When I say random shit, I mean random shit that trickles through my thick skull, not like randomly shitting your pants during meetings or randomly popping a squat in the aisles of your local Best Buy.  This set of random shit is what happens when you are bored and working out (from this morning).

• If you rip a huuuuge fart on a treadmill, your mind thinks you are crop-dusting, but you’re not.  In fact it doesn’t matter how hard you crank up the treadmill, you can’t outrun it.  Oh yeah, it also pisses off the old guy on the treadmill next to you.
• I saw Avril Lavigne in a video this morning.  She is looking like a total slut.  Sweet.
• The Santa Claus in both Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman is a fucking asshole.  Especially in Rudolph.
• Are republicans represented by red because of the huge redneck base?  Are democrats represented by blue because they are huge baby blue ball-babies?
• Sublime’s 40 oz Freedom is a great work-out album.  80’s pop, not so much.

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So I’m with my 2 year old boy at a local indoor playground today.  There are a million of these types of places around with the inflatable bounce rooms and slides and shit.  I’m generally in a meh mood because I’m even at the place, when I start noticing the other clientelle.  I’ve been at this place at least a dozen times, and the other folks were normally in the same socio-demographic group that I’m a member of,  you know, entitled assholes.   Today was different.  The first clue that something was amiss was when I caught glimpse of a bright yellow mullet out of the corner of my eyes.  I had to give a double take, the dude was in his 50’s had a bleach blonde mullet, and get this.  Feathered Bangs!  They were so impressive that they deserved to be capitalized.  He even had a long handled comb in his back pocket.  Then I start noticing middle and high school aged crackers running all over the place and jumping around on the apparatus (and scaring the shit outta my boy).  Typically there are 1 to 7 year olds there, this was something else.  By this time my redneck senses were going ape-shit.  Shiny light would blind me from keychains attached to belt-loops, I saw not one but two neck tatoos, and a pod of rednecks changed the channel on the TV in the parents area from Football to NASCAR… WTF!!  For some context, I grew up among the rednecks in rural Pennsylvania, only we didn’t call them rednecks, in PA they were called hicks.  Same difference.  However, I can speak their language.  I’m struggling if I want my boy to be fluent in redneck or not.  I think it’s inevitable, so I should embrace it.  I already purchased him a rusty Chevey Blazer with ultra-patriotic bumper stickers.  So he’s got that going for him… which is nice.

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Ok, get ready for diarrhea of the keyboard.

So I got back from the geek conference on Friday (not to worry, I didn’t wear my full length Chewbacca costume this time) and went right to a Halloween party this weekend… for the kids.  Let’s just say the highlight of the party for me was when I was getting my daughter out of her car seat when we arrived, my left calf started to really itch.  I pull her out of her car seat and am holding her in my arms when I look down at my now burning leg to see that I’m standing on a fucking Georgia fire-ant metropolis, and they are throwing a “fuck-you” party on my leg.  After dancing around and yelling like an asshole for a few minutes we went to the party.   I also got to miss Penn State beating the shit out of Michigan in the second half…. shit.  Later that night the girl has a fever and ends up with strep throat.  Awesome.

Sunday was a lazy day, we did jack shit in the morning, which was spectacular and then shopped for the week and carved the biggest fucking pumpkin ever that night.  This pumpkin is so big, I could shove both of my kids in there and light the candles…. not that I would ever do that, again.  Monday was back to the grind, dealing with hundreds of unread emails and voicemails, and general work shit.

Which leads to today.  Today is two weeks away from election day.  I’m struggling with the fact that I am going to make a protest vote (most likely a write-in for Ron Paul) that nobody will notice or care about.  But after much reflection, it is the only vote that I can make with a clear conscious, so what if it is “throwing away my vote”, I’m not going to vote for somebody who I think will do a bad job just because he is the lesser of two evils.  If enough people say enough is enough, maybe they can make a difference.  Doubtful, but one can always hope on a Tuesday morning.

