tornado alley roundup
Mar 8th
The Midwest always seems to get the shaft. Celebrities call it “flyover land” on their way between LA and NY, but celebrities are idiots. Celebrities don’t know what they’re missing. Us folks in the middle of the country can party better than those lightweights on the coast, and they just don’t know.
As the graphic below clearly illustrates, we know how to rock it. The areas in red are where bars outnumber grocery stores. The yellow areas are where life sucks more.
This is a work in progress and we’re still hammering out details, but let either myself, Travis, or Ed know if you would like to come. Even if you’re not from the Midwest, you’re still allowed to come.
Email Travis at tstyles77 AT gmail DOT com
Email Ed at edadams444 AT gmail DOT com
Email me at jeff AT badlydrawnmonsters DOT com
Click on the link on the nav bar above for more information.
Bring it on, St. Louis!
n.e.i.t. because i’m contrary
Mar 4th
I know Thursdays are usually reserved for Too Much Information Thursdays hosted by LiLu. But today I just can’t think of a story for that would entertain you enough to actually write about, so I’m changing it up. No offense to LiLu, because she’s awesome and has Oprah-like power in the blagonets, and I’m sure I’ll be back with more TMIT’s at a later time.
Today, I am going to tell you a NEIT story. That’s right, a “Not Enough Information Thursday” story.
This story takes place when I was younger. My family was on a vacation to someplace. We had dinner at a restaurant. One of my sisters had food. In the food, we found a foreign object. Someone complained to someone who worked there. Then another someone gave us some free food. It was gross but we were happy. The restaurant went out of business much later.
The next day we kept driving. We drove through some mountains where some hillfolk lived. They kept trying to sell us things. Eventually we made it to a beach somewhere. There were a lot of people at the beach, including a lot of the hillfolk. They said words that weren’t really words and I couldn’t understand them.
Then we went to this other city with big buildings. We saw this guy who worked in government but used to be a singer. Oh, and it was hot.
There’s my story of the time we did things. It’s surprising hard to tell any sort of story without details. Bonus points will be awarded if you can guess the guy we saw. Mad bonus points if you can guess what the hillfolk were trying to sell us, the name of the restaurant, or what the foreign object was; in this case, you are probably psychic.
short one
Feb 25th
This has happened about fifteen times today, with slight variations:
Me: “Can you read the words on the screen to me?”
User: “It’s blue!”
Ugh.
UPDATED:
This day just gets better:
User: “I’m out of columns in Excel!”
Me: “Um, Scroll down?”
User: “Oh! Will that work every time?”
caption contest giveaway winnar
Feb 24th
Sorry for the delay in getting this post out there, but real life actually happened yesterday and I didn’t have time to post the winner. But don’t you worry, because there totally is one and I’m not just making this up as I go along or anything.
Anyhow, in the end it came down to two folks who submitted multiple entries. Here are my two favorite ones, and I just couldn’t decide between them.
Travis‘ comment put Lonely Island in my head all day, which is awesome. Marnie’s comment made me laugh and mental ewwww at the same time, which is equally awesome.
Since I couldn’t decide between the two, I’ve decided to add a second, equally ridiculous, prize to the mix. Marnie will win the “Japan Samurai with Ninja”
Travis has won the “Build Your Own Easter Island Kit”
Not bad for a first giveaway, eh? Double the prizes and double the fun!
Congratulations again to our winners, and please send pictures of how awesome your prizes are. Because I’m going to need proof.
Stay tuned kiddos for the next one! If you have a suggestion for the next giveaway prize, let me know!
i didn’t know they changed that
Feb 22nd
As usual, this is an actual call from an actual person. I don’t have the ability to make this up:
Her: “I’m typing in my password and it’s not working.”
Me: ”OK, that happens to a lot of people, don’t worry. What are you trying to login to?”
Her: “I need to get my paycheck information. I think it’s because I can’t type a capital seven.”
Me: “Excuse me?”
Her: “How do I type a capital seven?”
Me: “…Do you mean the ampersand symbol?” (&)
Her: “No, like a big seven.”
Me :”…As opposed to a small seven?”
Several beats of silence. I hear typing clicking in the background.
