A Funny thing, using a new label for an old action...

I made up something the other night. We were at a concert. The opening act for the concert was our 18 year old son. If you go to YouTube and use the search terms: his first name and the name of the venue, you'll find the videos I took of his seven songs. Later I got some video of a wacked out girl singing her heart out to the original songs of a punk band named Titty Toaster Strudel. I was going to put that up on YouTube, but then I decided not to, because I'm not into sharing.

After our son's set, we were out in the parking lot with some other bemused parents. We were all talking without moving our lips so that none of the kids could read our lips and feel the need to beat us up for mocking them.

So about the funny new label: You know how guys make this two handed gesture, like they were holding a grapefruit in each hand, in front of their chest, and it means Big Boobs? Well, when a very well endowed, and minimally dressed young female walked by, all us older men did our best not to stare at her chestical area, but we failed miserably. A couple of the wives commented on our lack of mature motor control. By way of an excuse, I made that gesture with my two hands which denotes Big Boobs, and shook my hands as they were pretending to hold grapefruits, looked down at my hands, as if in awe, and said, "Did you see the size of her hands? Her hands were enormous!!"

Please feel free to use this old gesture with my new wording. I'm timing it to see how long it takes before I see someone else use this witty repartee.

Matter is the absence of nothingness.

And conversely, nothingness is the absence of matter. Meaning you CAN have one without the other. In point of fact, you have to have one without the other. I don't know where energy fits into the equation, much less the strong and weak atomic forces...

If someone asks you, "What's the matter?" it means that he or she is aware that nothingness is not present. Because if nothingness were present, the question would have to be, "Where's the matter?" The only entities regularly asking this question are the Vacuum beings of Planet Hoover.

When Vacuum beings go on vacation, they always want to know, "How's the matter?"

This post has been brought to you by the German penny sign, ₰, the hexadecimal number ₰۳ and the fruit of my looms.

What a coincidence! v. What's a coincidence?

Coincidence, per a dictionary: "the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection."

There is record of a tribe of people who believed that a certain boulder in a glade in a forest was a nexus (my word, not theirs) of fertility. In other words, if a woman wanted to get pregnant, she had to sit on that rock, pantless. They connected that rock with pregnancy, not sex. Everybody did sex, but only women who sat on that rock got pregnant.

See? All it takes for silly beliefs to arise and prosper is for ignorance and coincidence to work their subjective magic.

Every single one of us has fallen prey/pray to this phenomenon at least six times in our lives. Here's one of my personal experiences: I heard someone say that if a person stepped on a sidewalk crack, his/her mother's back would break. This was first grade. It was the same year that I cannily traded three dimes for three nickels because I had figured out that since nickels were bigger, they were worth more. Anyway, walking to and from school that year, I NEVER stepped on a crack. And so my mother's back never broke. I never mentioned it to her, but I'm sure she would have been grateful.

Here's another one many of us burden ourselves with: as you face a double, queen, king or California king bed, I sleep on the left. Through three marrages, etc. (Whew, that etc. was quite an interesting two years!!) I have always slept on the left side. I just know that bad things would happen if I ever slept on the right side, or worse, got out of bed on the right side! Horrors!

We are currently thought to be the culmination of either Ghawd's plan or Nature's natural design, and yet we are so burdened with superstition and ignorance than it's a wonder someone out there isn't marketing fertility boulders. Or maybe I'm just not watching the right cable channels?

My life is a Whirlpool right now!!! I should have gotten a Maytag...

You'd suppose that times would be tough for the Address Curb painting business. But things are going good. I've been doing this for 27 years on my own and it's been this way during each economic downturn. People don't mind paying a reasonable amount for a superior paint job. It's not like I'm installing plasma TVs at some ridiculous hourly wage! Now that's a business model that's probably not recession proof. Although I don't know if I could survive a full fledged Depression.

Max Shulman did a bunch of growing up poor in the Depression comic novels but researching them did nothing to educate me regarding my business model. But I did learn that young men during the depression couldn't get laid as often as they would have liked. Which was my experience entirely growing up.

I'm very personable, and a good listener, which goes a long way towards explaining why, among other things, I have children. It also means that after contracting with a homeowner to paint his or her address, in the color scheme of his or her choice, on his or her curb, I'll often be the target of that homeowner's need to get something off his or her chest. (It's seldom a brassiere, but hope screams eternal.)

I've heard some real doozies in my time. And yes, for the gutter-minded among you, when I was too dumb to know better, I got laid twice. Thank god both times they were females. I've come to realize that sex should be avoided at all costs unless you've paid the ultimate price, your freedom. You can take that to the bank, but you won't, until you're at least old enough to not be able to remember where you bank.

