Rants in My Pants

What the hell is wrong with Canada?

In America, the land of logic, we have five digit zip codes, such as 94720. If you want to get more exact, You can add a four digit extension, such as 94720-2121.

In Canada, the land of illogic, you have a pair of three alphanumeric combinations, which looks like an American zip code that’s been put through a Vigenère cipher. Here is a sample, honest-to-goodness Canadian zip code: “V5V 1E1″ What the hell is wrong with these people? Who wants to write that on a letter? What secret information is contained within this pattern??

One of the most disgraced, most charismatic people I’ve ever met has been Jim McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey who famously said “I am gay American” though might have better said “I am a corrupt gay American who pushed my corruption so far, the press of New Jersey could no longer indulge my excesses so I had to say I was gay to have a chance at returning to office later in life.” The first sentence, of course, is easier to remember.

One of the most disgraceful, least charismatic people I’ve ever never met has been Shmuel Tennenhaus, who wrote a blog entry about McGreevey’s new book. You can read it here.

I think by now we’ve all recognized that the service industry has stopped saying, “you’re welcome” and has shifted to the more guilt-inducing “no problem.” For example, here’s a recent exchange I had with a bank teller:

Me: There wasn’t a way to do it online, so thanks for helping me with this transfer.

Teller, in a distracted, irritated sort of voice: No problem.

Wait, what? I know it’s not a problem, at least not for you. It was a problem for me. That’s why I came to you for help, because that’s what your job is supposed to be. You’re supposed to help people. Can you imagine a surgeon saying “no problem” to a patient after she thanks him for removing her uterus? I doubt it.

Essentially, when someone says “no problem,” they’re lying. They are saying that whatever it was that you asked them to do was in fact a problem. A big problem. A huge, serious life-altering problem. In my case, I probably took 3 valuable minutes away from the bank teller when he could have more efficiently spent that time looking for midget-on-pony pornography, and for that I am truly sorry.

So stop it, Mr. Arrogant Bank Teller With A Fancy Tie Who Isn’t Much More Than an ATM With Glasses. You’re not better than me. You just have a slightly higher paying job than I do, with better benefits and a greater chance for advancement. That’s nothing, man, because apparently you’ve got serious problems.

From the Los Angeles Times:

“Diana Newton, 51, of Westminster [Calif.] sued the J.C. Penney Co. last month after she was allegedly thwacked on the head by a department store dummy,” the Los Angeles Times reports:

Newton said she was ambushed by a legless female mannequin at the company’s Westminster Mall store, a skirmish that left her with a bloodied scalp, a cracked tooth, recurring shoulder pain and numbness in her fingers.

The alleged attack was the latest in a string of mannequin mayhem incidents nationwide.

“There are a slew of lawsuits like this,” said mannequin manufacturer Barry Rosenberg, who joked that stores should run background checks on dummies before letting them mingle with shoppers.

It is disgraceful that any retail or other establishment should employ such mannequins. I blame the schools.

Okay. So a friend of mine and a friend of his created a web site called AwesomeMillion.com.

You can certify yourself, someone else, somewhere else, or something else as awesome on a subdomain like Andrea Bocelli’s (whoever that is) page.

My immediate instinct was to see if I could slip Hitler through, in blatant violation of the Terms of Service. That would be like the picture of the Rosenbergs on a stamp, sort of.

Unfortunately, my friend immediately caught this error and has not spoken to me in the 36 minutes since discovering it. Possibly he is very angry. Who can know for sure? Probably no one.

My hat is off to this idea. I think it’s hilarious and hope they do well, even without Hitler.

Recently was thrust before me a blog so outrageous, we might consider rewriting the first amendment to prevent the idea of it from annoying me.

The blog in question yet out of bounds, is called One Park Avenue Reality. It is operated by a horrible person named Shmuly Tennenhaus, who deserves to be beaten with a sack of oranges or teabagged by an elephant.

Consider, for example, a recent blog entitled Playboy Releases Flaccid Financials. Does Mr. Tennenhaus really feel it is helpful to bring sexual imagery to a blog that women and children might be reading? Or what about Jcrew Likes It Doggy Style! OR Page Six Serves Up Sloppy Seconds.

