Viewing posts from February 2015

Being a weather forecaster is one of the few jobs where constant failure is not only accepted, it’s expected. Hardly the same bar as, oh, say, airline pilot or surgeon. All you have to do is be tolerant of lots of ribbing from your co-workers, friends and family and you can make a nice living. There are limits to this, however. If you’re a weather forecaster who is unafraid to predict blizzard conditions when everyone else in Miami says sunny and 85, you’ll become notorious, but get such high ratings for being an idiot, that every station will want you and you’ll make millions of dollars. Crime and stupidity pay off big time these days.

In case you hadn’t noticed, weathermen/women aren’t called that anymore.  They’re meteorologists. This is a house of cards, however. If weather people are meteorologists, what do we call people who study meteors? Now they have to change their titles, Wite-Out their diplomas and pencil in cosmologist, a title they hate because people are always confusing them with cosmetologists, who are make-up artists. And as far as they’re concerned, apparently being an artist wasn’t lofty enough. Hence their new title. This whole thing is going to come to blows and there will be blood which, btw, is 98.6 degrees under partly cloudy skies at the moment.

Understand, I have nothing against weath…meteorologists. They have a lot of angst. I get that. Their jobs have become obsolete. Weather reports are available for wherever we are whenever we want from the app on our phones. But it’s still not totally accurate. It may look like it “knows” the outside temperature for the town I’m in, but it doesn’t take into account that I live next door to a leaking nuclear reactor.

And what’s with this “real feel” on my weather app? I don’t get this. If it’s zero degrees, but the “real feel” is -18, as it warned me the other morning, then it is -18. If that’s what it’s going to feel like to me, then that’s what it is. Telling me the real feel is -18, but it’s really 120 above is not going to make me feel any warmer.

Besides, how can anything be colder than zero degrees? Isn’t zero supposed to be the absolute lowest you can go? Isn’t that where things start or end up? So how can you have negative degrees?  I can’t have -2 gallons of gas in my car. And after a certain point, does the temperature even matter? Can you really tell the difference between -18 degrees and zero degrees? Are you now not going to go naked bull riding, but would have when you thought it was zero? Either way, your tongue is still going to stick to a flagpole, and people will still take your wallet, phone and all the extra heavy clothing you put on because you thought there was a difference between 0 and -18.

The best solution to this is that when it gets below zero, my weather app doesn’t need to get so specific. It’s TMI. It should simply read out: “Cold.” For me, that’s all I need to know.

A North Carolina Senator said that Starbucks and other restaurant workers should have the choice of whether or not to wash their hands before exiting the bathroom. Even though he admits that the PR alone would cause these businesses to go down the very toilets the employees use, he’s got a good point. We’ve become germaphobic.

Why else would restaurants put signs in their restrooms demanding that “Employees must wash hands before returning to work”? And what about the owner? S/he isn’t an “employee.” Does that mean s/he escapes the restriction? How extreme is this going to get? Next thing you know they’ll have a sign “All employees must now use toilet paper instead of your aprons.” I, for one, could never work under those conditions.

This trampling of our rights is only going to snowball. I can only imagine the outrage if a hospital put up a sign “All surgeons and support personnel are prohibited from entering the operating theater unless they’re wearing pants.” It’s not enough that they save lives, now they have to keep their private parts private. So much for freedom of expression. If we truly are a free society that should mean that clothing is optional, which has the added safety benefit of making it harder to carry a concealed weapon. So there! Bet the rule makers never thought of that.

One last thought…I think being a free country also means that if I don’t want my child to get a vaccination, then he shouldn’t have to. We all have the right to free speech, the right to vote, and the right to let our kids spread deadly diseases willy-nilly throughout the land.

There’s been a lot of hoopla of late surrounding driverless cars. This is an idea whose time has come. Yes, we’ll still have accidents, but nobody will be blamed!

Police officer: “Your car just plowed into a school bus. Forty-six people went down that ravine.

Driver: Oh my God. Did anyone get hurt?

Officer: No.

Driver: Whew.

Officer: Not until the bus burst into flames.

Driver: That’s awful!

Officer: Luckily, the fire was put out quickly.

Driver: I’m so relieved to hear that.

Officer: Yeah. If it wasn’t for the explosion, the bus would’ve never made it to the river.

Driver: I hope the water felt refreshing.

Officer: I wouldn’t know. We haven’t found the bus yet. So what did you see?

Driver: I didn’t see anything.

Officer: Weren’t you driving?

Driver: No. It’s a driverless car. Besides, I had just finished a double martini, I got a little woozy so I crawled through the back seat to the trunk and took a nap. I had a blanket and pillow in there.

Officer: Good planning. Well, have a nice day.

This just in: Grey has become the new black.

If you listen to radio call-in shows, doesn’t it always seem as if the callers aren’t really listening? Sure, they know what the topic is and know what they’re going to say, but it always seems like they start off on the wrong foot. The host says, “Good morning, Janet” and the caller, wanting to be polite, says, “Good morning, Lou. How are you?” The host always answers, “I’m fine, thanks.” For once I wish the host would be honest, and say, “I’m good. I’m great, I’m fit as a fiddle, whatever the hell that means, or weren’t you listening to the first 1300 callers who asked me the same stupid question? Pay attention, for heaven’s sake.”

