Non-advice for Auto Makers in Crisis

Dear Auto Makers in Crisis,

Things are changing.. rapidly. The SUV is dying. Your sales are down. It's time to swallow your pride and get a hold of yourselves. If you didn't see this coming, fire your yes-men. Sit down with a web browser, drink some strong coffee, and get a hard dose of reality.

Gas is over 4$ a gallon and it will never come down. We the consumers have begrudgingly accepted this because, like everything else, we have no choice but to bend over and take it. You are already seeing the backlash and it won't get any better. Stop pretending that 31 miles per gallon is something to be proud of or hard to attain. And stop insulting us with bullshit gas subsidies. Your incentive options stink.

You are now paying for holding yourself back from innovation. We're not going to buy a new car when the cost to fill the tank exceeds the monthly finance payment. Sorry.

Here is my non-advice. Offer cheap electric cars.. now. Not 5 years from now. The market is here now. The technology has been around for a while. Yeah I know, batteries suck right now. Figure it out because we need your cars and you need our money. Oh, a shortage you say? Make more or use something else. It's your cars customers are interested in buying, not your excuses. Other manufacturers are picking up where you are failing. (Yes, GM, you're almost there, but the internet will never forget what you did to the EV1.) Necessity is the mother of innovation, right?

If you are intent on staying in the dark ages, you will fail and the consumers will collectively chortle. Your competitors know this and are already cashing in. Do you really want to be laughed at?

Look, this whole illusion of freedom thing works better when we have lots of choices and plumes of your smoke billowing from our rectums. Sure, it's taken us over a century but your lie has finally been figured out and now it has become unprofitable. Please feed us a new lie with new choices tomorrow, not next decade. We're not going to buy your crappy cars unless we're all good and fooled up.

Signed,
Average Nobody With Money

P.S. Sorry for the overly-abused picture from last decade at the top of this rant. We get it, gas prices are high.

Never Go To Sleep Hungry

This scene took place last night at 3:03 AM while my wife and I were asleep in bed. It went something like this:

Me: zzzzzz (reaching down and grabbing my wife's hand)
Her: zzz.. (slightly waking up) .. aww he's grabbing my hand
Me: zzZzZz (bringing the hand up to my face)
Her: oh.. he's going to kiss my hand while he's asleep, how cute
Me: zzzZZz.. CHOMP!
Her: OOOWWW, DID YOU JUST BITE MY HAND!?$#@!
Me: huh? what happened?
Her: YOU JUST BIT MY HAND!
Me: I'm hungry.. zzzzz

For some reason, I remembered the whole thing when I woke up. We both went to sleep kind of hungry because we had dinner early. I will post more sleep shenanigans from my past. Apparently I'm rather vocal while sleeping.

I guess I need to sleep with a muzzle on.

I Saved My Dog's Life... Again

Today my brother and his daughter came over and we all went to the New York Aquarium. We saw a lot of aquatic critters and we had a great time. I took the following macro picture of a jellyfish with my wife's Rebel (click for higher-res):

We had a great time, as I mentioned. My darling wife had gone food shopping on Friday and bought an Angus London broil. I was extremely excited about eating said steak after we got back from the aquarium. The only problem was that when we got home it was pouring rain. Barbecuing with an umbrella turned out to be way easier than I thought it would be. My wife was making green beans and rice because my niece had requested it.

As everyone is sitting down to dinner, I was cutting up some steak for Satan my dog. I call her "grill buddy" because she always hangs out with me outside and waits very patiently for a hot dog or a burger. For some stupid reason, I thought if I cut the pieces up very small she'd have to eat them slower because it would take longer to sift through the dog food pellets to find the steak.

It turns out, I was wrong, as usual. I guess she really liked the steak because she started devouring everything in her bowl ravenously. She ate way too fast. She started to make a strange gagging noise that I never heard her make before. I saw her tail was between her legs and her legs started to splay out like she was going to collapse. She seemed scared but she was still chewing while gagging.

I called to my wife "SHE'S CHOKING! HELP!" and I heard my wife start to run into the kitchen but then slamming into the hutch and screaming in pain. I wasn't sure what to do so I started to give her puppy Heimlich. I squeezed upwards under her belly right below her ribcage where I figured her diaphragm would be. It took about two pumps and she coughed up a conglomeration of steak and food. Whew!

What bewilders me is that she immediately ate the offending morsels and continued to eat her dinner as if nothing happened. Dogs truly do live in the moment. Looking back, even as she was choking and falling over, she still had her face in the food bowl trying to eat more.

The rest of the night went without incident. After dinner I made chocolate ice cream and my niece played with the dog until they both got tired. I couldn't believe it. The dog actually ran out of energy and crapped out before my niece.

By the way, my wife was fine and after eating the steak, I know why the dog ate it so damn fast. It was amazing. It was slightly overcooked but very juicy. Angus beef is totally worth the extra money. I took all the above pictures with my wife's Rebel XT. Unfortunately, I ruined a lot of pictures in the dark rooms because the shutter would stay open longer and ole Shaky McTremorsons couldn't keep the camera still.

Also, check out this picture of that exact Bathysphere when it was actually in use.

A Streak of Mediocrity

Today, I bought two $1 scratch off tickets at lunch. I scratched them off and won $2 on one ticket and zilch on the other. I cashed in my $2 and bought a $2 ticket. From that ticket I won $4. I bought 2 $2 tickets. On one ticket, I won 20$ and the other I boo hoo'd. Feeling saucy, I bought two $5 tickets. On one I got $5 back and the other was a goose egg.

