This is not how you Wednesday.

I decided to start my day off from work today in my favorite way ever—by waking up an hour earlier than usual, getting dressed, and driving 40 minutes to work for a mandatory 45-minute staff meeting. For extra fun, I followed that up by getting personally called out into the hall and bitched out for not dressing at least business casual for this meeting, which took place before we were even open, despite the precedent for not needing to do so that has been in place for my entire tenure there. Before I drove the 40 minutes back home, I stopped by the work room to grab a nice tasty cup of Folgers—totally the best part of waking up—upon which I promptly burned my tongue.

For lunch, I picked my wife up from work and took her across town to our usual lunch restaurant, to find that their heat was out. Since we didn't have time to go anywhere else, we stayed and enjoyed the cozy ambiance of not one, but two compact space heaters on this lovely 28-degree day. There's really nothing quite like paying to have lunch indoors in a coat and hat.

On the way back, we decided to stop and get some coffee to counteract the effects of mild hypothermia. "Hey, why don't we try that new place that we've heard great things about? It's right on the way," we said. "There's no way that we'll get there and find it surrounded by a chain-link fence because the entire mini-mall is slated for demolition. What are the odds that they're on hiatus until like August?" Fuck.

No matter—we just laughed it off and headed to an old favorite, also right on the way back. Things began to get even better when we found a rare open parking spot just off the square. So of course, as we got out of the car and I pressed the button to lock the doors, I was greeted by the sound of absolutely nothing at all happening, because Battery Light, Motherfucker!

At this point, as I was opening the hood to smack the battery (no, seriously, that's apparently what fixes it when this shit happens), my wife told me that I needed to just go home, lock the door, and not do anything, which is pretty much exactly what I've done because clearly I can't Wednesday.

"Fire!" isn't the only thing you can't shout in a crowded theater.

So, my wife and I went to see The Desolation of Smaug last weekend. Granted, it's been probably almost 15 years since I last read The Hobbit, but there were still quite a few things in the film that I just don't remember being in the book. Like Legolas. Or the incessant oh-my-Jesus-fuck-the-seemingly-awesome-magical-ring-is-actually-Sauron's-fucking-Horcrux foreshadowing. Or the guy who threatened to come back and kill everyone in the theater over an argument about whether or not he should shut off his motherfucking cell phone because the goddamn movie was starting and they'd already played at least two different "you will be asked to leave" warnings during the half hour of previews during which he certainly could have taken care of whatever the fuck it was that was more important than being considerate to the 200-300 other people who paid nearly as much per hour as my first job did to see the film.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Minnesota.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Midwestern United States lies a largely unregarded purple state whose Scandinavian-descended life forms are so amazingly nice that they still think helping every potentially-axe-wielding stranger they encounter on the side of the road is a pretty neat idea.

One Thursday, a boy driving on his own in the dead of winter suddenly realized that something was going wrong with the very large—and very borrowed—vehicle he was driving. Sadly, before he could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and he was nearly lost for ever.

This is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

***

It was a long time ago. Ancient history. It was so long ago that, when it happened, I didn't tweet about it or post anything on Facebook or tumblr because they didn't exist. Even if I had wanted to blog about it, I would have had to wait until I got home because that's where the Internet was. I didn't have a smartphone, because those hadn't been invented, either. Cell phones had been invented, but they were roughly the size and weight of a brick and got the same reception as one in any place with a population under a million people, which was very much where I was at the time. And, at any rate, I didn't have one of those, either.

What I did have was a gigantic SUV that I was borrowing from my girlfriend's stepfather. I had recently used this to travel the 400 miles between the town I grew up in, where I had just spent Christmas with my family, and the college I no longer attended in northeastern Iowa. I had done this for two reasons: first, because they returned from the holiday a few days earlier than the school to which I had transferred (largely because it was attended by the girl I was seeing at the time) did; and secondly, because although I had spent the majority of my two years at the former school waiting by the phone to talk to the girl I was seeing at the time, talking to the girl I was seeing at the time, and then feeling depressed when I had to get off the phone with the girl I was seeing at the time, I had still somehow managed to stumble into a few decent friendships, and I wanted to visit.

That piece went fine; there was no catastrophe there, except possibly the fact that the only beer anybody had was Miller Lite, and the resulting catch-22 of needing to be drunk already in order to be able to tolerate it enough to drink the amount necessary to get drunk in the first place. The actual catastrophe was waiting somewhere along the 350-mile stretch of road that lay between my former college and my current one. More specifically, it was waiting just outside of Austin, Minnesota, which is the birthplace of a large number of things, including my friend Jess, whom I like, and Spam, which I rather don't.

The gigantic vessel I was piloting, like most things from America, was powered by explosions and had a voracious appetite for fossil fuels, so it wasn't terribly long before I had to stop for gas. Because commerce is one of the most powerful driving forces of the Universe, this happened approximately three minutes before the impending catastrophe decided to stop impending and start doing Very Bad Things inside the most expensive part of the vehicle it could find. This happened to be the transmission, which I worked out rather quickly when I got back onto the Interstate, attempted to return to the proper speed, and discovered that it had suddenly decided that second gear was the only way to go, and would hear nothing of first, third, or fourth. Accordingly, the maximum speed available to me suddenly dropped to thirty miles an hour, which seemed to upset approximately everyone who came up behind me doing seventy-five, even through most of them were from Minnesota. Shortly thereafter, in case I hadn't got the first hint, it began to lurch about violently every few seconds.

