The Tip Clock

Tonight a bunch of us are going out to dinner here in Philadelphia because it is restaurant week, a two week event where local expensive restaurants give prix fix menus for special prices. Poor people rejoice!

Lets stop here on this guided tour of a blog post while we examine something in a  little more depth: Restaurant WEEK… is a two week affair. Did you notice that?

When exactly did advertisements get the privilege to openly lie because it sounds better? Lets be fair… "Restaurant Weeks" does not sound very good, in fact it kinda sounds like a skin condition if you say it fast enough and run the two words together (go ahead, try it out) but it is flagrant false advertising!

Personally I like "Restaurant Fortnight", because that sounds exciting. Anything with "fort" in it adds an element of danger! But the Philadelphia chamber of commerce won't return my calls, especially after I bugged them about the tree watching last year.

Nomenclative disasters aside, thinking of restaurants has caused me to come up with an invention that both amazes and disgusts me, and I will present it to you today.

We've all been there. You're out at a restaurant and the service was fine and the food was good, whenever you needed your water refilled someone slid by and BAM, you had a full glass. But after the plates have been lifted and your stomach is groaning with too much deliciousness, you no longer really want to just laze around, it is time to go home.

But something is standing in your way.

The bill...

Why DO I hate everybody? (part 3) - Beautiful Fields of Death

It has been snowing a lot here lately.

Good for snowballs, bad for trying to get into your parking lot when the UPS truck driver decided it was a good idea to stop directly in front of the entrance, completely blocking it off, because he didn't want to risk pulling into said parking lot, then, when you ask him to move, he gets stuck with his wheels spinning for a solid five minutes before just jamming the truck into reverse and almost ramming into your girlfriend's car out like a giant, brown, deranged wildebeest full of undelivered packages…

Ahhh… winter!

With nothing to do but sit inside and avoid a UPS related death, it's all gotten my remembering juices flowing. When I was six we went on a summer backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They're beautiful, as you can see:

But you can also see that, despite it being summer, there is still some snow in the mountains. That is important, but I need to give a little background:

Both of my parents are associated with medicine, and as a result would often discuss parts of their work at home. Therefore, as a kid I would hear my dad come home one day and talk about, say, brachiocephalic angina. In listening to him describe it, I would hear that it often manifested first with pain in the left arm.

Then, a month later, I would overhear my mom talking about meningitis and how it was associated with severe neck pain.

Now, the reason why adults are doctors and kids are not, (aside from the fact that kid doctors couldn't examine members of the opposite gender because they're YUCKY!!!) is that adults can distinguish between different diseases and their different symptoms.

I did not possess this ability.

Basically what I was hearing my parents talk about amounted to one giant super disease that was ever growing, constantly adding various crushing pains, bloody wounds and general pus-iness  to its arsenal, all the while zeroing in on nine year old boys named Owen.

Space Bowling Balls!!!!

All right!

We're back!

Now, I know, I know. "Owen," you're screaming at your computer screens. "You have been gone for OVER a MONTH! How dare you!?"

Well, that is true, I have been and for that I am truly sorry. But New Years happened, then other stuff happened.

By the way, have any of you heard of the Peekskill Meteor? Well, in 1992 a meteor brighter then the moon crashed into a car and completely destroyed it. Don't believe me, check out the site.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110123.html

Why am I bringing this up?

Because it makes you think. At any point, at any time, you could be going about your day, maybe mowing the lawn, maybe tossing your neighbor's pet cat up in the air to see if they really land on their feet, when BAM!  A fucking bowling ball from space could just take you out.

Could happen.

But, since it hasn't. Updates will come this week. And they will be goooooooooood.

(is it bad that, now that I've written this, I'm suddenly more wary of meteors?)

The Best Joke I Have Ever Heard

So this isn't a story, but someone gave me the idea to write this as a blog entry, mainly because, as you will see when you read it, if you HAD met this guy, the meeting probably would have been blog-worthy.

So here we go:

George worked on the 15th floor of the Fleet Building right in the heart of downtown. He got to work every morning at about 9AM and left every evening at exactly 5PM. Most Fridays, when he got off work, he went to a little bar across the street, had a few beers, then went home.