Her: ”Nope, that’s not working either.”
Me: “OK ma’am, I just reset your password. The system will automatically send you an email to the address you registered with, which is firstname.lastname@yahoo.com. You can check that for your new password.”
Her: ”How do I do that?”
Me: “Check your email? How do you normally check your email? This is your personal email address.”
Her: ”I don’t have a personal email.”
Me: “Then how did you register?”
Her: ”I don’t know?”
now boarding, flight to revolting
Feb 18th
Cheers for Thursdays in which the blagonets reverberate with the sound of TMI broadcast around the world and preserved for future generations to discover and wonder at the mistakes made by their ancestors. Hip hip!
I don’t even remember which city I was flying back from, but the horror of this flight will stick with me forever.
I do remember that this was my connecting flight, and I had to run from one part of the airport to the other. When I got to the right gate, I found that our flight had changed to a later flight, and that our largish jet was being downgraded to a smallish propeller plane. Not that big of a deal, that kind of thing happens all the time. I had to change my seat number, but also not that big of a deal because I don’t request certain seats when I fly alone.
Or so I thought.
So our plane finally shows up at the gate, and it’s one of those flights where some people don’t even get off because they’re just going on to the next destination. By this time it’s night, and most of the people in the airport and plane are sleeping or napping or trying to. As I’m getting on the plane, I’m pass a couple rows of folks with blankets and pillows and such. As I’m walking by the row numbers, I groan because I realize that my seat is in the very last row.
I hate the last row. You can’t recline at all, and it’s always right next to the bathroom, so every person on the flight gets to bang into your elbow as they use the facilities. The big bonus is I also get the olfactory delight of being less than a foot away from the door to the bathroom, which as we know doesn’t have the best ventilation in the world.
The rows are three seats on one side of the aisle and two seats on the other. I’m going to be on the three seat side, which means I get to sit next to two strangers.
And as I approach my seat, I see the people I will be sitting with. And I’m playing it pretty fast and loose with the word “people.”
In the middle seat, there is the mom. The mom weighs about 300 or so pounds, all of which are brought into sharp relief by her lime green, spandex stretchy shirt and her neon pink, spandex stretchy pants. Strapped to the mom’s chest is a baby in one of those harness carrier thingies, and before I even get close it’s obvious that the baby has made doody and has not been changed for some time. The baby is bawling, with snot running down its face and onto the lime green spandex shirt.
You might be thinking, “well why isn’t the mom attending to the baby?” The answer is in the window seat next to her in the form of a four year old jumping up and down in his seat and screaming some incomprehensible gibberish in between crying as well. Snot and tears on his face have mixed with what appears to be chocolate and/or other food from a previous meal and never cleaned up. The mom is trying to get him to stop jumping up and down in the seat, but not doing a very good job of it.
And right next to this display is my aisle seat. I sit down with my book hoping to escape into a literary happy place. Upon sitting, I realized that this woman was too large for me to put the armrest down. A couple of her fat rolls were actually spilling over onto my thigh. The poopybaby was screaming in my face and smelling better than ever.
I’m leaning as far as I possible can into the aisle, and just praying that we take off soon so I can get out of my godforsaken seat. Every time the flight attendant comes down the aisle, she either bangs into me or has to ask me to move. This is still a preferable alternative to moving my sensory organs towards the wreck on my right.
About an hour into the flight, the attendant sneaks up behind me and whispers in my ear, “There is an available seat in the front row if you want.”
If I want?! I couldn’t want that seat any more if it was a massage chair at Brookstone and came with free bacon. I thank the flight attendant profusely and grab all of my things in a mad dash to the front of the plane.
I felt bad for the new people I was sitting next to, as I’m certain I had absorbed some of the wonderful smells from my old seat. My right thigh was still hot and sweaty from her stomach’s intrusion into my personal space. I had a wild look in my eyes that declared “back off” to all those around me.
I showered as soon as I possibly could upon getting home. Twice.
who and why
Feb 16th
The other day, I’m on Yahoo! news like I normally am and I see all these “BREAKING NEWS!” yellow headlines that are normally reserved for something really important. Naturally I look to see what the breaking news is, and it leaves me with a feeling of “…huh?”