In a brilliant synopsis of the overall situation, I shouted "Fuck!" a number of times before pulling over to the side of the road and activating my vehicle's short-range distress beacon (which, in that part of the country, is better known as "raising the hood"). The temperature outside was slightly above average for early January in Minnesota, hovering around six degrees Kelvin, so I stood next to the beacon to signal that I had not, in fact, been rescued yet. Meanwhile, in an apparent effort to keep warm, time compressed itself so that several weeks passed between each vehicle that went whooshing by, which, in most automotive dialects, translates to a hearty "fuck you," but in the Minnesotan dialect, is accompanied by a small one-finger wave from the steering wheel and translates more accurately as "I'd really like to stop and pick you up, but unfortunately I'm on my way to a lutefisk supper/potluck and my car is entirely full of my relatives and possibly also a hotdish, so I'm very sorry, but would you accept a rain check?"

Nothing happened for a long time. After that, nothing continued to happen, but more urgently, and at a lower temperature. Eventually, it got tired of hanging out on the side of the road and went off to happen somewhere else, which, in all likelihood, was somewhere in North Dakota. It was precisely at this moment that someone finally saw the distress beacon, wasn't transporting their entire family to any fish-gelatin-based church fundraisers, and stopped to help.

As my rescue vehicle slowed to a halt, a million warnings, news stories, and horror films about the dangers of hitchhiking flashed through my mind, were completely ignored, and fell right out of my head. Instead, my attention was focused on a different problem: I couldn't for the life of me figure out why, of all the vehicles in Minnesota—a number that, although perhaps insignificant next to the quantity in, say, New York or Los Angeles, was still, overall, a respectable total—this was the one that had chosen to stop. It was tall and yellow, with the name of a school district painted on its side, yet it was only about half as long as it seemed that it should have been. I was still puzzling over this when the doors opened, and then, just as the driver looked out at me and said "car trouble, eh?" my mind finally finished registering that I was really, truly, about to hitchhike...on the fucking short bus.

There are a number of events in life whose sole purpose in occurring seems to be part of some bizarre practical joke the Universe has decided to play on you, and this qualified in every possible way. I assume that the next thing that happened was that the driver offered to give me a ride to a mechanic's shop in the next town and then did so, but honestly, the details here go a bit fuzzy because I suddenly noticed that, not only was I hitchhiking on the short bus, but that I was not its only passenger. There was also a boy, roughly ten years old. In a wheelchair. Wearing a helmet. At that point, all the rational bits of my brain came to the realization that their services were no longer needed, and promptly passed out.

When they came around again, I was once again standing next to my disabled vehicle, but this time there was a tow truck parked immediately in front of it, and its driver was looking my engine over. He pulled out the dipstick and examined it, which led to the following conversation:

"Well, shit."
"What's wrong?"
"It's your transmission."
"Well, yes, I had guessed as much. What's wrong with it?"
"No, this"—he held up the dipstick and indicated the shards of metal clinging to it—"is your transmission."
"Oh."

When we arrived back at the mechanic's shop, I was more than a little surprised to find that the bus driver was there waiting for me. He offered me the use of his cell phone to call my girlfriend and ask her to pick me up in Worthington, which was about two hours of awkward silence in a car with a complete stranger and his teenage daughter on their way to her high school volleyball game farther down the road. I was something less than completely comfortable leaving a number of my possessions behind, given that they were guarded by nothing more than a few locked doors and the integrity of a group of strangers who made a living by dismantling automobiles, but by this point, I had resigned myself to the fact that whatever was going to happen had very little regard for my feelings on the matter, and that it was a waste of time and energy to put up any sort of a fight. When I returned to retrieve the rest of my things, I discovered that, in addition to the bit about picking up strangers while driving unconventional vehicles, "Minnesota Nice" also meant that no one in town even thought of breaking into the out-of-town vehicle sitting unguarded outside for a week. As for the borrowed colossus, it was towed back home and summarily sold for parts, which had apparently been the plan for it all along, until it had been offered to me.

The next time I went home, I bought my first cell phone. It cost twenty dollars and did nothing but send and receive calls and text messages, which everyone I knew was reluctant to use. I understand if this is the one bit of the story you simply cannot bring yourself to believe. I agree; it's completely ridiculous.

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

In case you missed it, a couple weeks ago, the Texas state legislature almost passed the Barefoot Pregnant Women Act, but the bill died as the special session expired at midnight after a heroic filibuster by Senator Wendy Davis. The very next day, one of the biggest pricks in the history of ever the governor called another special session and told them to pass the exact same bill, which made it out of committee pretty quickly after the chairman cut off testimony and refused to recognize anyone opposing the bill, because democracy.

When the Butthurt Session began last Monday, thousands of people stood outside to register opinions and wait to testify. Those in favor of the bill wore blue, while those opposed wore orange:

It's like "Where's Waldo," except in this case, Waldo is actually a raging misogynistic dinosaur.

But wait—that shape looks awfully familiar:

"It's just the rebels, sir. They're here."
"My god, man! Do they want tea?"
"No, I think they're after something more than that. I don't know what it is, but they've brought a flag."

It's not exactly a stretch, given that, although something like 80% of the people in Texas don't want this bill to pass, protesters have been called "terrorists" and "an unruly mob," and the Governor himself said that "the louder they scream, the more we know we are getting something done." Why not just come right out and call them "rebel scum?" It's no more than you'd expect from people that essentially derive their mandate from an organization that was led by this guy:

"Your feeble filibusters are no match for the power of the Dark Side."

Anyway, it already passed the House earlier this week, so this afternoon the Senate will begin discussing Death Star HB 2. Since nearly three weeks remain in the special session, a filibuster is all but impossible, so it's unfortunately very likely to pass.

"There will be no one to stop us this time."

