My wife has managed to scour every single Big Lots in San Diego county (except the one in Poway) for $3 DVDs. I finally had to put her on DVD restriction. We must have bought 70 or 80 in the past few weeks (not to mention the 30 or so we picked up in the couple of months before that). God help me if she ever figures out that there are Big Lots in places besides San Diego.
Revenge is a Dish Best Served …
At our Christmas party this year, we did a white elephant gift exchange. One of my bosses brought this USB rocket launcher, basically, a nerf dart gun, powered by USB. Still, pretty darn cool. Turns out she got it at thinkgeek.com. I had never heard of the site, but when I checked it out, it was so cool.
So the other day, I noticed that she had a box for an Annoy-a-tron in her office. Now, this is one of the meanest things I saw on thinkgeek.com. An Annoy-a-tron is a small electric circuit board a little smaller than a business card with a built in battery and speaker and a magnet so you can hide it under the desk, chair leg, or whatever. What it does is at some interval ranging from 2 to 8 minutes, it makes a noise, such as an electonic beep.
I see the box for this and say, “You really bought that. That is the meanest thing I ever heard.”
“Would that drive you crazy?” she say.
“I would kill somebody. I’d get a gun and come in here blasting.” I say.
She says something to effect of, really? So I go on ranting and raving. She gets up and goes in my other boss’ office next door, and they both smile knowingly at each other. I totally didn’t pick this up. She walks out and down the hall toward my office. She reaches under my desk and pulls out this thing, hits a button, and a cricket chirp plays.
Now, I’d had a cricket in my office about two weeks, or so I thought. We really did have some crickets in the building. I know I heard them over by the bathrooms. So when one showed up in my office, I figured that one of them had migrated. I didn’t worry about it, because I knew there was nothing I could do about it.
When Mary and I were first married, we lived in an apartment about a half a block from a pet shop which sold reptiles and raised crickets. We always had crickets in our apartment, and there was nothing you could do about it. They would chirp, and you would look for them and they would stop chirping. So when one showed up in my office, I didn’t worry about it. There was no point. It never dawned on me that it was always one single chirp, and as the woman in the office down the hall, pointed out later, always 3 minutes apart. It also didn’t dawn on me that a cricket has a finite lifespan, and it had been there for weeks, and never moved nor changed its chirp. For all I know, it should have been an entire colony by now.
After she pulled out the device, we laughed, but then I started thinking. I can’t just let this slide. Ahh, revenge. Sweet revenge. Then again, she is my boss, and I do really like my job. This is going to take some careful planning. Revenge is a dish best served …, in a way that won’t get me fired.
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One Man’s Bizarre Reaction to Fear
I saw on the Daily Show last night that Keith Olbermann from MSNBC said of the new Republican Senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, that he was “irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”
Now, I don’t care that he said it. “News people” on the 24 hour “News” networks aren’t supposed to be impartial or objective. They’re supposed to be controversial, so effectively, he’s just doing is it just doing his job. And what he said this one time is really only slightly worse than what pretty much anyone with a mic pinned to their chest on fair and balanced Fox News say about Obama, every single day.
I’m not going to argue about whether he should or shouldn’t have said it. What I take issue with is the use of homophobic in conjunction with tea-bagging. Aren’t these pretty much mutually exclusive terms. I know what homophobic means, and I’m pretty darn sure I know what tea-bagging means. I guess it’s possible that different people have different ways of dealing with their fears. Apparently, the Honorable Senator Elect from Massachussets deals with his fear of gay people by sticking their testes in his mouth.
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Who’s that Doggie in the Window?
This has happened to me twice in the last couple of weeks. I’ll stop somewhere on the way home from work, and I’ll get out of the car and see a little tiny dog in the rear window of a parked car, on that little shelf between the top of the rear seat and that back window. Both times I’ve wanted to say to the dog, “Shouldn’t you be fake?”