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So I’m in Florida this week for a technical conference that is full of IT nerds.  A shitload of fucking nerds, geeks, and chips, dips, and dorks.  When I say a shitload, I mean a fucking shitload, like 6 or 7 thousand of em.  As I’m looking at this sea of awkward dudes and the occasional woman (btw, if you were a chick looking to get laid at this conference and couldn’t… then there’s no hope for ya) with disdain, it slowly comes to me.  I understand these people.  I kinda look like them.  I do the same thing for a living.  I actually like what I do for a living, and like talking about it.  I fuck around on my computer until late at night.  Wait for it.  Wait for it… Holy motherfucking christ on rye bread.  I’m a nerd.  Goddamn it.  Now I have to kick the shit outa myself.  Fuck.  What’s worse… I totally get why the pic below is funny.  FUCK!

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That’s right bitches, I didn’t realize it until yesterday, but Total Diatribe is one years old!  It came to me after reading a moooooooooog post over at Mental Poo, it turns out he is a year old too.  As an aside, I’m really glad that I’m just a year old, because I just crapped my pants.  And that would just be creepy if I was say, I dunno, late 30’s.  I could take this opportunity to highlight some of my favorite posts or brag about how great I am (I am great by the way), but the truth is, most of my posts suck.  I wrote them high on crystal meth…. or was that rock candy?  Either way, my tooth hurts now.  To wrap up this little gem, please vote for me for President…. I’m no worse than the other two assholes up for office.  Peace.

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Shoot yourself twice in the upper body while being evicted.  This happened to 90 year old Addie Polk of Akron Ohio, and Fannie Mae forgave her loan and signed her  house over to her (click here for full article).  Something tells me that this strategy will have limited returns for pretty much everybody else who decides to use this method.   Congress and “the people” can only use one symbol per crisis, everybody else in this situation is fucked.

In a similar vein, I watched a portion of Meet the Press today and Tom Brokaw stated this:  (full transcript here)

… let me introduce a moment of heresy into the political campaign. Isn’t it also time for these candidates to reflect just what Peggy was saying and say to the American people, “You’ve got a role in this, too. You’ve got to step up.” We’re not going to make gain without some pain here in the next year, and, in fact, the American people have been part of the problem that we have right now. A lot of them took loans that they should—ought not to have taken. Credit card debt is very high. And they want to turn a blind eye to things like entitlements, Medicare and how we’re going to pay for it.

I had some immediate conflicting reactions to this statement.  First, it was a bit of a sting as I have spent many years of my life living above my means as well as many many Americans, currently, my family has paid down most of our debt and have taken great pains over the last couple of years to eliminate credit spending all together.  But the statement rings true.  My second reaction was making this statement (as a member of the MSM and a puppet of our government) is like a drug dealer complaining about the junkies.  Our government has taken great pains to encourage spending both by average Joe and by themselves with their incredible deficit spending, forcing an unnaturally low interest rate, giving incentives to sub-prime mortgage houses, and by giving two fucking ridiculous tax rebates and encouraged people not to pay down debt or save but to buy buy buy.  How many of you sat down with a used car salesman mortgage broker to obtain financing to purchase a house and were told:  “you’ve been cleared for XXXX” where XXXX was waaaaaaay more than you knew you could realistically afford.

It fucking makes me sick.

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I’ve had two losing poker sessions in a row, but somehow, both sessions felt satisfying.  In early August I was in New Jersey for vacation, and had the opportunity to sit for about 10 hours at the Borgata.  The Borgata continues to be my favorite poker room, it is huge, nice seats, good dealers, and has lively games 24/7.  I played 2/5 NL at the Borgata with a $500 buy-in, which was the table max.  About half-way through the session, I was down to 200 bucks, and then quickly afterwards I found myself with about 50 bucks in chips in front of me.  I wasn’t playing horribly, actually, I thought I was playing rather well.  I made a couple of good lay-downs and had some very close beats (like pocket KK vs. pocket AA), and there were no moments where I thought “that was a fucking donkey move”.  I found myself all-in with my last 50 bucks and I finally won a decent hand.  I rode a rush past my buy-in and then roller-coastered 100 up to 100 down for the remaining hours of the session.  I left 100 down but felt satisfied that I was able to fight back.  I think I could have made it a positive session given time, but it was 4 am and they were breaking the table down.  If I was single, I would have stuck around, but life calls sometimes.

