You are Deep Space Nine. You goth, you.
What Star Trek are you?
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December 24, 2004
YES!
Merry Christmas
The reason for the season is love.
Not hate, not intolerance.
With that said, Merry Christmas, Happy Chunukah, Happy Kwanzaa, and Happy Holidays to all!
And here’s hoping I get to be a digicam whore tomorrow!
And I’m still here!
This Christmas Eve, head over to Unspunand read a Jew’s take on Jesus.
A Lovely Evening Planned For Moi
Today was like the worst day ever to work. It was very slow and I had a grand total of two deliveries.
The first was to the loss prevention team at Target. Between getting my car into the parking lot of Target, getting yelled at for parking on the curb at Target, and weaving my way through the crush of people trying to get into Target, the $1.50 tip seemed somehow the perfect way to cap the event.
My second — and final — delivery was to State Farm insurance down on York Road. Finally, customers who know how to tip! And judging from Jamal’s deliveries, he was having worse luck than me. State Farm hooked me up nice, and as I was leaving called out, “Thank you, Merry Christmas!”
Well, the cute dark-haired girl at the desk yelled back, “I’m Jewish!”
I turned back and said, “Happy Chunukah!” and got a laugh.
I love customers with a sense of humor.
Anyway, I’ve got some General Tso’s chicken in the other room, and some beer. I’m going to settle down in front of the telly for an episode of Old School Star Trek, then I’m going to clean my apartment & wrap some gifts.
Fun night, huh?
Tis the Season?
Another father, who asked to remain anonymous, echoed Benson. He said the same students pick on his daughter: Even though she’s Catholic, they think she should go to their church, he said. The father said his daughter has been bullied since sixth grade and, despite his frequent calls and e-mails to administrators, the abuse continues.
“If they take more action than they currently have, there’s the fear of admission that they were aware of the problem before and did nothing about it,” he said. “To be honest, I don’t know how much the administration is involved or if they do walk through the world with blinders on so they can honestly say, ‘I don’t know.’”
He said he thinks a religious group might be using the school as a way to “have a private school but not have to pay for it.”
In addition to the harassment, he and Benson said the school’s pro-Christian leanings make a hostile environment for non-Christian students. They said students have distributed fliers for religious activities, student presentations often have religious themes and some events used to be held at a nearby church. The school’s auditorium is still under construction.
Roughly 5 percent of Peak to Peak’s middle-schoolers requested to leave the school during the 2002-03 school year, a slightly higher percentage than in other area middle schools, district numbers show. About 1 percent of Louisville Middle School students and 3 percent of Angevine students requested a transfer.
A Louisville mother who is Buddhist called her daughter’s three months at Peak to Peak “a nightmare.” She said the school had obvious fundamental Christian undertones. Parents frequently talked about church, and their children were out of control in class, said the mother, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“I think they put so much stress on these little ones that they just snap,” she said.
Judd Golden, chairman of the Boulder County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he has received complaints from Peak to Peak parents and students for the last three years about religious harassment that’s not taken seriously enough by the administrators.
“We think they’re failing to adhere to religious neutrality,” Golden said. “Students’ religious beliefs are being demeaned.”
He said the repeated complaints led him to the conclusion that there must be tacit support for Christian bullying at the school.
’tis the season, huh?
Hat Tip: Jesus General.
You can keep it, thanks
If you were looking for proof that money does not buy happiness, you can’t do better than this tragic story of what a $300 million lottery win did to this family two years down the road.
Bob from Accounting
December 23, 2004
UPS guy please be my hero
What did someone say about the best laid plans of mice & men?
Went to UPS. Ooops. They didn’t have the package. This time of year, unless you call the number and ask it be held, the drivers keep the packages on the truck and make every attempt to get it delivered. Yikes! I went flooring back to my apartment and wrote a note, and taped it to the door. The note read:
UPS: Please for the love of all that is good and holy please please please leave the package at my apartment door or I will have quite the miserable holiday. Thank you!
Then I ran down to Michael’s, and I was successful! Gift card and frame! I tried joking around with the clerk, but I think she was either Christmased-out or just didn’t “get” my humor. That’s okay – few people do, most just think I’m a raging lunatic with homicidal tendencies. That’s not fair – I’m not a lunatic!
I didn’t have enough time to get to Home Depot before I had to be at work, and work was … crazy. Anyone in Baltimore today knows how crazy the rain was, and we got a thunderstorm, too. Unfortunatly I was trying to deliver a pie in a residential neighborhood under construction when the thunder and lighting hit, and all kinds of mud and debris totally dirtied up my car. I swear, I wash the damn thing and Mother Nature is all “rain” and “snow” and “mud”. Bitch.