Calandar
At this time of year, I usually write about my pet peeves about calendars, but since I driven this into the ground, I thought I’d give it amiss this year. Some time before or after New Year, I buy a new calendar once they go on half price. I usually got some sort of art. In the past few years, I’ve had Gil Elvgren pinups, paintings of Spanish dancers, and New Yorker cartoons. This year is a calendar titled, Salute (vintage French liquor advertisements). The art for January has the dirtiest, nondirty picture I’ve ever seen in my life:
Club Sabbat, Priceless
For the last few years, my wife, Mary, and I have been going out for New Year’s Eve. Mary and our friend Anasthasia go out dancing once or twice a month at this Goth club, Club Sabbat. I’m not real big on clubs, but every once in a while and on special occasions like Halloween and New Year, I’ll tag along. This year Anastasia was going to a New Year’s party, and I figured I might be off the hook for New Year, but no dice. A couple of days before New Year’s Eve, our friend Ned asked where we were going. The options were the gay club that Ned works at, or Club Sabbat. “Sabbat,” I said. “I’d much rather look at chubby Goth chicks than skinny gay guys.” I kind of have a thing for Chubby goth chicks (definitely more than skinny gay guys). Also, I like the music at Sabbat better. The gay club plays what I like to refer to as, Gay French Disco music (not a big fan), while Sabbat plays Angry German Industrial Dance music (still not a big fan, but at least I like some of it). Plus, in the back room at Sabbat, they usually play 80s music (which I really do like).
The way it usually works is that Mary and Anastasia dance to the Angry German music in the front room, while I spend most of the night in the back room with the 80s music. In the back room, about every fifth song, they throw in an Angry German song, and most of the time, it’s not one of the ones I like. When this happens, I’ll usually go get a drink or switch back to the front room for a song or two, depending on whether they playing something I like there.
The second best thing all night was this one chubbyish girl, wearing a corset that stopped just short of her boobs and four pieces of electrical tape on her nipples to keep her from getting arrested for indecent exposure. Awesome. Now, part of the reason that this was the second best thing all night is that this is what she always wears. Still, I do always feel like I should thank her whenever she walks by.
Now, the best thing all night happened about a little before closing. Some time after last call, it seems like the two rooms switched. The back room started playing Angry German music and the front room started playing 80s music. Not only that, but in the back room, it was this really weird mix of one of the Angry German songs that I do like, where the song would more or less stop, while they play these electronic drum/synth loops for a minute and a half. After the next song showed all the signs of doing the same thing, I moved to the front room to dance with my wife, where they were playing Depressed Mode, woohoo, 80s music. Anyway, the during the next song, the second to last of the night, Duran Duran “Come Undone,” there was this woman in a skin tight back vinyl dress. Now, I’m not going to say chubby, because clearly she was well into the fat range. Not, that I necessarily have a problem with that. She was dancing about 8 feet away from us and I was more or less facing her when she pressed her back against the wall and started to hump the wall. No, that’s not right, it was more like she was humping the air in front of her as she slowly slid down the wall. It was freakin’ awesome …, up until the point where he butt got below her knees and sort of lost her balance. Then for about two seconds, it was like, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” She was able to recover and right herself without assistance, and she turned around did the same thing (without the balance issues), with her butt facing away from the wall this time. Again, freakin’ awesome, except for the fact that I was still trying to keep from laughing at the whole “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” thing earlier.
So to recap. Chubbyish girl with nothing but four 1-1/2-inch strips of electrical tape covering her boobies. Awesome. Fat woman in a skin-tight vinyl dress, up against the wall, humping the air, both directions. Freakin’ awesome. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” priceless.
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Dark Prince Studios - Pictures from various Club Sabbat events
Defined by Muzak
I don’t know if this is true for everybody, but I’ve always felt that music was important to me. I was born in 1962, and because I had older siblings, I grew up with a lot of 60s music, The Beatles, The Stones, and even Hendrix. When I was about 5, my favorite song was Jimi Hendrix “Third Stone From the Sun.” The reason I liked this song was that there was a part at the end where it sounded like a train, pulling out of the station, which spoke to my five-year-old musical taste.
As I got older, I listened to what they were playing on the Album Rock FM stations, bands like Led Zeppelin, The Who, Pink Floyd, Yes, Jethro Tull, and so on. I graduated high school in 1980 and started college in the Fall of that year. By this time, Rock was at kind of a low ebb. What were the bands at about that time, Supertramp, 38 Special, and even the old supergroups, like Pink Floyd weren’t living up to their former. Pink Floyd’s The Wall came out my senior year of high school, and I guess at the time I liked it, but I knew it wasn’t nearly as good as any of their previous three albums. Thinking back on it, there was some decent music in the Album Rock camp, bands like Cheap Trick and AC/DC were doing some decent stuff, but when you compare Rock of the late 70s/early 80s, there no comparison to what was being produced five or ten years earlier. At the time, I mostly listened to older stuff. I was really into Hendrix. I even listened to the oldies stations, because they played the songs I remember when I was a little kid. Since I didn’t like a lot of what was happening in music in the present, I retreated into the past.
