…is dudes who walk into the men’s restroom and say “dude, it smells like sh** in here!”
My New Favorite Thing…
2
Huh.
Provo. 1:10AM Sunday morning.
On the way home I see a car stopped at a red light with a group of about 6 kids dancing around it with guitars, tambourines, and washboards. The first thing that came to mind was “man, you see some weird things around here.” This probably needs to be my last year in this town.
Best Craigslist Ad Ever
I guess this was on Craigslist in Montana. I know it’s a copout in lieu of a real post, but it was hilarious, and it’s better than nothing. Enjoy!
OK, let me start off by saying this Xterra is only available for purchase by the manliest of men (or women). My friend, if it was possible for a vehicle to sprout chest hair and a five o’clock shadow, this Nissan would look like Tom Selleck. It is just that manly.
It was never intended to drive to the mall so you can pick up that adorable shirt at Abercrombie & Fitch that you had your eye on. It wasn’t meant to transport you to yoga class or Linens & Things. No, that’s what your Prius is for. If that’s the kind of car you’re looking for, then just do us all a favor and stop reading right now. I mean it. Just stop.
This car was engineered by 3rd degree ninja super-warriors in the highest mountains of Japan to serve the needs of the man that cheats death on a daily basis. They didn’t even consider superfluous nancy boy amenities like navigation systems (real men don’t get lost), heated leather seats (a real man doesn’t let anything warm his butt), or On Star (real men don’t even know what the hell On Star is).
No, this brute comes with the things us testosterone-fueled super action junkies need. It has a 265 HP engine to outrun the cops. It’s got special blood/gore resistant upholstery. It even has a first-aid kit in the back. You know what the first aid kit has in it? A pint of whiskey, a stitch-your-own-wound kit and a hunk of leather to bite down on when you’re operating on yourself. The Xterra also has an automatic transmission so if you’re being chased by Libyan terrorists, you’ll still be able to shoot your machine gun out the window and drive at the same time. It’s saved my bacon more than once.
It has room for you and the four hotties you picked up on the way to the gym to blast your pecs and hammer your glutes. There’s a tow hitch to pull your 50 caliber anti-Taliban, self cooling machine gun. I also just put in a new windshield to replace the one that got shot out by The Man.
My price on this bad boy is an incredibly low $12,900, but I’ll entertain reasonable offers. And by reasonable, I mean don’t walk up and tell me you’ll give me $5,000 for it. That’s liable to earn you a Burmese-roundhouse-sphincter-kick with a follow up three fingered eye-jab. Would it hurt? Hell yeah. Let’s just say you won’t be the prettiest guy at the Coldplay concert anymore.
There’s only 69,000 miles on this four-wheeled hellcat from Planet Kickass. Trust me, it will outlive you and the offspring that will carry your name. It will live on as a monument to your machismo.
Now, go look in the mirror and tell me what you see. If it’s a rugged, no holds barred, super brute he-man macho Chuck Norris stunt double, then contact me. I might be out hang-gliding or BASE jumping or just chilling with my ladies, but I’ll get back to you. And when I do, we’ll talk about a price over a nice glass of Schmidt while we listen to Johnny Cash.
To sweeten the deal a little, I’m throwing in this pair of MC Hammer pants for the man with rippling quads that can’t fit into regular pants. Yeah, you heard me. FREE MC Hammer pants.
Rock on.
Star Wars: Retold By Someone Who Hasn’t Seen It
Who’s Laughing Now?
A couple of years ago, a guy named Peter Schiff started making the rounds to various financial news programs with a message that seemed laughable at the time: the economy is in trouble. He predicted that problems with the housing market that would soon spread to the larger credit markets, and he decried the lack of saving by the American people. Two years later, it turns out that he was exactly right. The part of this story that is the most incredible to me was the reaction that Schiff’s fellow analysts had to his predictions. Responses ranged from disbelief to downright condescention. So next time someone runs you down when you know you’re right, remember this guy.
Found via Starpointe Marketing
Get A Better Job!
I walked out to my car the other day and came across this card stuck between my car window and car door.
I was fairly amused by the irony of receiving a card advertising a $20,000-a-month job in this fashion. I mean, it begs the question if this guy knows how to make this kind of money, what is he doing wasting his time going from car to car instead of making sick money all the time? It just doesn’t make sense.
Ok, so that seems pretty cut and dried, but let’s take this even further. Let’s say that this guy is advertising what is doubtless a real-estate scheme or an MLM and is actually making this kind of money. And let’s say that he just hired some schmoe to pass out his cards. Well, the same question still applies. Why would this guy waste his time teaching someone else how to make that kind of money when he could use his time to make that money himself? Furthermore, what is his card-deliverer doing passing out cards instead of using the system himself?
Thanks but no thanks for the business opportunity buddy.
Why I Hate The Olympics
OK, so maybe hate is a strong word. But (for the most part*) I couldn’t care less about the Olympics this year. Here are a few of my reasons:
1.) Hello, Obscurity – Let’s think about it. With the Olympics, we have the weird combination of sports that nobody watches until the Olympics show up (volleyball, swimming, gymnastics) and sports that everybody usually watches but all of a sudden are unpopular during the Olympics (baseball, basketball). I refuse to inexplicably get excited about a sport just because there’s a round piece of metal at the end of it. Badminton, anyone?
2.) Sissification – My sports watching preferences and my sports participation preferences are radically different. For myself, I enjoy participating in sports like biking and rock climbing, you know, things that don’t involve catching any objects or hitting other people. But when I’m watching sports, I like to see some violence. You know, players getting smashed and beaten and otherwise physically dominated. This is why I enjoy football so much. Sadly, the Olympics are a little weak in the contact department, unless your idea of contact is getting tapped by a fencing foil.