I'd like to think that a group of representatives who refuse to actually represent the people who elected them will eventually be thrown out of office, but even if that's true, what good will it be to all the women whose health—or lives—will be put at risk by this ignorant, misogynist, cock-driven farce of a pretense of giving a shit about women? It seriously makes me ashamed to have a penis.

What the Fuck Just Happened in Texas: TL;DR Edition.

You may have noticed that the interwebs have been blowing up over the past 24 hours or so with stuff about the Texas Senate and hashtags like #standwithwendy. Amidst all the tweeting and tumbling, I've noticed that there have been a few people who have no idea what's going on, probably because they couldn't seem to find anything about it on the news. I know that a lot of people don't have the time to wade through hundreds of posts on multiple sites  to piece together the whole story, so I've compiled a quick tl;dr guide to get you up to speed. You're welcome.

So, it basically started when Governor Dick Perry called a special legislative session and gave them last-minute instructions to pass an anti-abortion bill that would shut down all but five clinics in a state that's close to 800 miles across in both directions.

Here's what the bill looked like:

So Senator Wendy Davis announced that she intended to filibuster:

They told her that meant that she had to speak—without stopping—for 13 hours, and couldn't sit, lean, eat, take a drink of water, go to the bathroom, or stray from the topic:

She was eventually told to sit down after 11 hours because talking about sonograms (which are required to have an abortion in Texas) wasn't "germane to the discussion":

Every major news outlet while all this was happening:

Except CNN, who were all:

MUFFINS!

Then Senator Van De Putte called out the President of the Senate for ignoring parliamentary procedure and refusing to recognize her because he was trying to force the vote and didn't want to:

"At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?"

The President impotently tried to quiet the cheering crowd after that burn:

But the entire gallery was like:

They tried to vote on it anyway:

The vote was too late to be legal, so they tried to change the journal to say it happened before midnight:

Just kidding. Those assholes aren't nearly cool enough to be the Doctor.

But the entire Internet already had screenshots:

So they had to concede:

The End.

P.S. I'm sorry for all of this.

Apparently my day wasn't exciting enough for the Gamemakers.

I don't actually keep a written list of all the things that I don't expect to happen to me on any given day because it seems like a really weird waste of time, even for me, but if I did, I'm pretty sure that "getting hit in the face with a giant fireball" would probably be way the fuck up at the top of it every single day. Today, though, I would have been wrong.

The whole thing started when I was like "hey, I should grill stuff tonight because food tastes like awesome when you cook it with fire." When my wife got home from work, I had already started the grill, and was inside getting everything ready to go on while it heated up. Normally, the next thing that happens here is you open the lid, put stuff on the grill, and then take it off and eat it once it reaches the desired level of fiery deliciousness. Today, however, something went awry.

It could be some freak coincidence relating to the foil that I put on the grill to keep the asparagus from falling into the fire, but probably the NSA agents who are assigned to watch my life got bored and wanted to make things a little more interesting. One of them pushed a big red button somewhere, and when I lifted the lid, this happened:

I really wish this were an exaggeration.

By some kind of miracle, the casualty list only includes a little bit of hair and the ends of some eyelashes. My glasses stopped it from hitting my eyes, and somehow I got to keep both of my eyebrows. It did manage to burn out pretty much all the cilia in my nose as well, which means that, for just a second, there was fire INSIDE MY HEAD. It also means that I'm pretty much constantly smelling burnt hair, which is fucking fabulous. I've showered twice already, but I can't get the smell to go away because it's literally in my nose. Somebody get me a silver parachute.

The following is a true story. The names have not been changed. Fuck the innocent.

I promised a while ago that I'd tell the story about the time my friend and I were accused of running an actual mafia at school. This is that story. [Law & Order clang]

"Introduction"

It was probably 6 months after Columbine, in a school of about 330—that's K-12. If you've ever lived in a small town, you already understand that the primary form of entertainment is talking about other people because there's shit-all to do there. It's sort of like TMZ, but with people you've never heard of. Basically, what happened was that some asshat kid said something to his girlfriend about my friend and I being "crazy," and "like those Columbine kids." She told her mom, who worked at the elementary school. Her mom then told the high school counselor, who told EVERYONE HE ENCOUNTERED. Seriously, this douchecanoe ran around like some asshat Chicken Little warning everybody about the Richland Mafia, because two 17-year-olds in rural North Dakota (yes, that is redundant) somehow constitute an organized crime family.

"Because of reasons"

The whole thing somehow blew up into this grandiose story about how the two of us were plotting to show up with an arsenal and carry out a hit on...well, everybody, apparently. Nobody actually talked to us about it, but suddenly all but maybe three of the teachers were adding their own observations to the heap of bullshit collection of totally credible evidence, such as:

Exhibit A: "They dress in black a lot."
This was actually half true. My friend dressed in black a lot. I dressed in white a lot. This was mainly because my friend owned a lot of black shirts, and I owned a lot of white ones. I also dressed in orange fairly frequently, which was mainly because no one had ever explained to me that the fact that you really like a color does not necessarily mean that you should wear it. Ever.

As long as you're wearing bright, cheery colors, the world is a playground of fucking happiness.

Wearing black makes you summon Satan to shoot drugs up your asshole and murder everyone forever.

Exhibit 2: "They write in 'gang symbols.'"
If "gang symbols" means "anything other than the Latin alphabet," then this is true. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of douchenozzles running around inciting moral panic because they don't know that there are other languages, but the TV told them about these "gangs" in big cities where you have to kill people just to get in, and they identify themselves by writing weird. Actually, we were both very into language, and experimented a lot with creating languages and alphabets, which is exactly the kind of thing you do before you go out and murder everyone. By that logic, Tolkien was the fucking Godfather.

Yes, I know it's actually called "Quenya." You're missing the point.

Exhibit The Third: "They're not in any sports."