My last session was on Saturday night, home game at my house.  Much smaller stakes as it is a home game and 7 of the 8 people at the table work with me in some fashion.  And, let’s just say that changes my playing strategy.  I bought in 4 times (a new record for me), but fought back at the end to wind up 10 bucks down from my original buy-in.  Not bad, however, I find it very hard to play against  co-workers or people who work for me.  I tend to not play very aggressively and rely on card luck.

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… you eat the bar, and sometimes, well, he eats you.

That pretty much sums up the week for me.

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I got an email today, this email was better than 10 hate comments and 30 videos of nuns washing cars in thongs. It was a copyright infringement email. Not only was it a copyright infringement email, but it was from Gary Larson’s “people”, you know the motherfucker who writes The Farside. The Farside was only my obsession in junior high, I basically creamed my pants when I read the email. I don’t flatter myself, I was dumb enough to name a couple of images of the farside cartoon “farside1″ and “farside2″ on a post back in November (post removed BTW) so the lawyer types probably did a google image search and scraped up my post off of the bottom of the interwebz shoe. The letter was pretty cool. I’m going to frame it.

Dear totaldiatribe

Creators Syndicate, an international newspaper syndicate, syndicates Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons to foreign newspapers. In addition we handle all reprint permissions requests for The Far Side following guidelines long established by Mr. Larson and his company FarWorks Inc. (copyright owner to all Far Side images). In short, we approve or disapprove requests to reproduce Mr. Larson’s cartoons, and carefully monitor the ways in which they appear.

We are writing on behalf of FarWorks, Inc. and Gary Larson about your posting of two Far Side cartoons on your website http://www.totaldiatribe.com/2007/11/. While Mr. Larson is certainly flattered to know you are a fan of his work, we have to be concerned about any unauthorized use of The Far Side name and cartoons, especially when they appear online.

FarWorks has a serious problem with unauthorized uses of The Far Side worldwide. As a result, it does not allow online publication of works from The Far Side. No matter how insignificant a few uses may seem, it still amounts to making versions of the cartoons available in digital form for anyone to download, which makes it virtually impossible for Mr. Larson to control future uses, something that is very important to him.

 

Please read the letter from Mr. Larson below, and respect his wishes by removing the cartoons from your website. Many thanks in advance for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

<Name Removed>

Permissions Department

Creators Syndicate

<Address/email address removed>

Enclosures: A note from Gary Larson

A note from Gary Larson

RE: Online Use of Far Side Cartoons

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

I’m walking a fine line here.

On the one hand, I confess to finding it quite flattering that some of my fans have created web sites displaying and / or distributing my work on the Internet. And, on the other, I’m struggling to find the words that convincingly but sensitively persuade these Far Side enthusiasts to “cease and desist” before they have to read these words from some lawyer.

What impact this unauthorized use has had (and is having) in tangible terms is, naturally, of great concern to my publishers and therefore to me — but it’s not the focus of this letter. My effort here is to try and speak to the intangible impact, the emotional cost to me, personally, of seeing my work collected, digitized, and offered up in cyberspace beyond my control.

Years ago I was having lunch one day with the cartoonist Richard Guindon, and the subject came up how neither one of us ever solicited or accepted ideas from others. But, until Richard summed it up quite neatly, I never really understood my own aversions to doing this: “It’s like having someone else write in your diary,” he said. And how true that statement rang with me. In effect, we drew cartoons that we hoped would be entertaining or, at the very least, not boring; but regardless, they would always come from an intensely personal, and therefore original perspective.