I was stiffed an unusually large number of times. One woman had the gall to actually say, “It’s the end of the month, I can’t afford a tip.” But she can afford five large pizzas, some subs, mozz sticks, and sodas. Uh-huh. Whore.
Getting out of work, I hightailed it down to Barnes & Noble where I got the gift card! Yay! Then I hightailed it to Home Depot, hoping they were open late. Nada. Hopefully they’re open tomorrow. I’m going to head over to Shawan Liquors and buy the wine bottle with the Oriole’s logo on it. I think it was a wine bottle, I was only there briefly on a delivery, so I’m not sure. Whatever, Dad’ll get a kick out of it.
Arriving at my apartment, finally, I noticed something. The sign for the UPS guy was gone. My heart fluttered — had a cruel neighbor stolen my sign? I ran up the steps, crashed into the window, and grinned. There was a box at the door to my apartment!
Yay! UPS Dude — you fucking ROCK!
I’m very tired, and plan on drinking a tall glass of cold milk, getting the dishwasher started, and then going to bed.
Light Blog Whore Today
I have a busy day!
I have to be at work by 11, and I’m there until ten tonight. Before I get to work, I have to go to UPS and get my package; go to Michael’s and get a frame & a gift card; and go to Home Depot and get a gift card. I also need a gift card from Barnes & Noble, but they’re open late, so I can go there after work.
I need to get a move on! Anyway, not so much the blog whore today shall I be. For those of you who enjoy that, sorry! But I do have a really cool review of “Shaun of the Dead” a few posts down. Read it. It’s funny.
December 22, 2004
Walmart Controls EVERYTHING
For two people on opposite sides of the political spectrum, I’m sort of surprised they see eye to eye on this story.
Messy Hair Girl writes, “…do you really want the counter clerk at WalMart making a judgement call about your own mental fitness?” She also observes, quite correctly, “It really frightens me to see how blind people can be to things and how quickly they are willing to sacrifice everyone’s personal privacy, rights, and liberties to satisfy their own agenda.”
And over at Right-Thinking from the Left Coast, hardly a bastion of liberal thought (last I checked, libs are character-assassinated on sight), and in his usual sarcastic manner, Lee observes, “So, despite selling a legal product, and living up to all federal laws regarding the sale of firearms, Wal-Mart is somehow responsible for this woman’s death because they decided not to break federal law by peeking at her medical records.” I’m sort of dissapointed he didn’t work in a reference to “asshat liberals”, but he makes his point anyway, and I’m sure there are some insults floating around in the comments box anyway.
Why only one lane? Why?
I just returned home from the Giant Food in Hunt Valley.
Apparently there was a scheduling crisis, and they only had two employees working the front. One was running around “trouble shooting” the automated checkout lanes. The other was running a register.
Well, for some reason, a bunch of rich stupid people came in to shop. Being rich stupid people, they were too stupid to use the automated checkout lanes, and too rich to wait in line, so one particularly obnoxious woman kept asking the clerk, “Why is there only one lane open? I don’t understand. Why?”
The clerk kept answering her – “I’m sorry, people called out, we didn’t have a lot of people scheduled, call tomorrow and bitch to the supervisor there’s nothing I can do.”
“Why do you have only one lane open? Why?”
The clerk would answer her again. And again, the bitch would ask, “Why only one lane? Why?”
It was like the fucking cunt expected that clerk to walk into the backroom, find a crate of employees marked “Checkout Bitches”, and activate one or two of them like they were androids.
I really wanted to lay into that woman, with some favorite choice words: bitch, cunt, asswhore.
And people wonder where all the Christmas Spirit has gone.
Ackbar & Red Cabbage
I’m not supposed to be home – but I had a delivery to the neighboring apartment complex, so I swung by here to put a note for UPS on my door, “LEAVE PACKAGE PLEASE.”
We hired this guy at work, I call him Admiral Ackbar because he resembles the Star Wars character. When I came in today, he was making salads. He had five heads of lettuce shopped up, and was using a grate-thingy to get some red cabbage flakes to color it up a bit. He already had a pile in front of him that was about twice as much as we usually use. I told he’d done enough.
Fifteen minutes later, he’s still making red cabbage. This time I ask Zapp to tell him to stop, so Zapp does.
Ten minutes later, he’s still making red cabbage. He’s gone through literally half a head of the stuff. I grab the cabbage and say quite firmly (and I was quite proud of my restraint since I didn’t club him over the head with a carrot) “This is about fifteen times as much red cabbage that we use, when someone who has worked here for a long time tells you that you’ve made enough, you should probably listen to him.”
I wrapped up the cabbage and the carrots and put them back in the walkin. As I walked past Ackbar again, he asked, “Don’t I need to slice up some more cabbage?”
Restraint is an amazing … amazing … thing.
Dan Brown – SUED!