Anymore. We were in all the sports, but we were never popular enough to be given any playing time, so we said "fuck this shit" and quit wasting our time. Instead, we joined other activities where our talents would be appreciated. [Note: in small towns, this is how team tryouts work: years before you are born, when your parents are still in high school, everyone is divided into cliques. They all finish or quit school, move nowhere, and start having babies who, to save time, are divided into the same cliques. If you're in the popular clique, you get to be on the team and actually play.]

Exhibit Fuck You: "They get bullied, just like those Columbine kids."
Who the actual fuck looks at this situation and goes: "Wow, quite a few of our students are inexcusable pricks. We'd better consider suspending the people they're bullying in order to protect their God-given right to be assholes."?

Exhibit I Don't I Can't Even: "They locked everyone in the computer lab, turned out all the lights, and walked from person to person pointing a gun at everybody's heads, apparently as some kind of 'preview' of what they were planning to do later."
OK, so this one actually sounds pretty fucking serious because of the locking people in a room and, y'know, the bringing fucking weaponry into the school. Except that a) that room only locked from the outside, b) neither of us even owned a fucking gun of any kind, much less brought them to school and pointed them at people, c) what kind of fucking moron brings a gun to school and points it at people in order to tell them that they're planning to bring a gun to school and point it at people sometime in the future, and d) of the probably twelve or so people who were actually present at the time this allegedly occurred, not fucking one of them had the slightest clue what the hell anyone was talking about when asked about it later on.

Fortunately for us, the principal was not an asshat, douchenozzle, or any other form of dumb motherfucker. He had actually lent me his book on Norwegian runes after seeing some similarities in my invented scripts, so he was disinclined to acquiesce to anybody's request to suspend us for no fucking reason. Apparently, he believed that students maintain some level of actual rights at school. Pretty much, he asked us one time, for the sake of ritual, if any of this was remotely true. We, of course, said "no." He replied (paraphrased): "no shit." Then he told us that it probably wouldn't be a good idea to be seen wearing a trenchcoat to school any time soon, and let us go.

"Aftermath" (You can insert a curriculum-based pun here if you want)

During the course of this ridiculous drama, my mom (who worked at the school at the time) of course asked me what the hell this was all about and why somebody would just make up some story like this. When she saw how close I was to an aneurysm of confusion, she also called several of the people who were there at the time. When they had the exact same reaction, she wrote an open letter to the entire staff, which basically said "what the actual fuck is wrong with all of you? You owe my son and his friend a huge fucking apology."

I never got one. The closest thing I got was the day the counselor walked into my study hall on a day where I happened to be the only student in the room. He sat down backwards in the desk in front of me and started spouting some bullshit about responsibilities and safety or something. I'm not actually sure, because I wasn't fucking listening. I didn't even look at him; I just waited until he stopped talking, then waited a couple more minutes until I could tell he was getting really uncomfortable that I hadn't kissed his ass and forgiven everything yet. Then I just said "are we done here? I'm kind of busy," and he got up and left. I'm pretty sure I never talked to him again.

That's pretty much the end of the story. I don't know if there's a moral or anything. I think this is the part where the screen just fades to "DICK WOLF," and you have to decide for yourself what the fuck it all means. The best I've got is that some people are assholes, so fuck 'em. Leave. Do awesome shit. Don't look back, until it somehow comes up that you were once accused of running a mafia, and everybody in the room is like "you have to tell that story!"

Librarians are probably the most polite paparazzi ever. Or the politest. I don't know, I'm not Merriam-Fucking-Webster.

So, I had this whole post ready to go about how I broke my ankle at roller derby practice a few weeks ago where I was going to complain about how I always have to have people carry stuff for me and how I can't skate again until probably June, or how fucking exhausting it is to have to do a thousand miniature pole-vaults just to get anywhere, but then something happened on Saturday that made it totally worth it, so I had to rewrite the whole fucking post. Thanks a lot, one of the most amazing things that has ever happened to me.

In an effort to make being stuck in a cast for weeks suck less, I got a blue one, and I painted a TARDIS on it (which I'll admit was a bit of a challenge to do upside-down at 2AM):

Yes, it is bigger on the inside. Y'know, to allow for the swelling.

Then I went to the Texas Library Association Annual Conference, where Neil Gaiman happened to be speaking on Saturday. At first, they told me he was just going to be speaking, since he's coming back on a book tour in a couple of months, but then he apparently decided to do an incredibly limited signing that you had to have a ticket to get into. There were 100 tickets—total—for like 7000 librarians, but I totally got the second-to-last one. WHICH LED TO THIS:

Neil Fucking Gaiman signed my cast. Also, yes, I'm pretty sure he took his wife's middle name.

After he signed it, he pulled out his phone and took a picture of it...which he then tweeted and posted on his Facebook page. Then he retweeted my reply to him (about a minute before he came on stage to speak). I posted a couple pictures of it to snark the tumblr. I also tweeted the pictures at The Bloggess and she told me I win the internets AND THEN SHE FOLLOWED ME!

So, for the rest of the afternoon, I'm having some kind of aneurysm of awesome, which is still going on when I go to watch my wife destroy everyone on the track and win Best Blocker in her roller derby bout. While I'm there, she skates over to me and tells me that another girl on her team follows the Doctor Who Official tumblr. Who fucking reblogged my post. And then so did Neil, who added "I was impressed." And Amanda Fucking Palmer. And about 7000 other people. And then I passed out because I couldn't fucking handle the amount of awesome that was happening all in one day.