This material and thinking is entirely offensive. Some people may think that Shmuly can get away with this because his family name means “Christmas Tree” in German. This is a common myth that is not true, the name only bears a passing resemblance to Tannenbaum. In fact, his name means nothing in German. The same in American.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to a party at the Playboy mansion.

While introducing himself at the first meeting of all the residents of my dorm floor during my first week in college, my next door neighbor claimed one of the four bathroom stalls for the remainder of the year as his own. Other people were allowed to use it, of course. He was just marking some territory and, essentially, warning others that they would have to contend with whatever it was he decided he was going to do in there for the next 9 months. Was he serious? I think he was, although we never monitored his bathroom habits, save for the time someone found him passed out with half of his body inside a running shower stall and half of it splayed out on the floor.

The reason I bring this up is because I’m having trouble with the concept of the office bathroom. I’ve never been one for public toilets anyway, but gone are the days when I could realistically head home when the appropriate stimuli made themselves known. As 1 of only 4 men in an office of approximately 60 people, it’s not hard to figure out who is using the men’s toilet. I, for example, have used the exact same stall and more or less the exact same times of day for the last year and a half. This situation presents a slight moral dilemma. For example, because I use this same stall, and because I happen to drink a lot of coffee, I am consistently driving down the resale value the sweet, efficient toilet. Also, all three of my male colleagues know exactly what I’m doing and, depending on their olfactory and problem-solving abilities, what I ate for dinner the previous night.

To move on to an example that does not involve me, at least not directly, only three of the four male employees here wash their hands after completing their business. This too has a connection to my college days: one of my floor mates did not believe in washing his hands after handling parts of his anatomy that had direct connections to Hepatitis A and other communicable diseases. This, in a word, is disgusting. What’s more disgusting is that this not-so-fine gentleman enjoyed playing Tetris on my roommate’s computer. How we survived, I’ll never know. Flash-forward to today: with all the SARS and bird flu fears that are just flying at you like an F/A-18 Hornet, you would think that hand-washing would be a no-brainer. This would be true if everyone had a brain, which they don’t. The astounding idiocy of inability of this gentleman to wash his hands is further compounded by the fact that I work in a goddamn public health organization! Where’s the Department of Homeland Security on this one? Honestly, he’s going to kill us all.

What’s more, our office bathrooms are located in the main thoroughfare of our office. Our floor is divided into three long columns, and the bathrooms are located down the central columns somewhat near the elevator and stairwell entrance. Also along this column are the break room (where the coffee lives) and the mail/copy room, where the photocopier and ever-so-fun paper-shredder live. Now, if I’m having a very boring day and I want to go shred some paper, I have to potentially pass people coming out of the bathroom. This is awkward, because I know with fairly good certainty what they just did in the bathroom, and I don’t like it. I don’t care if it’s the other guy who, for some reason, brushes and flosses his teeth three times a day (and DOESN’T clean the food particles off of the mirror), I do NOT want to engage in any sort of recognition or conversational process with anyone emerging from the toilet. And yet I’m forced to, because the hallways aren’t quite big enough to just go around someone- instead you have to kind of angle your body in such a way that it makes you look like you’re failing an audition for Soul Train.

To sum up, I should be given my own bathroom and direct access to said bathroom within the safety of my own office. Everyone else should be forced to go somewhere else to do whatever it is they have to do. And the love of SARS people, please, wash your goddamn hands!

Ok, so I bought this pass from Continental Airlines called the “Privilege Pack.” It was like $125 or something. It came with maybe 7,000 miles, a $99 companion ticket (why I bought it), a coupon for airfare, and rental car coupons, which make great pieces of toilet paper.

My favorite part of this book was 2 free passes to the VIP President’s Club. I used one last week before a trip to Europe. A good time to use it. My flight was delayed 7 hours because of a storm. They had to reroute the flight to New Hampshire because of a storm in Newark, then the storm went to New Hampshire. You’d think they would have maybe rerouted the flight to the south where the storm didn’t go?

This would have been excruciating except for the free-wireless-internet, free-copies-of-the-economist, free-coffee, leather chair lounge. I really some of you who were born rich have enjoyed the President’s Club your whole lives but for me it’s something wonderful and new.

Okay. The most stupid of stupid laws is this: in New Jersey, you are not allowed to pump your own gas. In case you have never lived in New Jersey and don’t understand that, I will repeat: it is illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey. Full service is mandatory.

