OoooowwwwooooOOOO!
Even thought what I touched didn’t look like poison ivy to me, I’ve been piddling around a Google images search and these are classic ivy lesions. Except I got off lightly — man there are some disturbing pictures out there. Counting blessings…
August 16, 2008 — 1:13 pm
Comments: 33
Say, I could really go for a big weepy dose of poison ivy!
I don’t think it is poison ivy, actually. I was well aware of the clump of undergrowth I was sticking my hand in and it wasn’t ‘leaves of three’ or anything else I recognized. But you can react this way to many of Mother Nature’s beloved greenbabies, which is one more reason Gaia can kiss my ass.
The primary site is messy and scary, but it’s the secondary sites that are getting me down; any place this naughty forearm can sneak off to in the night — my neck, my chin, my pantyline, my left armpit — I’ve got a patch of misery. Milder than the mama patch, but MUCH itchier.
We had a transformer blow this morning, which tripped the fire alarm at work. I got to stand outside for forty five minutes next to my boss’s boss’s boss and several hundred of my choice cow-orkers, while I squirmed and jived and thought, “don’t scratch your belly…don’t scratch your belly…don’t scratch your belly…”
Eventually, topical ointments weren’t cutting it; I’m having temporary itchy patches pop up in places my naughty spot hasn’t gone NEAR. Free-floating histamines, I guess. So I bought some Benadryl on the way home — or, as I like to think of it, Coma in a Caplet. Diphenhydramine knocks me flat. They gave it to me for hives when I was a kid, back when it was prescription only, and it’s like weasel narcolepsy.
Took one half an hour ago; so goodbye, cruel world!
Hey, y’all have just read a 253-word essay by a weasel describing a rash. Isn’t the internet wonderful? Have a great weekend!
August 15, 2008 — 4:53 pm
Comments: 32
What else you going to plant in a weasel’s garden?
You must click this link for the big sloppy color version, with extra ninja toenail action. Yeah, up yours, Cute Overload!
There was a mound of clean, loose earth left over after the mighty Shit Processing Factory was installed, and Mummy Runnybabbit apparently snuggled right down into it and laid bunny eggs.
Because Uncle B is terribly old and terribly rich, he sometimes hires a couple of spry young lads to help him in the garding. They dug up these buns like ‘taters, they did. Shrieking and screaming (the buns, I mean). No sign of mama. Longtime readers may recall that rabbit’s milk is very nutritious and baby buns only need to nurse once a day. But I think these guys are old enough to be weaned.
I instructed Uncle B not to tell me what they did with them, because I assumed it was something horrible and manly. Took them by their back legs and cracked them like whips, perhaps. Bit they little heads off while singing Viking war ballads.
But no…Squishy McSlopbucket and his merry pirate crew took them into the next field over and left them in the embankment. Great. They’re going to be right back in our garding in no time. MAKING MORE BUNS.
Some day soon, Uncle B and I are going to have to have that little talk about the birds and the bees and the runnybabbits.
August 14, 2008 — 11:38 am
Comments: 49
Clown wars
“When she was arrested in Afghanistan last month, Aafia Siddique allegedly had in her possession maps of New York, a list of potential targets that included the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the subway system and the animal disease center on Plum Island, detailed chemical, biological and radiological weapon information that has been seen only in a handful of terrorist cases, as well as a thumb drive packed with emails, ABC News has learned.”
Seriously? She was carrying all that around in her purse? Was the thumb drive labeled “Shhhh…Super Secret al Qaeda Plan to Take Over the World”? Was she wearing a little black mask and pants and a striped shirt with “TERRORIST” written on it? Has any nation ever faced an enemy more cartoonishly slap-dash, underripe and just plain bug-fuck crazy?
Let’s take just one datum and think it through a little. The Statue of Liberty has symbolic importance to Americans, so I’ll give them that. But it’s on an island and access is controlled by the Parks Service. A search is involved, so you couldn’t carry much in the way of explosives. Not sure what explosives would do, anyway; the statue itself is a thin skin of copper stretched over a steel framework. Hard to damage. Maybe you could fly a plane into it (I accidentally did that all the time with Microsoft Flight Simulator). Might or might not work. Plus, small body count. In sum, not a very good target. So why even put it on a list, let alone walk around with it?