Then one day, about halfway through college, my musical world changed. A local station that I had never listened to before switched format and started playing New Wave. I loved it, all of it. Some of it, I already knew, like The Cars, David Bowie, and the B-52s (who I’d previously thought were too weird for me from seeing them on Saturday Night Live). But others, lots and lots of others, I’d never even heard of. I loved it, all of it. Bands like, Depeche Mode, Men at Work, Yaz, The Cure, The Clash, Wall of Voodoo, and even Devo, a band I actively hated after what I had seen them do to (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, again on Saturday Night Live.
This became the music that I feel defined the very fiber of my being. This wasn’t my brothers’ music. This was my music. At the time, when you went into a grocery store or a department store, they play Muzac, elevator music. Mostly, songs I grew up, watered down and played on violins, which brings me to my point. The other day I was in the grocery store, and they were playing Men at Work “Overkill.” My music, the music I love, the music that defines my very soul is now Musak. Damn, I’m old.
Stupidest Marketing Ploy Ever, But Wait…
Yesterday, I saw what I thought was the stupidest marketing ploy ever. It was for Dial Magnetic, Dial’s new body wash that uses pheromones:
Here’s the message as I see it. “Use this stuff and your wife/girlfriend won’t be able keep her hands off you.”
Now, here’s my issue. No guy is going to buy a body soap with pheromones and be thinking about his wife or girlfriend. I can tell you exactly what he’s going to be thinking about. Just an apostrophe s and a word or two after the wife/girlfriend in the above phrase:
- Use this stuff and your wife/girlfriend’s sister won’t be able keep her hands off you.
- Use this stuff and your wife/girlfriend’s best friend won’t be able keep her hands off you.
- Use this stuff and your wife/girlfriend’s college roommate won’t be able keep her hands off you.
Or eliminate the wife/girlfriend in the above phrase and you get:
- Use this stuff and Cindy from Accounting won’t be able keep her hands off you.
- Use this stuff and what’s-her-name from down the street won’t be able keep her hands off you.
- Use this stuff and that girl at the bank won’t be able keep her hands off you.
You get the idea. That’s what guys are thinking, which makes this a stupid marketing ploy, but then it dawned on me that this commercial is not aimed at men in monogamous relationships, it’s aimed at women in monogamous relationships. I’m sure that the marketing people at Dial are thinking that most men in monogamous relationships don’t even buy their own soap. Their wives and girlfriends do. But no woman in a monogamous relationship is going to go out an buy Dial Magnetic for her husband/boyfriend, because she knows exactly why her husband/boyfriend would want to use such a soap. Even if it’s all marketing hype, she not going to take a chance that one of the tramps named above, is not going to be able to keep her hands off her man. And even more so, she’s not to chance that this stuff might actually work on her.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that women don’t like sex. They like it every bit as much as men do, and as far as enhancing sex with their monogamous partners goes, women are way more likely than men to want this. But are they going to persue this by introducing something into the equation that even remotely has a chance of making them more suceptible to his charm. Not on your life, buddy boy. To women, sex is about power, so are they going to want something that will give their male partner more power in the bedroom. No freaking way. If a woman in a monagamous relationship is trying to enhance the sex, she’s going to want something that gives her more power, not less. Don’t believe me, read the cover of any issue of Cosmopolitan magazine published in the last twenty years. Every issue has at least three or four articles talking about how women can get more power over their men in bed. So back to this commercial, if it really is aimed at women in monagamous relationships, it’s still stupid, right? But wait ….