So, you are probably agreeing with me already in thinking this is very stupid because it is very expensive. In a twist of irony, it is actually not more expensive than other states because New Jesrey has a lower gas tax than other states.

So now you’re probably thinking - “that’s not so bad. a little bit of luxury for the same price.”

Okay. You may mean well, but you are wrong. It is super-dooper frustrating because … it takes ten years to tank up in New Jersey!!

Here is what happens: you pull up, then you wait while the attendant, who is talking on his cell phone and smoking, wanders around the property. Eventually, cued by God-knows-what-but-certainly-not-your-presence, he makes his way back towards your car, takes your cash/credit card, asks you what you want, then sticks it in you. Again, he wanders away, possible to bake pastries. You can’t be sure. If you knit, you can make good use of the time in your rapidly heating/cooling automobile. Eventually, he returns and takes it out of you and give you your change/credit card and receipt but you still feel it for the rest of the day.

Once the guy took so long I lawlessly removed the nozzle myself. The guy sort of wandered over, smingly. I pointed at my watch and said, “I don’t have forever.” The customer on the other side of the pump then said, “Yeah, you people do take forever!” The attendant just laughed and said, “You’re a good man.” Whate the @#$@! does that mean? I just want to get gas in less time than it takes to eat-in at McDonalds.

This corrupt system is bizzarely perpetuated in the name of safety. I guess all the other states in the country are unsafe. It’s a bizzare system because - who wants that fricking job? I can understand unions that represent teachers and construction workers - jobs you can like but how did the gas-station-attendant coalition get so powerful??? This is, as the French say, tres retarde.

The second tropical storm of the 2006 season, affectionately named Beryl (rhymes with “peril”), has formed off of the coast of North Carolina. Lest we ever forget, we are approaching the 1-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, possibly the most incredible and destructive force of nature since the introduction of the Hummer.

People, at some point we need to rise as a group and say enough is enough! We can no longer tolerate nature to fuck us up the ass like this. I have long opposed nature and the power that it wields over us like a cruel Egyptian pharaoh, but to date few have followed my lead. As we get further and further into hurricane season, perhaps this is the year that someone will take some action and put down this nature intruder once and for all. I’ve developed a number of proposals that I think, nay, I KNOW will solve our woes.

Build a giant weather barrier: man has long dreamed of physically protecting himself from the elements. This drive has led to the invention of umbrellas, jackets, roofs and Oakley sunglasses. For some reason, at this point in history when our mastery of technology is as great as it has ever been, this drive has stalled. Some blame a leveling of the innovation curve, others blame our top scientists being addicted to World of Warcraft. The beauty of this approach, however, is in its simplicity.

What we need is some sort of giant wall to protect us from more hurricanes. I’m not talking about New Orleans style-levees that we find out are dry when we drive our Chevy’s out to inspect them. No, I’m talking about walls that approach 100 feet high. And on top of these walls, we’ll place enormous rotator fans to blow the horrible storms back where they belong: Mexico and the Caribbean.

Send more National Guard troops to the coastal borders: we all know that hurricanes don’t start in the Midwest, where God is feared in an All-American fashion. Like those pesky immigrants, most hurricanes attack the United States from coastal regions such as the East Coast and the Gulf Coast. A stronger military presence in the area will deter any future storms from even thinking about entering the country. This proposal needs to be combined with a less lenient approach to those storms that do illegally enter the country. Our policy of catch-and-release has not worked. Instead, we need to gather up all of the storms at the earliest possible point and shoot the fuck out of them with machine guns.

Regulation: If both of these policies fail to bring about change, we will be forced to the Hail Mary play of the Democratic playbook. As it stands, hurricanes are not technically legal by current standards, but they aren’t necessarily illegal either. This gray area has tied the hands of our best public officials. I’ve talked to both of them, and Gary and Herm both think that our last resort could very well be to regulate hurricanes so at the very best we could tax them and derive some revenue. A strong contingent on the right feels that hurricanes can best be dealt with by market forces, but Gary is pretty convincing when he says that the laws of supply and demand don’t necessarily apply to 100 mph wind.

Let’s face it, inertia led to us sitting on our dumpers and watching Hurricanes Hugo, Andrew and Katrina beat the crap out of us. But we can
still win, provided we grow a little backbone and start treating nature like the little bitch that it is. Are you with me? Are you with me??????