This week, however, he heard about a brand new bar that opened on the top floor of the building in which he worked. It was, apparently, really fancy and George thought it sounded neat, having a drink on the 99th floor, so he decided to go there when he got off work on Friday, instead of his normal place.

Friday afternoon rolled around, George closed his computer, picked up his coat, and took the elevator to the very top of the building. He got off and walked into the bar. It was lavishly furnished, like a bar out of a gangster movie, but there were only two people in there, the bartender and one client.

Dial-a-Whore

Cell phones have a built in ability to tell you when you're doing something you shouldn't be doing. For example: texting and other activities. The cellphone will randomly throw in words and phrases you would never use as a way to deter you from focusing on other things while texting.

"I don't know why I texted you asking if you wanted to eat at the "candy coated sparkle garden" tonight! I was walking while texting! It's not my fault!"

Similarly, the phone warns you when someone calls and it doesn't think you should answer, it does this by saying "blocked ID" on the caller ID. When that happens… common sense says to ignore.

But I had received about 6 "Blocked IDs" in the last two days, so when another one came through, I decided I needed to answer.

If ONLY I had known...

"Hello?" I said.

aaaand... Silence! Why didn't I listen to you, oh wise cell phone!? This can't be good!

"Who's this?" a gruff, southern accent grates into my ear?

"Who is this?" I immediately asked of the voice… my subtext being: "Hey! You called ME, fuckwad!"

More silence. 

"Ok," I ask, attempting to resolve a conversation quickly spiralling into regret and anger. "Who were you trying to reach?" Now, when I asked this question, I wasn't expecting anything wacky, I was expecting to hear "um… mark, is he there?" or "tony's pizza", you know, something normal.

But it wasn't going to be that sort of day, I suppose.

After another brief silence, he finally asks: "Is this Jada… from the escort service?"

The Depressing Snot Parade

(It must be bodily functions week here at Why I Hate Everybody… check out this)

I don't know about you, but I don't usually just wake up sick. I remember when I was a kid, I would go to bed feeling fine, but then I would just wake up, out of the blue, at about 2 AM, slowly sit up and then vomit vociferously all over the place. 

Seconds later, because of some weird barf based sixth-sense that mothers are blessed(?) with, my mom would burst into the room and help me into the bathroom, while my dad was left with the task of cleaning up. No easy feat because vomiting from the top bunk has the same basic effect as filling a bucket with pink paint and three day old sushi and then just spinning around in circles until every surface is gratuitiously coated.

But as I got older, and moved from the top bunk, to the bottom bunk, to a bigger bed, back to the top bunk briefly when I was afraid of being attacked by fiddler crabs, and then back to a bigger bed, my illnesses started coming on more gradually.

For me, the sore throat is the horseman of my well-being's apocalypse. As soon as I feel the dreaded nasal-drip-pain I drop into panic mode. 

It starts rationally enough with me drinking some tea and taking Vitamin C, but as the soreness begins to radiate I start resorting to more and more outlandish remedies, up until the point that, even though I have been dipping ALL my candy canes in strawberry vodka and oreos, I officially have a cold. Observe:

Yup... even the lamp is against me.

Pissed about Pissin'

The act of peeing is a charged subject.

Now, I don't mean that peeing creates electricity, because if it did… BOOM, energy crisis over, for the love of God somebody call Al Gore! What I actually mean is that peeing, like many bodily functions that result in something firing wildly out of a person at high speed, is something that can cause other people who happen to be in the vicinity of said ejection, discomfort.

As a result, there are a few ground-rules in modern society that accompany Tinkle time.

Women, frankly, have it easy when it comes to peeing, just like with everything else. When women go to the bathroom indoors they are constantly protected by plastic walls, queens of their own tiny little urinary fiefdoms. It is men who have a hard time. 

Now, anyone who has every been to a sporting event or movie theatre will testify that men actually have it easy, based on the length of the waiting line, and while it is true that it is a more simplified process for men to actually saddle up and pee, there is something that stands in the way of the pleasurability of urinals.

Other men.