The breaking news of the day: Alex McQueen had died.
Now I hope I’m not insensitive when I say I had no idea who that is. I started thinking, “Was that Steve McQueen’s kid? Did Steve McQueen even have a kid? How long has it been since I watched ‘The Great Escape’? ‘Bullit’ is awesome. Yay cars.” Rather than keep going down the road of random free associates, I wikipedia’d Alex McQueen and found out that it was an English guy who made clothes. And not even clothes that normal people wear, but the kind that only anorexic models on runways wore for about 30 seconds and then never wore again.
Color me confused as to how this man affected my life. As far as I can tell, the only time we crossed paths was when this yellow banner appeared on my Yahoo news.
Maybe I’m wrong and I have half the clothes in my closet are somehow distantly related to something he did on a runway in Milan.
So internet, let me ask you, who was Alex McQueen and why should I care?
I’ll tell you right now, I hate “reality” television. I think it’s about as real as Montag, as scripted as an Obama press conference, and as edited for television as a George Carlin routine. So when I’m in the checkout line and see a dozen different magazines talking about Snooki, I’m required to try and figure out who the heck this Snooki is.
So after hours of research, I have been able to determine that she appears on this unholy wreck of a show called ‘Jersey Shore,’ she has large hair, and she got punched. Which, quite frankly, if the first two things are true then the third was bound to happen sooner or later.
So I’ve answered the first part of my question: who the hell is Snooki. And maybe I’m wrong about this next part and she has somehow affected my life in hidden and mysterious ways or invented a new vaccine for fake tans, but my dear internet, maybe you can tell me why I should care?
caption contest and first giveaway
Feb 12th
Awhile ago I had that little caption contest going, but since I couldn’t offer any sort of reward for being clever the interest kind of faded. Now I have found my first prize for the victor, and let me tell you it’s a doozy.
This contest will be open for about a week or so, basically until I feel that it’s over and I’m going to send the prize out to whichever caption makes me laugh the most. I’ll do a last call for entries the day before it closes on Twitter, so if you’re not following me already go ahead and just do that now.
Since this is the first time I’ve done a giveaway, I’m going to start small. Literally.
That, my friends, is a genuine box of “Japan Samurai with Ninja” at 1:72 scale. That’s right, if you win this contest you will win your own private army in a box. They will do whatever you ask them to do, but you might have to learn Japanese first.
Even though the poorly translated wording on the box indicates that there is a singular samurai and ninja in the box, this couldn’t be further from the truth. This box contains forty (!) different type of ancient warriors, ready to do battle on your desk or workspace.
Now that I’ve got your attention, here is the picture on which to caption. Do yourself a favor and look at this picture for a couple minutes because I guarantee you that it will 1) make you laugh and laugh, and 2) raise a whole lot of questions.
Ready, set, GOBEFUNNY!
“See? I told you Sasquatch was real.”
“You were right, kiss me!”
oh yeah and thanks
Feb 9th
I haven’t been as thankful for things as I should have been, so I’m going to bear down and write me some thank you notes. God knows the empty envelopes and stamps have been sitting on the desk for a couple weeks.
Join me in celebrating thankfulness through “unlove” as Ed would say.
Dear snopocolypse, snOMG, and other names for blizzard on the east coast,
Every year you get a couple inches of snow once a season and everything goes to hell. The news channels can’t stop talking about how it’s the worst snow ever. We’re in the midst of a 3-day blizzard here and you know what I did this morning to get to work? I got up 15 minutes early. So thank you for your inability to deal with an event that happens as regularly as a scheduled federal holiday and making me look more masculine than Bear Bryant in the process.
Also, snow boots are not made of suede. Just thought you should know.
Thank you,
Gettin’ Manlier by Accumulation
Dear Diabeetus,
I will destroy you in one hundred kilometers. This isn’t so much a thank you note as just a warning.
Thank you,
Monster on a Two Wheels
P.S. Donate on the page in the nav bar or the link to the right!
Dear Memes,
If it wasn’t for you, I apparently wouldn’t write anything. Can you ask your cousin Inspiration to stop by and give me a few pointers? I could really use the help!
Thank you,
What’s it called when you can’t think of the word….