These fuckers are always being picked up with “maps of the subway system” or “lists of targets” — stuff that’s easily Googlable, perfectly innocent in isolation and make NO sense to be carrying around, unless the whole purpose is to buy yourself a world of hurt and look menacing in a headline. Honestly, when you’re just blue-skying your evil plans, it’s really, really not a good idea to write it all down and carry it on your person.
An earlier ABC News article quoted the Afghanistan National Police as saying she was carrying materials from the “Anarchist’s Arsenal” — bet you anything that’s our old friend the Anarchist’s Cookbook, helping angry Americans blow themselves up since 1971. How terrorized am I supposed to be by a pack of bozos getting their doomsday weapons out of a book you can buy on Amazon for twenty bucks? I think MIT ripped this chick off.
Staunch righty that I am, it would cross my mind that the government is making all this stupid shit up, until I remember how much of it there is. Like, remember this guy? Mohammed Taheri-Azar, former University of North Carolina student. Pleaded guilty yesterday to nine counts of attempted murder. Avenged Muslim deaths around the world by driving his SUV into a crowd of UNC students. Really, Mo? That’s your evil plan?
You know, you can give ’em all the education you want, but someday they’ll break loose and fly off down the road waving their arms and going “ULULULULULULULU!”
It’s like we’re fighting the Global War against Angry Pinwheeling Retards.
August 13, 2008 — 9:57 am
Comments: 21
ZOMG I has fake hepatitis B!
Well, I guess my career as a blood donor is over, thirty years and I-forget-how-many-gallons later. Now I’ve got to come up with some other mildly shitty karma-balancing exercise to replace it. Anybody got an old lady who needs to cross the street? A lot?
And, yes. I scribbled out my unit number, just in case somebody recognized it from the label on my bag of blood. Okay?
August 12, 2008 — 2:10 pm
Comments: 34
Happy Victory Over Japan Day, y’all!
Okay, it’s not literally VJ Day. That would either be August 15-ish, when Japan actually surrendered in dubya-dubya-eye-eye, or September 2, when they filled out the paperwork. But as Rhode Island is the last state to observe the holiday, we figure we can do it any time we like. So we do it on the second Monday in August.
When I was in the Boston office, it used to piss me off that half my colleagues got the day off and I didn’t. But now I’m in the Providence office, I’m like “ha ha! Take that, you smelly Boston office losers!”
I think we chickened out and changed the name to Victory Day, though. Or We Love Our Little Yellow Friends Across the Sea Day. Or maybe it’s The Unions Never Give Up a Paid Holiday Day.
What do I care? Day off! 🙂
It’s raining. 🙁
August 11, 2008 — 8:56 am
Comments: 28
Morning bucket o’ weasels = molto ossim
I had a dental cleaning this morning, so I blew off work for the rest of the day. I dropped by Petco for some catfood on the way back and got there just as the store was opening. The highlight of any trip to Petco, of course, is gawping at the animals– especially the big box of ferrets at the front of the store — so I was grievously bummed to see the ferret cage empty. An employee was rushing around filling food bowls and dumping various squeaking gobs of fur into cages and I said, “no ferrets?” and she said, “oh, they’re over there in that big red bucket.”
And they were!
Three pointy white faces stared up at me out of the bucket. It was a big red bucket of weasels! They were extremely excited to see me, and I was extremely excited to see them. Much to my surprise, nobody cared if I played them and she left the lid off the cage when it was all set up and the bucket was up-ended into it. The ferrets humped all around the cage and chewed on my sleeves and tried to climb me like a tree and, one by one, did the weasel dance for me. Wonderful way to start a long weekend.
Alas, I didn’t have a camera with me. But while I was Googling suitably representative ferret pics, I found this story: one of our last two colonies of wild black footed ferrets has lost a third of its members. To the plague. Yes, that one. THE plague. The big mama-jama.