Also, pretty much the entire conference knew who I was in the span of about 2 hours, and suddenly everybody wanted a picture. It was like the politest paparazzi ever. "Can I take a picture? Do you mind? Is it OK? Oh, thank you SO much! I/my daughter/son/coworker/friend/neighbor is SUCH a fan." Of Doctor Who, that is. Or Neil Gaiman. Probably not of me. Yet.

Hello, Sexy.

Holy shit, you guys. This is real.

I'm about 167% sure this is just one of Google's April Fool's Day things, but this just happened and if it's not I don't know how to make sense of the universe anymore.

About a year ago, I submitted a redesigned snark logo to the Sparks McGee tumblr, which was, in turn, based on this blog post by Wil Wheaton. Since then, I've noticed that a lot of people are finding me here by searching for "i've got a course you can plot." Mainly out of curiosity, I Googled it, and this happened:

In case you can't tell, the first result is the Sparks McGee tumblr. The second one is where I posted about the Sparks McGee tumblr
actually posting my submission. That third one? The original post where Wil Wheaton FUCKING INVENTED IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Not funny, Google.

I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

Some days are just assholes. By the time you get out of bed, they've already been awake for hours, coming up with ways to be a dick to you. Especially Thursdays. It's like their entire purpose is to make goddamn sure you don't take Friday for granted. Last Thursday was one of them. It started out like every other day, with the strident noises at ass o'clock in the morning.

Every. Fucking. Day.

Then some boring shit happened. I took a shower and got dressed. While I was doing that, apparently Thursday went to hide in the kitchen and waited to jump out and punch me in the face.

The last thing I usually do before leaving for work is put out some food for the feral cat colony we inherited when we moved into our house. Our own cats are obsessed with the food that we give to the ferals, but one of them can't eat it because she has a "sensitive stomach," so she can only handle Science Diet Food For Cats With Expensive-Ass Digestive Conditions. The other one will try to eat literally anything she can get into her mouth (seriously, anything—even shit like cardboard). They had already managed to tear a hole in the bag by reaching under the laundry room door. When I went to carefully pick up the bag so it wouldn't spill, the Gobbler jumped up and tore the hole wide the fuck open.

It wasn't actually the Russian
Blue that tore the bag, but I can't
fucking draw the caliby. It was
totally a team effort anyway.

Then, while I was distracted by the Purina version of Exxon Valdez (for those of you under 30, that was Deepwater Horizon, but with a boat), my lunch went into stealth mode, or maybe it found an invisibility cloak. I don't know, but I totally forgot to grab it before going into White Rabbit Mode and running out the door shouting "I'm late!" to no one in particular.

In all fairness, it may have just been hiding from the Vader spatula.

Of course, I didn't realize it until I was almost all the way to work, so there was nothing I could do about it except hope that it hadn't gone bad by the time my wife went home for lunch.

Yes, my seatbelt is actually wider than my body. Safety first, motherfucker.

And then when I got to work, I was all pissed about forgetting my lunch, so I forgot to grab my keys and badge and had to go all the way back up to the third level of the parking garage to get them. When I finally got into the building, there were notes plastered all over the place that said that IT had done some kind of upgrade the night before and now basically nothing worked.

The note basically said "here are all the things that aren't
working today. It actually listed "Etc." as a bullet point.
Then it listed one or two more things after that, because
they don't know what "etc." means. Or "upgrade," apparently.

For some unfathomable reason, we still opened. After that, I spent pretty much the entire rest of the day pretending to be Scotty from Star Trek. Every time someone asked me for something, I was all "Ah cannae do that, Captain!" It probably helped that I was also wearing this button:

I'm not entirely certain whose reflection that is on the left, but
my money's on either the Grim Reaper or Emperor Palpatine.

It was even better since our catalog is actually called Enterprise, but probably you don't care because you don't work here. If you did, you wouldn't be reading this right now because you'd be too busy dealing with whatever asinine bullshit this Thursday was trying to pull.

Seriously, fuck Thursdays.

PROTIP: You always generate more interest if you call it "Apocalypse Prevention."

The city that I work for just emailed everybody a press release for its 2012 Arborfest celebration, which went something like this:

Spend some time enjoying the outdoors with your family this coming weekend while learning more about the dozens of different trees in ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZfuckingboring.

I was pretty much asleep for the rest of it, but I thought I also caught something about a fucking tree competition? Where the winners get plaques for their champion trees, or something? What the actual fuck is a champion tree? Is it like an Ent? Because those guys were badass:



The problem with Arborfest isn't that it's stupid or unimportant; it's just that most people find trees excruciatingly boring. They don't actively do...well, anything. They just sit there, for hundreds of years, or until some asshole comes and knocks them down because they hate breathing or something. All the important shit is stuff you can't actually see, like producing oxygen and preventing soil erosion and other things that put people to sleep because nothing's blowing up or having sex.

Really, the problem with Arborfest is just in the marketing. It would do much better if they started marketing it as HOLY SHIT IF YOU DON'T COME TO THIS YOU'LL SUFFOCATE Fest or Carbon Monoxide Apocalypse Prevention Fest. People would pay attention to that shit. For example:

Guess who's taken a sudden interest in the rainforest.
HINT: It's you, motherfucker!

See also: The Whomping Willow.

You're welcome, Arbor Day celebration marketing teams.

P.S. As I'm writing this, one of the biggest storms in the history of ever is ravaging the East Coast of the U.S. and Canada, causing floods, fires, and blizzards, and leaving millions without power, supplies, or maybe even homes. The Red Cross is in serious need of blood donations, as well as disaster relief funds. Here's how you can help:

• Give Blood: http://www.redcrossblood.org/
• Make a Donation: https://www.redcross.org/donate/index.jsp?donateStep=2&itemId=prod10002 (If you're in Canada, you can find information from the Canadian Red Cross here: http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=44405&tid=001)
• You can also text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 (added to your wireless bill).