Well, “not only does Mr. Brown write like a seven year old“, now he’s more than that – he’s an alledged plagiarist, too:
A New Zealand author is embroiled in a plagiarism row over Dan Brown’s blockbuster hit, the religious thriller The Da Vinci Code, and has launched legal action against the novel’s publishers.
Nelson-born Michael Baigent and American writing partner Richard Leigh are suing Random House Group in Britain, claiming damages that could run to millions of dollars.
But Baigent and Leigh, whose own 1982 work Holy Blood, Holy Grail caused such religious outrage when it was published that it sparked death threats, say Brown has lifted large tracts of their research without permission.
Their lawsuit claims at least £150,000 damages for breach of copyright, saying a “substantial” amount of their work has been used and asking that copies of The Da Vinci Code be destroyed.
Hat Tip: Bitter Girl.
GEEK ME OUT!
Tell me that this is just not the coolest website you’ve ever wasted time on!
Hat Tip: Jawa Report.
Got Zombie?
Earlier today I endured great hardships in getting through the parking lot of Best Buy, getting through the crowds of Best Buy, and getting through the check-out lane of Best Buy. Why did I do this? To buy shiny round discs, including this one.
I’m not a fan of the horror genre, but ever since I saw the trailer last spring, I wanted to see this film. Why? It looked funny, and anylight-hearted look at zombies is probably going to be a good romp, especially when its British. The last British zombie film I saw was 28 Days, and, uh, ew.
Okay, so if one is to believe “Shaun of the Dead”, there is one really important lesson to learn. If your entire town becomes populated by zombies, and you hide out in a bar, 1.) make sure to stop at the gun-store and get a lot of firepower. But that wasn’t the real lesson, the real lesson is 2.) DO NOT STAND NEAR THE WINDOWS BECAUSE THE ZOMBIES WILL REACH IN DRAG YOU OUT AND DISEMBOWEL YOU AS EVERYONE WATCHES.
Also, that scene was very disgusting and I had to close my eyes. Do real people have that much bloody guts, or is it just for the prop dummy that the zombies ripped open?
Xander speak: “Sometimes I shouldn’t say words.”
Is it too late to mention that this rambling, disjointed post may or may not contain spoilers? Okay, ignore the latter – spoilers are a certainty. Also, taxes. Also, at Best Buy? Some old lady said I looked like Rodney Dangerfield. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond so I punched her in the face instead of trying.
There’s a lot to like about the film, but it isn’t over-the-top with the satire. Our hero is a 29-year old loser who likes hanging out with his best bud over the objections of his roomie and his girlfriend. After a particularly bad day at work, she breaks up with him and he becomes depressed. This helps to explain why on his daily commute to the convenience store, he doesn’t notice the dead bodies, the zombies, or the bloody hand-prints on the soda cooler’s glass door.
Well, eventually he and the best-bud find out, and wind up in the garden pitching LPs at some brain-dead supermarket worker who our hero shoves onto a drainage pipe, which promptly impales her. The gravity of the situation creeps in as she removes herself from the pipe, leaving a gaping hole (through which the camera frames his shocked expression as she lumbers forward) in her stomach.
This leads to a hilarious situation in which, like many great films — but for today’s purposes, we’ll just compare it to ‘Star Wars’ — our heroes embark on a (star?) trek to save their loved ones, along the way picking up a lot of annoying (but occasionally helpful) compatriots. Like David, who was not smart enough to brush up on the above mentioned rule #2. But he was smarmy and deserved it, and if I’d seen this in theaters, I’m sure the audience would’ve cheered, like that scene in “Empire Strikes Back” where a horde of horny uganaughts have their way with Threepio’s body parts as he screams, “Stop! Stop! Oh, R2-D — hey, that tickles — where ARE you?”
There are some touching moments in the film, I teared up as Shaun’s dying stepfather, Philip, confesses his love for Shaun, and his failings as a stepfather. Shaun, who has always previously refered to Philip as “not my real dad!” later tells his mother, “He was my real dad! For a moment, he was, but now he’s not – that thing, he’s not Philip, he’s not the man you loved, not anymore.” Because, of course, Philip died and then came back as a zombie. Surprise! I was wiping away tears as I shouted (much I’m sure to the enjoyment of my neighbors who were probably asleep by now), “BASH HIS ENGLISH-LOVING BRAIN OUT! BASH IT NOW!”
There are of course the typical movie cliches. Remember the scene in Weird Science where the blonde kid is holding what he thinks is a water gun and he pulls the trigger and blows a hole in the wall? And of course the good guys show up at the last minute to save everyone with guns blazing.
Funny movie. Worth the rental or purchase. Don’t eat food during it. Disembowlment: yuck. Also, no sex scenes. Dammit.