I knew that plague was endemic in the prairie dog population, and I knew that prairie dogs were ferret food, but I never put two and two together. My favorite disease and my favorite animal, tragically juxtaposed. Apparently, ferrets have zero resistance to plague. They up and die, every time.
People do okay with it now. Every once in a while, some kid out West skins a rabbit he found dead and gets himself a dose of yersinia pestis for it, but antibiotics knock it right down. Whether that’s really the same disease that knocked out a third of the population of Europe is not entirely certain.
Huzzah! My weekend has begun! In with a weasel, out with a…well, we’ll find out.
August 8, 2008 — 10:54 am
Comments: 32
Art Crime
Hey, y’all, I’m in an all-day meeting in the Boston office today. The good news is, my old Mazda dealership can fit me in. The bad news: the Weaselmobile is currently due for about $1,200 in routine maintenance. Yay!
I’ll leave you with this. Oklahoma County Commissioner Brent Rinehart decided the best way to reach voters in his district was to mail them his own personal comic book. The article calls it “edgy”. I call it “a huge steaming pile of loose monkeyshit” — which is, come to think of it, what “edgy” usually means.
It would be a lot more fun if these vile, psychotic drawings were his own, but he actually hired somebody to draw them. Somebody who, presumably, got paid. (Somebody named Shane Suiters, who may or may not be a tattoo artist. Lots of stuff bounced up when I Googled his name, but nothing I felt confident enough to print. Try it! It’s fun!).
Sadly…yes. You guessed: Brent is a Republican. Though really mostly what he is is a nutter. He’s had conflicts with fellow Republicans on the board, at least one of whom has played the “I urge him to get help” card.
You can (and I encourage you to) download the whole masterpiece here (3 megs, .pdf). Now, don’t tear the place up while I’m gone. And somebody please remember to let the dog out at least once today. That wasn’t fun to come home to, last time.
August 7, 2008 — 6:10 am
Comments: 40
Caring is not helping
My mother taught special ed for years and years. She said you could tell when a volunteer was going to wash out in the first week, because she’d be all, “oh, the poor darlings!” You have to be able to make retard jokes to hack it in the retard biz.
Me, I tend to be pretty far over in the boo-hoo end of the scale. “Well, isn’t that special, Princess,” I says to myself, “you care too much to help. We call that: FAIL.” So I make myself do whatever half-assed stuff I can manage, like give blood or visit the pussoes. Then I go home and drink. I’m Mama’s special little throbbing raw nerve ending.
I have huge admiration for the people who shovel the world’s shit for a living. Doctors and nurses. Soldiers. Cops. There’s a reason all the hardest professions have a reputation for black humor: it’s the only way they can bear to do what they do. And it’s awfully easy to slip off the tippy top of that bell curve into one of the unhelpful places on either side.
I got here thinking about Ingrid Newkirk, wondering if she started out okay and went batshit insane staring into the abyss. I don’t think so. There’s another kind of person that thrives in dark places: the kind for whom misery is like oxygen. Doctors, as a class, have given the world more than their fair share of serial killers.
Sometimes I think only religious people should tackle the hard jobs. Specifically, religions which teach of an afterlife (or a future life) chock full of justice. Or retribution. At the very least, a damn good reason why things have to be the way they are.
August 6, 2008 — 2:57 pm
Comments: 16
Happy Underpants Day!
I know it’s legit, because Hasbro is teaming up with FreshPair.com to put underpants on the Operation guy (whose name, disturbingly, is Cavity Sam). Only, I can’t find anything on Hasbro’s site about it.
Sadly, both NationalUnderpantsDay.com and its sponsor FreshPair.com are blocked from work, so I can’t tell you how NUD is observed. Some minion without Websense filtering will have to tell us what we’re supposed to do today. And no making shit up!
Gyah. You know? I try to keep the true spirit of National Underpants Day, but they’re not making it easy.
Edit: fixed the link (thanks, Musli). I guess, since
I can’t follow it myself. Sadly, it’s National Underwear day,
which isn’t nearly as amusing. “Pants” is a comedy word.
August 5, 2008 — 10:02 am
Comments: 35