Is there a "Donald Trump Is a Giant Asshat" Foundation?

Disclaimer: This isn't meant to be a political post, so much as an explanation of the reason I just had to say, out loud, at my desk at work "What the actual fuck?"

Second Disclaimer: The following video represents 3 minutes of your life you will never get back.

For those of you who've had the incredible fortune of never having heard of Donald Trump, this is the moment when your blissful ignorance comes to a tragic end. If you can get past the arbitrary shouting (I think he may be part Dalek), you'll discover one of our nation's foremost satirists.



I think it's hilarious how he pretends to be demanding something as ridiculous as President Obama's college applications, as if it were required that he not only have gone to college and done well, but that he'd written an eloquent personal statement to get accepted in the first place. The ransom video format was a nice touch as well. "If you don't provide all these documents to my satisfaction by 5pm on October 31st, I won't donate 5 million dollars to charity!" Classic! He completely lampoons the way we distract ourselves from issues that actually matter by debating semantics or accuse another party's candidate of being ineligible for the office rather than just saying why we think they'd be bad for it. He's totally got me imagining Obama playing the President in one of those movies where he has to go "We do not negotiate with terrorists!" "But Mr. President, they've got our transparency!" "Shit, we've got to stop them! Call the Registrar's Office! Yeah, ask for Jack Bauer."

On the subject of transparency, Ana Marie Cox wins the Internet for this tweet:

Trump promises Americans that for $5m, "their president will become transparent," but didn't Clint Eastwood already do that trick?
— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) October 24, 2012

I'm glad we've got Donald Trump to keep us focused on what's important in this election. President Obama is the only President in the history of this country not to release his college applications and transcripts or his passport application, and it is unacceptable that we as a nation should know so little about our leader—there's Never. Been anything. Like it. In fact, I propose a constitutional amendment to require stricter documentation of a presidential candidate's background, including all of the following:

• Birth certificate
• Long-form birth certificate, or whatever it may be
• Dated, geotagged video of live birth
• Baptismal records
• Handwritten letter of recommendation from both grandmothers
• College applications and transcripts
• Passport application
• Gym membership
• Prescription history
• Urine sample
• Third-grade essay entitled "What I Want to Be When I Grow Up."
• March Madness brackets going back at least 10 years
• American Idol tryout video
• Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem
• Vial of unicorn tears
• Tax returns (unless potentially damaging to the candidate's campaign)

Seriously, if the President actually does this—after I finish bashing my head against the wall—I hope he'll consider the Donald Trump Is a Colossal Wank Foundation.

I've never been prouder.

This just happened, and it's made of awesome.

So, first of all, both of our cats are pretty much in love with books, and they'll come lie by/on my wife and me for story time. We thought it mostly had to do with the fact that they love to lie on them, but they've just pretty much proven that they're only interested in good books.

Sana is a Harry Potter fan. I'm pretty sure she's a Slytherin.

Gwen has been reading Craig Ferguson's Between the Bridge and the River with us.

Remember when I borrowed and read Twilight because my integrity is some kind of masochistic asshole that didn't feel like I should be making fun of it if I hadn't read it? Well, the other day I was finally going to get it the fuck out of my house return it, so I went to grab it off the shelf. This is what I found:

Yes, it was upside-down on the shelf. Just because it was in my house  doesn't mean I couldn't protest it.

"Sorry you had to do this, Jake." I think that was the one sentence in the whole book I could identify with.

Clearly, someone had taken issue with the quality of literature (I use that term loosely) that they found. My money's on Gwen, or at least one of the foster kittens, as they lived in that room for six weeks. Also, they were actually small enough to stand on top of the books while peeing, whereas Sana would have needed to employ some kind of crazy-ass Cirque du Soleil maneuver just to get herself into the unnatural arrangement necessary to provide this particular critique.

What I find most hilarious about the whole thing is that this was the only book on the shelf that they disliked. Neither of the books immediately next to it was even touched, which seems to imply an intentional measure of control on their part, especially since both books next to it were taller. In fact, none of the other books they could reach seemed to offend them, and it wasn't like there weren't plenty of other options:

"Thoreau, OK. Tolkien, fine. Twain, Vonnegut, good. Twilight?!? What the actual fuck?"

Seriously, I don't think I've ever been this proud. Also, I owe someone a new copy of Twilight. Sorry.

The system is down, yo.

So, I'm about a million years (read: a couple weeks) behind on all the shit that's happened that I've been meaning to write about. I could tell you why, but you'd probably be disappointed, so just imagine that something really awesome happened, but it's somehow top secret because of reasons, so I can't tell you anything about it, ever. In fact, let's assume that's the case every time I get too busy/lazy/depressed to write for a while. It's better for everyone that way.

Anyway, last November, HTC rolled out a Ridiculously Important System Update Meant To Fix Shit That's Totally Broken For Real, That We Promise Won't Actually Just Fuck Up Everything About Your Phone for the Incredible. Yes, the Incredible One. Shut up.

You'll probably remember how, after I finally had to force the update to actually install, it didn't fix anything, and actually did fuck up my phone badly enough that I had to do a factory reset on the fucker.

Well, guess what came out relatively recently...ish? June, maybe? um, before today? RISUMTFSTTBFR,TWPWAJFUEAYP for the Incredible TWO! (Update two, not the Incredible Two.) Like the last update, it's so full of awesome that you'll have to do a bunch of secret hacker shit to even get it to install in the first place! But RISUMTFSTTBFR,TWPWAJFUEAYPFTI2(U2,NI2) is better than the first one, because it's newer!

