom like I belonged there. The only supplies I brought were my sister’s Happy Days lunchbox filled with Marshmellows and a Thermos™ full of water. The administrative staff thought it was all very cute and funny. My mother did not.
And Thirty years ago today, I was squeezed out of my mother and thrust upon the world for the very first time.
The clip above is from an MSNBC morning news show that broadcasted today. It features three of the newscasters reporting on the day’s stories, as usual, but when journalist Mika Brzezinski is supposed to start off with the “lead story” she immediately apologizes for the content, then after a second thought flat out refuses to discuss the topic.
What was the topic that she refused to report on? Paris. Effing. Hilton.
The clip jumps a few times, showing Mika getting more and more frustrated with both her fellow newscasters and the producer (which I assume is shouting obscenities in her ear) who still try to get her to do the story. She even goes so far as to steal a lighter out of one of the other newscasters pockets and attempts to BURN the damn story on live television. Before she can set fire to MSNBC’s studios they wrestle it away from her, but not before she rips the copy to shreds.
The producers even go so far as to print out another copy, which she promptly stands up and shreds in a nearby waste bin.
Kudos to her. If only everyone else in the media would do the same, Paris would lose all her powers and die on a coke binge somewhere. The media not paying attention to her is like Kryptonite to Superman.
Source: Perez Hilton
It’s summertime, so while we’re being inundated by the latest Gwen Stefani single or whatever shit-tastic garbage commercial radio is trying to shove down our throats, I thought I’d take a moment and recommend a few recent, or sort-of-recent, albums that I’ve been listening to. Some are quite mainstream (Maroon 5, Nine Inch Nails), some are rising stars (Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen), and one that nobody knows but should (The Eames Era).
As always, I welcome all comments, hate mail, and other recommendations. If you’d like to see what I’m listening to right now, here’s my last.fm link which has every song I’ve heard for the past year or so.
Maroon 5 - It Won’t Be Soon Before Long
I’ve been an early fan of Maroon 5, when they first released Harder to Breath as a single several years ago. On a whim, I got an opportunity to catch them live when they opened at a tiny club in Houston (Numbers, represent!) for the 90s one-hit-wonder Cowboy Mouth (remember Jenny Says? Yeah, them.) They put on a hell of a show, and I’ve been a follower of theirs since then.
Of course I was impatient for the next album from the ex-Kara’s Flowers bandmates, since frontman Adam Levine had been spending so much time recording with everyone else in the music industry (Kanye West, Alicia Keyes). When I got the word that the new album was coming, I think I literally cheered out loud.
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Long time, no see, eh?
I realize my absence may have been unnoticed by some, but I also know that some of you Interwebians wondered. Let me put your basest fears to rest. Not dead, not incapacitated, and only marginally closer to the stroke that’s been impending for about 7 or 8 years now.
No, what sent me on my electronic hiatus was a trailer. One simple, short, well-disguised travesty of justice. The trailer in question is, as anyone who knows me is probably aware, Rob Zombie’s “re-imagining” (his words, not mine) of the epic slasher flick, Halloween.
For the uninitiated, the Halloween mythos follows the bloody, screamy story of Michael Myers, the preeminent slasher figure of modern film-making. The original film, written and directed by horror legend John Carpenter (who, by the by, also composed its prolific theme music), follows the story of Laurie Strode (played into cinematic history by Jamie Lee Curtis), a teenager being stalked by Myers for, at least in the beginning, unknown reasons.
As the story goes, Michael Myers viciously murdered his own sister, who apparently was not a very nice girl, with a butcher knife. In the original film, Myers’ motivations are vague, and somewhat supernatural. He stalks Laurie and her requisitely moronic friends until they’re dead and she’s saved by the inestimable Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), who has treated Myers for years. Not much of a plot, eh?
The beauty of Halloween was not the plot, or the acting (although Pleasance is decent and Curtis is passable), or even the quintessential theme. It’s the cinematography that elevates this film beyond a simple horror flick. There is no more gripping scene than that of Dr. Loomis, standing silent and aghast as he looks down from the balcony of the old Myers house, at the pile of leaves where Myers’ corpse should be. This scene, among many, is one of the reasons I’ve always admired this film. In point of fact, critics and moviegoers of the time (the film was released in 1978) agreed. Not only does it rank as one of the most critically well received of the horror genre, but has become a part of popular culture.
Now get ready to flame, Interwebians.
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Friends - check
Money - check
Well-slept - check
Opposite sex - check
Guitar - check
Microphone - check
Messages waiting on me when I come home - check
How come everything I think I need always comes with batteries?
What do you think it means?
- John Mayer, “Something’s Missing”
Heavier Things