To attempt to be “funny” is a very scary, risk-laden proposition. (Ask any stand-up comic who has ever “bombed “on stage.) But if there was ever an axiom to follow in this business, it would be this: be honest to yourself and — most important — respect your audience.

So, in a nutshell (probably an unfortunate choice of words for me), I only ask that this respect be returned, and the way for anyone to do that is to please, please refrain from putting The Far Side out on the Internet. These cartoons are my “children,” of sorts, and like a parent, I’m concerned about where they go at night without telling me. And, seeing them at someone’s web site is like getting the call at 2:00 a.m. that goes, “Uh, Dad, you’re not going to like this much, but guess where I am.

I hope my explanation helps you to understand the importance this has for me, personally, and why I’m making this request.

Please send my “kids” home. I’ll be eternally grateful.

Most respectfully,

Gary Larson

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In this installment of Stories from the road, our hero finds himself in Chicago.

Is the multi-day hangover a myth? Fuck no. I’ve got one. I remember the days when I could drink until 3, and then still make an 8 o’clock class the next morning (my notes would be unreadable and would smell like stale beer, but I still made the class). I just got back from Chicago where we drank like rock stars, told and re-told old stories, and realized our age all in one fell swoop. And then we re-told some old stories. The impetus for the trip was a reunion of a rugby team I used to play for, we had won a regional championship game for our division in Chicago 10 years ago and there were 3 international rugby matches scheduled for this past Saturday, so we scheduled the trip, took our pain medication, and went. I think there was a total of 18 guys on the trip.

Friday night was fairly typical reunion fare, a couple of us went to lovely Gary Indiana to play some poker while the bulk of guys went to the Cubs-Sox game. We all met up at bar/restaurant afterwards in the suburbs of Chicago. We sat around and bullshitted the night away while pounding down brew-dogs. And eventually closed the place down. I haven’t closed a bar in years.

Saturday is a rugby day. I only got about 3 hours of sleep (stupid internal clock), and after some greasy breakfast to lube up the gullet, we headed over to Toyota Park for the rugby matches. The first thing I noticed was that the parking lot was full of people drinking in groups of 10 or 15 and singing rugby songs. We entered the gate, and cracked open our first beer of the day. The time was 10:50 AM. We got into our seats on the 50 meter line and got ready for the first match (Ireland vs. Argentina, when the sun came out. I have mixed blood (mostly Irish and Scottish). This. No. Good. For. Sun. My face now glows a deep bright red and you can barbecue off of my forehead. Anyway, I moved into the shade soon after the first game, but too late. The good news was the beer kept flowing, so soon I didn’t feel my face too much.

The other matches of the day were fairly uneventful (England vs. Scotland, and US vs. Canada), my only comment is, we fucking suck. All told we were at the field for 7 hours boozing it up. We headed back to the wonderful Holiday Inn (nuthin but the best for our lot), and had a few more cold ones while we sat around and argued like little bitches about what we were going to do that night. In a moment of drunken clarity we came to the conclusion that some people are planners, some people are do-ers, and some people tell the do-ers what to do. And the do-ers get paid the least and do the most work (i.e., they’re fucked). But I digress. We eventually found a planner who planned an elaborate plan. The plan was, walk across the street to a sports bar. We’re fucking idiots. So a person that tells the do-ers what to do said “hey fuck-nuts, we’re leaving” and we left. Problem solved.

After some food and beer and shots and mustard and a little side of burning rage, we decided (again we needed a planner for this) to head over to a more “exotic” bar. In other words, we found a strip club. We ended up at the strip club and even the burning rage issue went away for some reason. All I could say was “god-damn we drink a lot” when I saw our bar-tab at the end of the night. We got a cab at 3:30 AM and headed back to the hotel. The last beer I finished, 3:20 AM. That’s 16+ straight hours of boozing it up if you’re keeping score at home (assuming I’m doing my math correctly course, remember the multi-day hangover thing?). I realized how old I am when I only got another 3 hours of sleep again (fucking bullshit stupid internal clock!!!).

I’m done… where’s the tylenol?

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