blog

08.12.08 - Do I have a "problem"?

07.07.08 - Kids these days

This anteater likes raver jewelry and whippits. Where are the parents?

06.11.08 - Poetry in Motion
I just wrote a haiku for my state paper's poll.
It never made it.
(see below)

06.09.08 - The beach is the thing.

At the beach, I made this.

This, too. I won't deny it.

Yes, I know, using sea glass makes me a cheat.

05.26.08 - Deenster salad time.

Now if you did not know, or were not very sure, I will tell you that Paula Deen puts some nonsense into her dishes. I remember watching her on the Food Network almost two years ago creating this "salad" with lettuce, cheese, bacon, water chestnuts, mayonnaise, bananas and about nine million other ingredients. This "salad" was freakish, to be honest with you. While I was watching the show, I kept pinching myself to validate that I was not dreaming and I also lost the ability to speak for several seconds. And here I find myself, two years later, thinking about that recipe. I tried to look it up on the Food Network website. I typed in "paula deen bacon banana" into the search box and this is what popped up:

At first I foolishly tricked myself into believing that this was the "salad" I was having the
yen for, thinking that it was not possible to have more than one recipe from the same
person featuring both bacon and bananas. WRONG.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING I DID NOT GIVE UP SO EASILY. I used my brain a bit and used this as a search:

YES IT WORKED, I said to myself, when THIS appeared:

If you happen to find yourself sitting at your desk, looking to take a break from doing expense reports or needing to kill time before your sales meeting (where you WILL get yelled at), I recommend Googling this recipe and then reading the reviews of all the people that have tried it. All the reviews have the words "unusual" and "surprising" in them.

Dear Paula, your "salad" could kill an Ethiopian.

FAME - 5.29.08

You couldn't imagine my delight this morning when I saw that the enterprising Manboy of the North had featured Joey on his world-famous website. Oh man oh man oh man. Ohh maaahhn. I went home for lunch and showed Joey the site, hoping it would make her feel honorific, but instead she hit me in the face for sending in a photo of her with goo-crust coming out of her eyes. I told her, "at least it wasn't lasers." Thanks Chris!

Adventures in Journalism - 5.18.08

The bad part about spring cleaning is the cleaning part, and having to go through all of your crap and the human trauma of deciding if it will be okay if I throw away the instructions to the humidifier I bought my freshman year of college. The good part about spring cleaning is the (very) few times when you find little gems of things that you had previously forgotten about, but which are awesome. I found the following two precious pieces of paper at the bottom of the box I had used to clean out my desk when I left my job as a news reporter. Both were from the police reports that I would have to type up weekly. They are amazing. Here:

"It totally ruined our mail."

AND this one (my favorite):

It's like a cross between someone's first novel and a story some loon would tell you at a bar.

Now back to cleaning... have a good Sunday everyone.

05-16-08 Poop Pouch

04-02-08 Seagulls love Burger King and I love the museum

I went to a museum on Saturday and I had a great time. I actually wish I were there right now. Anyway, I saw this seagull display, and I thought about how much seagulls love to hang at Burger King. Seagulls have such golden thoughts about Burger King.

03-31-08 Free food

Every time I think about how much I hate my job, my Inner-Self unconsciously guides me into the break room, or the "cafe," as it is referred to around the office, and my eyes glaze over with delight. There, all laid out in front of me, is free coffee in seemingly bottomless pots, with free creamer (powdered and liquid), boxes and boxes of free tea bags, hot chocolate packets, sugar, and three kinds of sugar substitute. Each morning, two tins are filled with pretzels and cookies. It is what hell would be like, if attendance were optional, but you went regardless because you could get free snacks out of it and each week you were paid (not so handsomely) for your time spent there. This provided food and drink makes the 40 hours of time I waste here each week seem more delicious than all the glazed donuts on this Earth.

03-30-08 Sunday morning...

03-25-08 Font war

Palatino Linotype, Verdana, Century Gothic, etc.
Serif, Script, Blackletter and Monospaced.
These are the fonts of our lives.

-famous person (probably not)((in fact, probably me))

So, apparently I am behind in my font education, because it seems as though 815347.9 trillion people hate the font Comic Sans, and have hated it for quite some time. I can’t say that I, personally, hate any sort of font (except maybe Wingdings 1, 2, and 3), but I respect the people who have chosen this very special crusade.

One couple in particular, who started this website, really hates Comic Sans. Oh MAN they just HATE HATE HATE it. The site, started by Dave and Holly Combs, really delves into the matter of why we should ban Comic Sans in most every area of life.