I was super-excited that there was a new update, because my phone is an unholy pile of fail was having some minor performance issues. Like how roughly 60% of the time I tried to call my wife, it wouldn't actually bother to place the call, just fake it for a little bit and send me to voicemail. It would proceed to do this the next six times I called, until my GAD took over and could not be convinced she was not dead in a ditch somewhere until a) I finally got home and actually saw her, or b) my phone decided to stop being a douchewagon and put my fucking call through. Or how I would get a text from her and try to reply, but it would say "Invalid Destination Address, Asshat" and refuse to send anything.

After a few weeks of wankery in which I would tell my phone to install the fucking update, then watch as it counted down from 10 and did nothing, I finally broke down and forced it to install. Here's what the update changed:

• Caused the phone to freeze every 5-10 minutes.
• Deleted all the apps, except the pre-loaded bullshit that is apparently so permanently encoded on the fucker that even it can't get rid of them.
• Disconnected my Google account.
• It would allow me to re-download the apps it deleted; however, it wouldn't actually run the motherfuckers.
• After re-downloading apps, a notification would pop up saying that an app that it supposedly couldn't fucking run anyway had encountered an error and needed to close. It then refused to close the app, waited two minutes, and repeated the whole goddamn cycle.
• It couldn't find the SD card. Again. Or still. I don't even fucking know anymore.
• It no longer did the cool weather animations, which may have been the only pre-loaded feature I actually liked.

But it did add an "App Associations" option to the Settings menu so I could change the default app to use for certain actions. Of course, it couldn't fucking run anything but the pre-loaded shit, but it was at least nice to know I could pretend to have options.

Oh, and my favorite thing of all: every time I restarted the phone due to the freezing and other assorted fuckery, it gave me this popup that said "UIDs on the system are inconsistent, you need to wipe your data partition or your device will be unstable." Instead of an option that said "OK" or "Then Show Me How To Fucking Do It, You Prick," my only choice was a button that said "I'm Feeling Lucky."

"Your system UIDs are inconsistent, punk."

After the hard reset:

• It can't find anything on the SD card from before the previous hard reset.
• It can't find anything on the SD card or its own internal storage from after the latest hard reset.
• Eight out of ten times I look at it, it's collecting "anonymous location data" because of reasons. If I turn this off, I can't use the weather app, and the map app does this.

I'll give it one thing, though—it's definitely incredible.

Battery light, motherfucker!

So, remember a couple weeks ago when I talked about how impossibly weird shit always happens to my car? Yeah, that. Times forever.

A couple months ago, my car started playing this game called Battery Light, Motherfucker! where it decided it would be hilarious to do all kinds of crazy shit with the electronics while flashing the eponymous light like a motherfucking rave. I took it to one of those Car Shit Emporium stores where they plugged my battery into an Etch-a-Sketch and told me that it was toast, but they'd be happy to sell me a new one. Hell, they'd even install it for a fee that's already built into the price of the battery free!

Ten minutes and a little over a hundred dollars later, I got into my car, backed up six feet, and started playing BLM! again. When I dragged them back outside again, they started running random diagnostics, none of  which could apparently be completed. Then they just started guessing. "I'm pretty sure that'll be a bad diode. Or, y'know, something else with your alternator. It's probably not charging. Or maybe charging too much. Whatever. Either way, it's totally not your battery. Anymore."

"Ziggy says your flux capacitor's out of dilithium crystals, Sam."

Then I took it to a real mechanic, who replaced the alternator, but also locked the (only) keys inside it when he was done, so that when I went to pick it up, I had to call AAA to send someone to help me break into my own fucking car at 11pm. Literally thirty seconds after I got off the phone with them, a random tow truck driver happens to be walking by after parking his truck there for the night, so he gets me into the car while I call AAA to cancel. Everybody wins! Except for the tow truck driver that AAA sent after they didn't fucking cancel. He lost like an hour and a half of his life. But he did get to hear me apologize my ass off for something that was so not my fault, so that's...something.

Anyway, last week, I went to start my car and...nothing. Brand fucking new battery, dead. Car Shit Emporium told me it was "charging weakly," and that it was totally a diode again, or maybe something else that wasn't their fault. That actually did turn out to be true—I got it fixed for free. After the mechanic worked on literally 25 other cars that came in after I dropped mine off. Priorities, FTW!

I'm not sure you've grasped the concept.

This conversation just happened:

Guy Calling Library: Do you take community service there?
Me: We do accept volunteers, but you have to apply through the City, and they won't allow anything court-ordered at the library. For that, they're going to make you do roadside cleanup or janitorial shit. You can find all that information on the City website.
GCL: Ah. It's just that it would be really convenient for me to do it at the library because I live in the apartments just across the parking lot. Actually, I'm looking at your building right now.

First of all, this is in no way fucking creepy, Dude Who Has Already Been Convicted Of Doing Something Illegal. Would you like me to go to the window and wave my arms or describe what I'm wearing so you can tell me that you can see what I'm doing?

Secondly, I do sincerely apologize for the inconvenience of your fucking sentence. I know that it's meant to be a pleasant and rewarding experience, and this is clearly in stark contrast to the section of the Penal Code that states:

§ When an individual is convicted of an offence against the Community, the sentence shall consist of a reasonably low number of hours of pleasurable service to the Community in a comfortable location convenient to the individual's place of residence.

Had you called even an hour sooner, the City may still have had a community service opening in the Getting A Blowjob From A Supermodel department. Again, I'm very sorry. Asshat.

Infinite Improbability Drive.

So, last weekend my wife and I were out running some errands, and we hit a pothole just after turning the corner into a Shopping Clusterfuck Area. Translation: we hit a relatively small bump at about ten miles an hour on a road that was barely more than the leftover pavement between like eight parking lots.