3.) The Benedict Arnold Effect – One of the downfalls of professional sports, I think, is the lack of loyalty that athletes have to their franchises. Back in the day, it seemed like a franchise would pick up a key player and that player would become iconic for the franchise. Think Michael Jordan for the Bulls or Babe Ruth for the Yankees. Nowadays, athletes play for the highest bidder, and it’s not uncommon to see a player go to play for his former team’s biggest rival. Sadly, this attitude has somehow worked its way into the Olympics. It’s nice to see a German dude swimming for Austrailia, but it makes me ask WTF? I mean, if selling out your franchise is bad, imagine doing that to your country. In any case, way to show loyalty, fellas.
4.) Beijing? Pt. 1 – These particular Olympics bother me because they’re being held in Beijing. How’s this for irony: let’s take an event that has stood for comraderie, friendly competition, and the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and hold it in a country that is well-known for its human rights abuses, totalitarian government, and slight antagonism to the rest of the world. Great idea guys.
5.) Beijing? Pt. 2 – Oh, and let’s not forget this awesomeness: why not hold these athletic events in one of the most polluted cities in the world? After all, these athletes don’t need to be able to breathe… right?
6.) The Anti-Bandwagon Clause – Last, but not least, almost everybody I know LOVES the Olympics. It is therefore my sworn duty to provide variety to the Olympic-loving landscape.
* The whole Michael Phelps thing is interesting to me because I love to see some trash-talking Frenchies get their asses handed to them, and I think Mark Spitz is a douche and needs to not hold that record anymore.
New Member Of The Family
I’ve been thinking of buying a bike for some time, and lately I’ve gotten more serious about it. As a result, I’ve spent a lot more time looking at classified ads. This has proven to be a fairly frustrating method of bike shopping because nothing is ever exactly what you want. Either the bike is missing features or the price is too high.
Anyway, I got home from work today and decided to do my regular check of the online classifieds (craigslist and ksl.com). I clicked into the road bikes section, and all of a sudden, there she was, the bike I had been looking for, at a killer price. I could hardly believe my eyes. The bike had just been posted, so I hurried and called the poster.
Me: “Hey, I’m calling about the bike.”
Him: “Wow. That was fast.”
The bike was in Park City, so I called my brother and told him that if he’d drive from Salt Lake to Park City to Provo to help me get this bike back home, I’d pay for gas. My brother hates paying for gas, and there was no way the bike was fitting in Jezebel, so he agreed.
When we got up there, I took one look at the bike and knew that this was definitely a steal. I handed the guy a bunch of bills and he handed me the keys to the bike (lock). He also commented on how quick I was to call. “Here’s how it went,” he said. “I walked outside, took a picture of the bike, went back inside and posted the ad, and was just leaning back in my chair after publishing the ad when you called.”
I guess some things were just meant to be. Here are a couple of pictures of my new baby:
Do It For The Economy
We live in difficult economic times. Soaring gas prices, troubled financial institutions, and spiraling unemployment are creating a devastating impact on our economy. But there another, far more insidious power at work here as well: the do-gooder.
This was driven home to me today when, after loading my groceries into my friend’s car, I placed our shopping cart in an out-of-the-way location for the cart gatherer to pick up. My friend made an exasperated face and trundled the cart across the parking lot to where a lonely, mostly unused cart corral sat.
“Now, Nate,” you might say.” “She was just being nice by taking the cart to the corral.” And on the surface, I might be tempted to agree with you. “And Nate,” you might continue. “There are signs all over the parking lot that say you should clean up your cart.” Again, a valid point.
But consider this: Wal-Mart, being the corporate megalith that it is, has perfected the art of überspecialization. They have thousands of employees with a very specific job function, and that job function is cleaning up the carts in Wal-Mart parking lots. Now let’s imagine that everybody decided to pay attention to those signs that Wal-Mart places in the parking lot and starts putting their carts away. All of a sudden, there’s no work for the parking lot cart attendents. Wal-Mart, always looking to pad their bottom line, decides that they can afford to fire those parking lot cart attendents to save a few bucks, and they then get the old people greeters to go out to the corral every couple of hours to pick up the neatly-stacked carts.
So really, by putting those carts away, you’ve deprived someone of a job, and furthermore, you’ve forced an elderly person to do a job that they’re probably not equipped for (if you car about such things). So do the economy a favor. Leave your carts in the parking lot.
Traffic Lights Redux
Living in Provo, UT is quite the experience. And by quite the experience, I mean that there are a lot of times when I absolutely hate it. Take today for instance.
Back in February of last year, I wrote this post about how Provo did the worst job of any municipality on the face of the earth at any point in the history of traffic lights when it came to timing this one light in particular. Well, today, I realized that they didn’t do a crappy job of timing this one light. They did a crappy job of timing ALL the lights in Provo. That’s right, virtually every light in Provo is a veritable suckfest of poor timing. That is the only possible conclusion, because somehow, I managed to hit every single light in Provo just as it turned red. Here’s a litte play-by-play of how it would go.
I come to a red light.
I wait at the light.
I hustle off the line as it turns green to try to catch the next light before it turns red.
The light turns red just before I get there.
Rinse and repeat.
This happened at (and I know that it sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I swear to you that I am not) EVERY SINGLE LIGHT. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. FROM BYU TO OREM! Even more galling was the fact that things got better once I hit Orem. You know for a fact that Provo has the worst light signal strategy in the world when Orem looks good in comparison.
So I ask you, what incompetent, people-hating person would do such horrible job programming these lights? I’ll tell you: Someone who has lived in Provo way too long.