Science deniers are the poster children for why we need more money for education. They dispute facts that are indisputable. “The sun rises in the East and sets in the West” is not proof that the Sun revolves around the Earth.

Furthermore, the fact that the Earth is spinning 1040 mph at the equator and 66,111 mph as we travel around the Sun is not disproved just because our hair is not constantly being blown back.

If you still believe the Earth is flat, I kindly suggest you take a long cruise, not to prove that science is right, but hopefully to prove you are. Fasten your seat belts and have a nice trip.

Ever wonder how musicians, especially rock musicians can play the same freakin’ songs over and over again, night after night, year after year? Figure it out. They’re deaf! If you spent your life standing in front of amplifiers that are louder than a jet for thirty years chances are you would be, too. Now you know why part way through the concert an assistant hands them a new guitar. The one they’re playing is out of tune and they don’t know it. If they need someone to tune their guitars, how can they hear well enough to write new songs?

Remember Evelyn Wood speed reading courses? Whatever happened to those? Why aren’t they around anymore? You know what happened? Twitter. How long does it take to read 140 characters? My dog can read 130, but then she gets tired and takes another nap. You know what Evelyn should do? Start another course. The Evelyn Wood Speed Texting Course for People Over 21. Ever watch some kid text? How can anybody type that fast on those little phone buttons? I’ll tell you how. They can’t. They’re not typing words. It’s garbage. Gibberish. They just want to make it look like they’re busy so we’ll leave them alone.

I don’t understand why Sigmund Freud, the Father of Psychoanalysis, decided that “anal- retentive” was the best descriptive for a certain type of personality. Makes me wonder what labels he rejected.

I don’t buy anything just because it’s labeled “organic,” “all natural” or “100% natural.” Rat feces are “all natural” but that doesn’t mean I’m going to come home from the gym and throw some in my protein shake.

Bad gifts: When I was a kid for my mom’s birthday I once bought her an ant farm. I figured, “Hey, now mom won’t have to go food shopping anymore. The ants will grow all the fruit and vegetables we need!” Of course, nothing happened. Then I realized one day that they can’t grow anything without water. But I put too much in. Ants may be good at a lot of things, but building lifeboats isn’t one of them.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

There are a lot of unconnected, random things in life that may not be worthy of a full post, but I need to get them off my chest, out of my head and out from under my skin. This is not going to be pretty. Here goes…

If my printer’s black cartridge is full and its color cartridge is empty, why can’t I still print in black? Last I heard, science had proven that black is the absence of color. So why do I need to keep buying color cartridges if the color I want to print is by definition the lack of color? I’ll tell you one thing—if I find out that my printer can print in color without having a cartridge of black ink, somebody’s going to hear about it.

A question for AT&T: if you disconnect my phone service because the bill wasn’t paid on time and I’m not near a computer AND you won’t even allow me to call your billing department on the phone I got from you, how do you expect me to pay my bill? If I got arrested, I’d get one phone call. So what’s with you guys?

Gas stations used to have a separate nozzle for each grade of gas, remember? The handles even had different colors so we wouldn’t get confused about which grade we were choosing. Truthfully, if the colored handles confused you, then maybe you’ve got bigger issues and shouldn’t be driving in the first place. Anyway, now there’s only one nozzle and no matter which grade we choose, it all flows through the same one. So how do we know we’re getting the gas we paid for? Who’s to say there isn’t just one giant gas tank in the ground, that different grades don’t even exist and the whole thing’s been a hoax from the beginning? Maybe that’s how oil companies really made their money. Everybody’s getting the same crappy gas even if we’re buying premium. At least the three nozzles gave the appearance that we were getting something different. Of course, the oil companies couldn’t care less if we think we’re getting scammed. Maybe that’s the real reason prices are dropping. We’re all waking up and buying the cheapest grade of gas, which might actually be the same as the high-priced grade.

Want to see something scary? The next time your town has a toxic waste collection day, go down and look at all the flammable, poisonous, explosive things your neighbors have been openly storing in their garages while having tailgate barbecues in their driveways. And what do the cities who collect all this stuff do with it? Do they turn it into shopping bags, make-up and lawn furniture, or do they just dump it down the sink like we used to do in the good ol’ days? Here’s my perfect solution. I think cities should send all that dangerous crap to our military who would then drop it on terrorists. They wouldn’t even have to “repurpose” it. Just put it all in a few million Hefty Bags with Twist Ties and Fuse and throw it out of some planes. It’s a two-pronged approach. The noxious “bomb” will kill them even if they manage to not get hit by one of the falling bags. This way we’ve gotten rid of our toxic waste and our enemies while cutting our military budget in half at the same time. One-stop dropping. Now that’s recycling.

Brain Marbles—just stuff rolling around in my head:

Why is it you never hear about women politicians having affairs? I’ll tell you why. Women politicians are smarter than men politicians.

If a t-shirt is sleeveless, do we call it an i-shirt?

With all the experts/consultants out there who are willing to tell us the secret to making millions, how come there aren’t more rich people? You know what the secret is? Become an expert/consultant who tells other people the secret to making millions.

If you think that money can’t buy happiness, you don’t know where to shop.

I haven’t seen any ads lately for Restless Leg Syndrome. Was it cured or did they decide that it’s just too stupid?