Look it up

I haven't been much of a nice guy recently, so in that regard, maybe it is better that I have stayed away from blogging anything of merit, for fear that I would be on one of my angry rants, and in the end, my blog would just end up pissing off the common folk who stop by to visit from time to time. That being said, what good is my blog if I don't say what is on my mind? Isn't this my forum, until some one pries it from my cold, dead hands? That being said, I have my lo mein with me, and lo mein is always a good "cheer me up" type food, so maybe my ranting will spare the populace at large, who knows.

I am still being pestered at the part time gig about not accepting the "promotion", to which I continue to say, really, I would like as little responsibility here as is humanly possible. Probably not the ideal thing to say to an employer, but then again, my idea of little responsibility is just doing my job, which is still far and away more than a lot of people there can say. Prime example would be Saturday night, where I was scheduled to close with Donny and Ashley. Well, the thing is, they apparently are something of an item I guess, I don't know how much, I could care less about their personally lives and all of that, but their interactions at work would lead one to believe they are more than coworkers. To the detail oriented, one would recognize that this is a clear violation of my "Animal Planet Rule of Dating", that being don't shit where you eat, and since most relationships end up turning to shit, don't bring them to the place that is paying the bills. Well, my sage wisdom falls on deaf ears this past Saturday, and worse, they thought it would be a good idea to mix both of those with alcohol they brought to work. Far be it from me to say drinking at work is bad, when I used to manage a pizza shop, I invented "Good Beer Friday", where we got a good import or micro and drank while we made orders, provided that no one got so drunk that they couldn't perform their job. If anyone got to that point, I warned, the Friday festivities would end forthwith. No such stipulation was handed out on Saturday, and it was alcohol much harder than beer. The result was that Ashley turns out to be a flirtatious drunk, and Donny when Ashley is flirtatious, turns out to be a pissed off one. If only I had a camera, we would have had video evidence of how much of a sage I really am.

That being said, I find I am being surrounded by idiots more and more these days, and unlike some people, I have very little tolerance for them. Friday I am screening calls for the radio show and all is going well, we are moving things right along and we are coming up on the end of the first hour when Lynn tries to get in one more call with about a minute left. She goes to the phone line and the person isn't there. I hate that, because it sounds like crap on the air to go to someone and have them not respond at all. That being said, we get out of the hour and do our top of the news thing and come back for hour number two. I am screening calls again and making sure anyone who was on the line from the last hour is still there when the phone rings again. It is the same person from hour one. Lynn and I have discussed this in the past and determined that if you call and we go to you and you aren't there, we aren't going to put you back on at a later time, partially because we gave you a chance to be on and you passed on it, and partially because it keeps us from taking someone who is going to do that as a crank, just keep caling the show and then giving us silence when we air the call. So, I am explaining to the caller that we went to them and they weren't there, they claim that the line went dead, to which I said, if it went dead, we would have had a dial tone or something, instead we just had dead air, which meant the line was still open on our end. That being said, I was going to give the caller a second chance when they said they didn't want to go on after all. Okay fine, you have now wasted my time twice this morning. Later we get an email from the caller saying that I have an attitude ( I admit when screening calls I do to better weed out the nutjobs) and that she was listening for her name on the radio and when she heard it the line was dead. I emailed back explaining that if she was listening on the radio, as opposed to the phone line, she was listening with a seven second delay, something that we run so that nobody can drop F-bombs on the air or go on a diatribe and once Lynn went to the line and no one answered her, it was because she was 7 seconds ahead of the audio you were hearing. My email brought a smart ass response about how they weren't going to call or listen again and that we need calls and good luck trying to get some. Technically, we don't need calls, the show is about the host, not the callers, we take calls because they can add to the over all show. That being said, I emailed back very simply that we indeed do like to take calls, and we like them even better when the person is on the line when we go to them. Fucking idiots.

Oops, I feel my blood pressure going up, better have more Lo Mein.

A quick diversion, that will help with the blood pressure. Maybe some fantasy sports stuff. I went 9-7 again in the office poll, for picking games, meaning that I will have at least one 9-7 in my final total. After three weeks, I am 20-12 dropping the low score, a good win percentage if I were betting on every game, not so good if I am trying to win a pool with about 80 other people in it. Fantasy football I went 1-1 again this week, but the win was in the yahoo league, 95-86, which means there I am now 3-0 and I take on the only other undefeated team this week, minus Clinton Portis and the Jacksonville defense, both of which are on a bye this week. In the bar leagaue, I lost 134-118 to fall to 1-2. As bad as 1-2 is, I am not sweating it yet because every week I have put up a good points total, which leads me to believe that the roster is sound, and it is not time to panic, especially with 6 playoff spots in that league. I do have the NFL leader in passing yards in Jon Kitna, receiving yards in Chad Johnson and rushing yards in Willie Parker, so no need to panic just yet. And in baseball, we are in the last week of the season and as of this typing, I could win back $30 of the $55 entry fee. I lead our league in wins (by 3), strikeouts (by 10) and stolen bases (by 9). Given how bad my team is, if I could get away with $30, I would consider it a minor miracle. I did draft a fantasy hockey team, but the season hasn't started yet, so not much to report there, other than I got the #8 spot in the draft order, and I hadn't followed hockey very closely in the off season, so I wasted two of my picks on guys considering retirement (Temmu Selanne, Peter Forsberg) that I had to address via the waiver wire after the draft. That being said, the 2007 Argonauts (I name all of my fantasy teams after the Toronto CFL franchise who used to have the coolest helmets) looks like this;