To really understand what’s going on here, you would have to look how this would play out in the real world. If a guy in a monogamous relationship wants to use Dial Magnetic, he needs to do one of two things. a) He needs to go completely covert with it and not even bring it into the house. Keep it in his locker at the gym and only use it there, or something along those lines. Or b) figure out how to use it in his own house right under his wife/girfriend’s nose, without her freaking out about it. Let’s look at option b. It would be easy enough to buy it on the sly and sneak it into the closet, but eventually it’s going to end up in the shower where she’s going to notice it, and if it just shows up there one day, she’s going to immediately think about him and her sister, best friend, college roommate, Cindy from Accounting, and so on. Sure, he could say that he didn’t read the label, but the fact that it just showed up in the shower one day. There’s no way she’s going to go for it. Trust me, no good could ever come from this approach.
To get away with it, the guy’s best bet is to buy it some time when they’re out together. Say monogamous couple is out at Target for the weekly shopping. Monagamous male says he needs some ordinary household item, and he leaves monogamous female with the cart and goes off to retrieve said household item. He returns a few minutes later with the item and maybe someting else they were planning to buy, and most importantly, the Dial Magnetic. He places all of the items in some unobtrusive spot in the cart where she won’t notice the extra bottle that looks like any of a dozen different things they might buy anyway. If he’s really clever (most men aren’t), he places the bottle in such a way that she sees it from the side. If she sees the back of the bottle, she might notice something that would make her suspicious. With any luck, she doesn’t notice it because she’s too distracted by all of the other useless crap she buys on their weekly trip to Target, a weekly trip, which by the way, she has made at least three times a week, every week since monogamous male and monogamous female started dating years ago.
Why would monogamous male go to all of this trouble? Two words, plausible deniability. If he really was up to something, why would he buy it when they were out together. Eventually, monogamous female is going to notice it. It might be in the cart at Target, or it might be a couple of days later when it shows up in the shower. The only thing for sure is that when monogamous female does notice it, she’s going to immediately think about her sister/best friend/college roommate/Cindy from accounting and ask him about it:
Monogamous female: So, what’s up with that Dial Magnetic.
Monogamous male: What?
Monogamous female: That body soap with the pheromones. Where’d it come from?
Monogamous male: Target, I got it Saturday when we were out together.
Monogamous female [making a mental note to check her receipt]: Oh, and you just happened to pick up the one with the pheromones.
Monogamous male: Pheromones, what are you talking about. I needed body wash, and I just grabbed one.
Monogamous female: You just grabbed one. You didn’t even look at the label, did you–
At this point, monogamous female pauses and a smile comes to her lips. She has just remembered that one night a year and a half ago when monogamous male was absolutely furious, because he had accidentally brushed his teeth with Monistat 7. Monogamous female and her sister/best friend/college roommate/Cindy from accounting still laugh their monogamous butts off about that every time they get together. Thus, monogamous female accepts it. And the next time monogamous male needs body wash he can just buy it, or even have monogamous female buy it for him. All he has to to is say that he likes the way it smells or that it rinses off better that the other stuff. And by this point, she’s seen the above commercial dozens of times and convinced herself that he’s doing it for her. Which makes this commercial, not incredibly stupid as it might seem at first glance, but the most deviously clever marketing campaign since Smilin’ Bob from the Enzyte commercials.
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Get Magnetic™ - Dial® for Men This is kind of a funny site. They have really cool sexist videos about pheromones, umm, and soap.
GadgetFest ‘09
Today, I went to GadgetFest, a small technology expo sponsored by a local technology group and held at my work, Qualcomm. It was a bit of a letdown. It sort of reminded me of going to a really small science fiction con, where you walk around the whole place in 20 minutes, and say, “Now, what?” There were about 20 vendors, two of which were divisions of Qualcomm. The rest were a smattering of cell phone and networking companies, with a handful of other tech companies.
The one thing that sort of stood out was this one company that was showing a prototype of their high-tech wallet. It was a hard case that was somehow keyed to your touch, so that only the owner could open it. It was also linked to your cell phone, so if someone steals it, and it moves more than 20 feet from your phone, it sets off some sort of alarm. Now, while the idea, does have some merits. Realistically, are we even going to be carrying wallets five years from now. By then, probably everything, ID, credit cards, etc. is going to be in your phone. So having a high-tech wallet in this day and age is sort of like having a high-tech boombox. Plays, CDs, mp3s, Bluerays, and with the emoticon keypad, you can update your facebook status. Good thing, I still have my penchant for break dancing.