The most inapt of settings? Tombstones.

“That would only be appropriate if the deceased were a clown or comedian,” says co-creator Dave Combs.

In one interview, Combs goes as far as to say, “In short, it’s just not safe for unregulated public use. It should be handled like controlled substances or firearms, and should be used only by licensed professionals in very specific settings.”

So, Comic Sans is like opium or a 5.56mm NATO machine gun. Fun to use, but seriously damaging to oneself and others. (I am only guessing, I have not used any of the three.)

Combs also remarks in the interview, “For every person who sends an angry email telling us to ‘get a life, it’s just a font’ we get about 20 praising the campaign. No kidding.”

No kidding? Is there really such a blitzkrieg happening here?

A couple weeks ago I started to watch a documentary on the font Helvetica. It was very interesting, but I never made it to the end, because I thought I got the picture after the first 30 minutes. Typography is certainly a fascinating topic, but I guess my mind would rather focus on other insanely specialized subject matter relating to things like candy or maybe dinosaurs.

But I will give Combs credit for coming up with such hilarious critique of the font: “Clearly, Comic Sans as a voice conveys silliness, childish naivety, irreverence, and… is analogous to showing up for a black tie event in a clown costume.”

On the flip side, Comic Sans is also wildly popular, especially with teachers and women in offices. Nothing can make these people happier than drawing up classroom rules or break-room etiquette using Comic Sans. In fact, one font Web site was so brash as to boast the type as, “almost extravagantly unintimidating” and “the most characterful” of all the Windows fonts. Hooray for Comic Sans!

And now, I will leave you with this promise from ComicSansWarrior:

03-23-08
Happy Easter from Joey, the original snout rocket.

So for those of you non-believers out there, I must tell you it is now the season of Easter. Easter sort of wraps up Lent, (I think. I should know. I went to Catholic school for roughly 16 years. I'm now in recovery.) and all the people who haven't been eating candy or swearing get to resume life as usual. Phew. Since it has been a rough couple of weeks for these folks, they get to reward themselves with ham this Sunday. I’d say ham accounts for 67% of Easter, with jelly beans garnering a respectable 26% and Jesus coming in at 7% (a holy number, but still kind of embarrassing). OH and also, Catholics do not eat meat on Fridays during Lent (it is a hard time for them), so Sunday’s ham-fest will likely taste extra succulent and pious. Eating this Easter ham is like tasting, first hand, the salt of Jesus’ sweat from his 2.5-mile cross walk.

Most of the people who work in my office are in the category “Irish Catholic,” which is not to be confused with the “Scots-Irish,” who prefer Protestantism. Irish Catholics are bad, but not as bad as most regular Christians in the south. ANYWAY I AM GETTING OFF THE TOPIC of the Easter season.

Since everyone at my work is Irish Catholic, it means that they like Jesus pretty hard and also that they like Easter, since it commemorates the time Jesus died FOR REAL. They love it!* AND Easter is not just one day, as I said before, it is a SEASON, and therefore there are many parts to it.

Here are the parts according to the bible:

Palm Sunday = When Jesus came to Jerusalem
Holy Thursday = Last Supper
Good Friday = Death by crucifixion
Holy Saturday = Jesus chills in the tomb
Easter Sunday = Ham

Here are the parts according to my coworkers:

Coworker #1: Tonight is the Last Supper.

Coworker #2: No, Jesus dies tonight.

Coworker #1: He dies on Saturday. No, wait, he dies on Friday and then the Jews have him on Saturday.

Coworker #2: The Jews have him?

Coworker #1: Yeah, they have him and then take him somewhere and then they LEAVE ‘em by a rock and THEN it’s Passover.

Coworker #2: What’s Passover?

Coworker #1: I don’t know, but I’m Googling it.

Then they threw around the word “Eastertide” for awhile, but OH MY GOD, do not get me started on Eastertide. It is too great a wave for me to ride on.

For the most part, Catholics around here (the United States), kind of half-ass Easter. They are constantly put to shame by people like this guy who show their devotion by ACTUALLY CRUCIFYING THEMSELVES. I think about 25 people try this feat every year and they are pretty stubborn about keeping the fire alive. Instead of making it illegal or something like that, all that can be done is to have a “health official” announce that it would be a good idea to sterilize those nails before hammering them into your hands and feet. This is a public service announcement… sterilizzzzzzze those nails, fool.

*They do not love it as much as Christmas

03-22-08 Weapons

I saw this in the local paper last week. I didn't need to modify it to make it amusing. This guy just wants his weapons back. That's it.

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