Pavel Datsyuk - C

Paul Stastny - C

Brendan Shanahan - LW

Tomas Holmstrom - LW

Martin Havlat - RW

JP Dumont - RW

Sheldon Souray - D

Wayne Redden - D

Michal Roszival - D

Ruslan Salei - D

Martin Straka - C

Jaroslav Spacek - D

Jordan Staal - C

Mikka Kiprusoff - G

Marty Turco - G

Dwayne Roloson - G

And while I am updating things, allow me to say that the change meter gets another 20 cents, so the newest total is $29.32. Since the acquiring of the level 50 badge in Hog Heaven Slot5 (Hoggy Archangel Badge), I have picked up the Go Team Go badge (Lottso), Round and Round badge (Phlinx), Double Six, Double Six badge (Backgammon), Balance Ball badge (Lottso), Tug of War badge (Lost Temple Poker), You Will Go Bananas badge (Word Jong) and Fall Fun Bdage (complete 5 challenges). I have barely started this weeks badges, mind you they just came out this afternoon, but I haven't had time to really work on them yet.

I have a question, maybe someone can answer it, because I am at a loss for explaining just why things are they way they are. When I work my part time job, they leave a local pop music station on, I think they go by the moniker KISS 96.1 FM, though for the life of me I don't know their actual call letters, not that they really matter to the question I am about to ask. They are one of the corporate stations in Pittsburgh owned by CBS. Mind you, CBS was the same parent company that recently canned Don Imus for his ill advised comments when he referred to the Rutgers Womens' Basketball Team as "Nappy headed hos" during a broadcast. The comments let loose a national outrage, how could he say that, blah, blah blah, The thing is, while stupid, I didn't see where they were necessarily a fire-able offense. That being said, our local pop station, owned by the same company, has a rather limited playlist, which means on any given shift at work, I can hear the same songs as many as 5 or 6 times in a 7 hr shift, including a song by some rapper who uses the moniker "Soldja Boy". Let's set aside his mangling of the English language for just a second and deal with the song itself. At numerous points in the song he recites the lyric "Superman dat ho". Me having little to no street cred, was perplexed by what this actually meant. I assumed it couldn't be good, but was unsure of its actual meaning. That is what the internet is for I guess, and after some research, I found it referenced a couple of different places where I got the same definition, one of which, Urban Dictionary, allows users to rate the definition, presumably so that we can understand if the posting is correct. Well, it was roughly 37 in favor of the of definition versus like 4 against, and another site also had this definition, so I am working under the assumption that this is the correct meaning of the phrase. Apparently "Superman-ing a ho" is the process where one ejaculates on the back of a sleeping female, then places a cover on them so that when they awaken, the cum causes the blanket to stick to the person's back, creating a cape like situation. While I can see where this isn't like crazy glue or anything, how is it that a company that fires someone for the phrase "nappy headed hos" because it is offensive, will also repeatedly spin a record referring not only to women as hos, but suggests one should ejaculate on a female while they are sleeping? Do I truly live in that much of a bizarro world?

Speaking of research, why is it that people can't spend two minutes anymore to look things up? I say this because numerous people on my list have mentioned the demise of 360 because of a project Yahoo is working on called Mash, another foray into the realm of social networking. First, kudos to Jen who didn't buy into the idle speculation and actually posted in her blast a link to the article from WIRED refuting that very rumor. I was curious about this rumor when I first heard it, having over 500 entries here, I was certainly concerned about any potential closing of 360, but after a whopping 2 minutes of research, I was able to locate the WIRED article that had someone from Yahoo stating that they were, in fact, not closing 360. This wasn't a trip to the library, or going through volumes of unintelligible stuff, this was a simple 2 minute Google search. Have we really become so lazy that while sitting in front of a computer, we can't be bothered to look something up anymore? That it is easier to traffic in speculation and innuendo than to look for simple facts? If we have reached that point, then our collective laziness indeed knows no bounds.

Speaking of laziness, I think a nap is in order, I have groaned on long enough.