What Happens When Most People Hit A Pothole:
Option A: Absolutely fucking nothing of any consequence. Maybe somebody in the car spills a drink or something.
Option B: They get a flat tire. It gets changed. They continue on, maybe fifteen minutes later than they'd expected to be.

What Happened When We Hit A Pothole:
The car instantly died and rolled to a halt. Several of the Impending Doom lights on the dash came on, and the odometer went blank. Not only did the car refuse to start again, it wouldn't even pretend like it was fucking trying.

After I pushed the car around the corner all by myself like a total badass with the help of a couple other people who had to stop behind us when the car died, I used my brilliant powers of observation and deduction to see if anything under the hood looked like it had fucking blown up or fallen off. Also, I mashed down all the fuses and checked the battery to see if it had come loose. Then I called AAA, who said they'd never even heard of that happening before.

We began to detect a theme in our interactions that afternoon when the tow truck showed up and the driver did exactly the same shit I had just done, then told me he'd never seen anything like this before. He also had some kind of weird Tourette's where he kept saying "GPS" all the time, but didn't actually use it. Or listen when we tried to tell him where to go.

Driver: I have GPS. I'll just use my GPS. Do you know where you're going? Because I have GPS.
Us: Turn here.
Driver: [keeps going]
Us: Um...
Driver: GPS.

After a brief tour of one of the least interesting parts of Denton, he finally dropped my car off vaguely near the shop, as it would apparently have been impossible for him to get it to the actual garage door due to the slight incline that he insisted somehow canceled out his truck's Giant Extending Ramp. Instead, a mechanic had to push it the rest of the way. When he had accomplished that, he called us back and showed us this:

"Have you had any work done recently?"
"Um, an oil change and an alignment."
""That doesn't make any damn sense. It didn't fall up."

It turned out that the bolt wasn't even from my car, so apparently what happened was this:

Somehow, a random bolt fell into my engine and probably got lodged in there somewhere. Then we hit a pothole, which caused the bolt to bounce around in exactly the right way that it connected the starter to something else metal, creating a short circuit that temporarily fried the computer and pissed off the anti-theft system so much that the whole thing refused to function until it was reprogrammed. At an improbability factor, I might add, of 2²⁶⁷⁷⁰⁹ to 1 against.

Except, if you're me, probability is a fucked-up algorithm that takes the normal laws of math and science and twists them into some hideous perversion that almost guarantees that the weirdest shit in the universe will always happen to me, while the probability that anything else will happen is often inversely proportional to how much I want or need it to.

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard a mechanic say "I've never seen this happen before,"
I could probably buy a new car. Two weeks later, it would burn up in the driveway because it
was landed on by a bald eagle that was on fire after being struck by lightning in midair.

Like the time that what I swear must have been an albatross bombed my windshield while I was driving down the road at 55 mph, perfectly illustrating the week I had been having.

Or the time someone decided to back out of a parking spot without looking and didn't even stop when I laid on the horn, so I threw my car into reverse and peeled out backwards, and somehow they only hit my front license plate. From the side.

Or the time my gas pedal got stuck at about 20 mph a few months after I bought my car.

Or the time my gas gauge got stuck at half a tank, and suddenly dropped down to empty at the exact moment I got too far into the middle of nowhere to make it to a gas station.

Or the time it was so fucking cold that I had half a tank of gas, but most of it actually fucking froze, and I got stuck in the middle of nowhere and my brother had to bring me some HEET to fucking thaw the rest of it out.

Or the time I got the oil changed in my wife's car and a few days later the oil filter fell the fuck off while she was driving.

Seriously, this is my life, all the time. I can't even make this kind of shit up.

America, fuck yeah!

So, Amazon's appstore has just offered me a spectacular deal in honor of America's independence:

What better way to celebrate America than by playing a bastardization of the national game of China?

I've also learned that patriotism is inherently tied to buying any of the following items, plus many more:

• New or used cars
• Appliances
• Furniture
• Shitty, shitty beer

Meanwhile, in Texas, today is the one day out of the whole fucking year that it's OK to admit we're part of America. Mostly, it's an excuse to mix alcohol and blowing shit up in the back yard, which is actually just regularly scheduled programming about 10 months out of the year here.

Anyway, Happy Independence Day, Americans! Remember to count your fingers before and after.

To Canada, specifically: I apologize for the noise. We'll try to keep it down. Also, your planning this year was much better than ours. At least you put your holiday on a weekend and not a fucking Wednesday.

To the rest of the world: Um, it's Wednesday, so I guess the week's about half over.

I meant to post this yesterday. It didn't happen.

You know how sometimes you're switching out the laundry, and the brand-fucking-new box of dryer sheets falls into the washing machine, but you don't notice because you're holding a huge pile of towels and shit, and you drop all of that in on top of it, and then when it comes out, everything is covered in dryer sheets and bits of cardboard?

Yeah, I just fucking did that.

Welcome to every day of my life.

In other news, here's what you've been missing on the rest of the interwebs:

What you missed on stumblr.
I pinned this stuff. It's made of awesome.
SNARKS MCGEE. I made this, and they totally posted it. "I've got a course you can plot." (The back story.)

What you missed this week on snark:
My brother graduated from college.
Apparently they don't do "have it your way" anymore.
The actual end of my patience.

Some other stuff that I didn't make, but you should look at anyway:
This is one of the most horrifying things I've ever heard of.
For the love of god, someone get me one of these.
Holy trainwreck, Batman.
Being a human: You're doing it wrong.
10 lovely reasons why men shouldn't be ordained.

Finally, something that a friend inflicted upon sent to me:
http://thecleverhelper.tumblr.com/post/22263818618

You're welcome, Internet.