At that point I was 15$ up. What was my next move. I bought a $20 win for life ticket. I won $30! I was so psyched I knew a big win was coming. I bought another win for life and as I scratched it off I heard the warbling descending slide whistle in my brain telling me I was still just a broke nothing.

Oh well, at least I have a couple bucks left to play tomorrow.

GRTEFUL

I saw this license plate and I thought it was a really powerful message. Take from it what you will. For those of you who came to see the picture, please enjoy it. The rest of this boohoo post is about a bad day I had so if that bores you, come back soon!

Saturday was an interesting day for me. My wife and I both had an allergist appointment. She was at 11am and I was at 11:30am. We got there at 10:45 to fill out the paperwork before. We forgot to sign in and another woman came in and signed in before we finished filling out the paperwork. Her appointment was at 11:15. They took her first even though we were there first. Oh well, we didn't sign in. I can accept that.

They asked us who wanted to go first. We asked her if we could both go in the room and get it done all at once and the woman said "it would be easier if you guys went separately so we can keep things flowing." We agreed. So they took my wife next.

She reports that she got a really thorough allergy examination from the doctor. They took blood and discussed everything. Meanwhile, I was in the waiting room and another man with a blue shirt showed up. Then a guy and his two daughters showed up.

As they called my name, I was optimistic. It was only 11:55. I have no problems waiting for 25 minutes. So I sit in the examination room waiting. The girl came into my room and took my height, weight and blood pressure. As she left, I noticed a reflection of the room next door to me. My wife is in that room. She got out at about 12:15 and then, after talking to the receptionist, comes into my room to wait with me. So there we waited.

I hear talking outside the room and I notice that he is giving allergy shots to the two girls who came in after me and blue shirt. I then notice that they put blue shirt in the room my wife was in. I can tell he is impatient because he keeps sticking his head out the door. I was kind of pissed but I thought to myself, "that's ok, I'm next and they're just getting quick shots."

It's about 12:30 now. Then the doctor goes into the blue shirted man's room and tells the assistants to draw blood. He closes the door behind him. My wife senses that I'm livid and tries to calm me down. She goes to talk to the receptionist who swears that he knows we are there and waiting. I can accept one person being helped before me but two is disrespectful and to me means I was forgotten.

The reason this pissed me off SO BAD, is because this happens without fail EVERY TIME I go to a doctor. I get forgotten about VERY easily for some reason. The other day the ophthalmologist admitted that he forgot about me while I was sitting in the waiting room for two hours. He was talking to another doctor when I got into the examination room. He only saw me because I got up and told the receptionist that I was leaving. Oh, and when I left I had gotten a 35$ parking ticket because my meter ran out while I was getting my new contact lenses fitted. So now, my patient patience is gone.

I told the receptionist, from behind gritted teeth, that I would call and reschedule. She felt really bad and tried to make small talk to calm me down. I insisted but my wife made her put my name down on her repeat visit schedule. I now have a new rule. I won't wait longer than 1 hour after my actual scheduled visit time. What is it with doctors and making you wait so damn long? Why not schedule your patients properly? I'm offering you my money in exchange for your professional service. I'm sorry, I can no longer spend 2 hours waiting for a 15 minute examination. There's plenty more allergists and ophthalmologists.

Later, we brought the dog to her play group in the park. My wife saw someone she knew from a while ago and while our dogs were playing, his dog smashed into my ankle on my left leg. Ouch. My ankle is still bruised today. To make matters worse, this gigantic bedspread of a dog came bouncing over and peed on that same leg like I was a fire hydrant or something.

On the walk home, I had to laugh at how awful my day was. My sister-in-law's boyfriend said "relax dude, you have a lot to be grateful for." He's right, I do. I have no reason to be as whiny and awful as I wanted to be. Then I remembered the above picture that I took last week and figured it'd be a nice tie-in to this boring non-story. I don't want to be an angel, I just want to be good.

For the sake of brevity, I'm cutting out the other stupid crap that happened that day. It was just your classic "bad day" where nothing goes right. However, my observant wife noticed this and bought me a box of chocolate. Go wife!

When I got home, I took a shower, drank a few Captain's Salads, and got my ass whipped in some Call of Duty 4.

Happy Summer!

It never felt like summer to me until I saw the first fire fly. Well Thursday night, whilst returning from the nightly puppy playgroup session in the park, I saw my first fire fly of the year. This morning he was chillaxing on my garbage can and ready for his close up. Too bad my camera wasn't up to the task (as usual).

I guess it's official. Happy Summer!

Naval Oranges, Yuck

In this week's episode of Easy Target Friday, I gallantly take on the produce atrocity that is the NAVAL ORANGE! Don't get me wrong, I love the ugly little balls of fructose and citric acid. It's not their fault that they look like Cthulu emerging from the depths of the DMV basement. They are quite delicious despite looking like a partially moved bowel.

The story about naval oranges is that in 1820 a single orange had a conjoined twin due to a mutation. This mutation leaves the fruit sterile so every naval orange that is out there is a direct descendant of that one 188 year old mutant abomination.

To demonstrate my point, click these for high res pictures:
I don't want to feel like I'm excising a malignant lump from my scrotum just to eat a delicious portion of my lunch.
I had to resist the temptation to carve goatse hands into the rind on this one.
Fruit porn, nothing to see here. This orange was just as delicious as it looks. Have a happy friday!