The other day I had a lady tell me about her son getting drunk and borrowing a friend's truck. Her son jumps in and takes off, not knowing that there was a couple in the bed of the pick up doing something beds are famous for. The guy in the bed of the pick up became incensed at the distraction that her son's driving was becoming to his partner. She was screaming, but it wasn't all about him, and this always pisses a guy off. So the guy in the bed of the pick up crawled to the rear of the cab, reached through the open rear window slider and started choking the lady's son. He panicked and hit the brakes. His seatbelt saved him from any injury. The guy reaching through the rear slider window was adequately braced against the rear of the cab, so he was doing okay. But the young lady wasn't at all restrained and the motion which will continue until acted on by an outside force translated into her body sliding on her naked bum into the rear of the guy who'd moments early been lubing her crankcase and the force of the impact to the back side of the guy smashed his dip stick into the rear of the cab, severely damaging it.

Now her son is being sued and apparently the plaintiff set a great value on his dipstick, declaring it to be irrevocably damaged and asking for a whopping big sum of money, exceeding the amounts available through the friend's insurance and their own insurance.

So I'm sitting there stenciling and painting and she asks me for advice... See? I must have a great personality.

Hola, ¿Que Tal?

I am slowly speeding up. Acceleration is minimal, but still present. It probably helps that my life is going downhill. Or as my inner child likes to prattle, "downhell."

The above is an example of what RAH (Robert Anson Heinlein) called, 'null content.' Oh, sure, you can read something into it and decide that I'm trying to say something. You can go all psychiatric on my tush and say that everything we do says something about us, but I say it says more about the interpreter than it does the interpreted. And truly, all I was doing was putting words together to fit the sentence model I was taught, with nouns, verbs, etc.

Talking/writing and not saying something/anything is practically a necessity for men. Most of us are taciturn by natural inclination, but if we want to get laid (by females) we have to appear to be 'involved.' And that requires 'communication.' Women define this differently than men. And then any man for whom women don't wordlessly take off their clothes and lay down soon figures out what women want to hear and we say it. (You know, there truly are men who have women pursue them... Where's the thrill? Having someone who wouldn't have you is a great memory to look back on!)

Which brings me (FINALLY!) to the point I wish to emphasize today: You're an animal.

Why do you Blog?

I've been asked this question, as a theoretical construct, by people who have never read a blog, as well as by people who have read my blog and are asking a serious question. To all and sudry (now there's a folk rock duo or website name, Hall & Sundry) I give the same answer: if you can't mop the heat on the kitchen floor, stay out of my bedroom! And I'm serious!!

Okay, but honestly, you know why I blog? It's my way of spitting at the raging forest fire that is the insignificance of my life. Yes, yes, I know how important you think your life is, but you're allowing pop culture to manipulate you. Back in the 1300s serfs really appreciated the insignificance of their lives. They didn't have Social Security numbers, no one sent them things in the mail or asked for their opinions. None of them really even had last names or were anyone's Christmas list. Sure, son of Robert at some point in the late 1500s became Robertson, but there were just as many Alf the pimple-faceds as there were Alf the anvil makers. When a serf died, his liege didn't ask for his name; the only concern was, who is going to pick up his slack? (And when did picking up my slack at the dry cleaners become a plural?)

I realize that to my wife and kids and dog, I have some significance. With the former two, money figures substantially in that significance. My dog doesn't care about my money, but it's probably only a matter of a few decades before we have house pets who can do simple math. But to 99.9999999999999% of the 6.5 billion Homo Sapiens on the earth, I don't matter. I am completely insignificant. I occupy in their hearts the very same expanse that the ants they stepped on this morning occupy. Maybe even less, if the ant bit them before dying. (Not even being accurate in my number/verb form construct makes me any more significant...)

Very few humans take the time and trouble to contemplate how little they matter. So hopefully in raising this issuse of how you totally don't matter at all, it will make me matter just infinitesimally that much more, as in zero x any number is still zero. I'll take it wherever I can get it, because like good spermatoza, there are times my insignificance simply isn't an issue.

No, but he's got a great personality!

Yes, that was me they were always talking about. Not the least bit cute or cuddly, but damn, what a great personality!

And I probably do have an above average personality, if I'm allowed to mess around with the statistical base you intend to use as the measuring stick. Put me up against Rap Groups of the early 90s and I'll do just fine.

But what's important here is what those of you who ask for a second opinion when you see yourself in a mirror can learn from me. And here it is: It's possible to get laid with almost the frequency that you'd desire if you were running a home for WWII veterans whose teenage granddaughters only visit when they need tuition money. All you have to do is do what any good scout would do: Be Prepared. And smile and be ready with a joke or to light up a smoke.

I can't tell you how many times I turned a good listening ear into an awkward breakfast. But if you don't mind someone not remembering your name, the awkwardness is almost endearing. But try to avoid looking in her eyes. You won't like what you see there.

When you get down to it, having sex with a truly beautiful woman is not that big a deal. It will soon come to pass that you won't be able to remember what an orgasm was like. Which brings me to the final ingredient in living a great life even though you were born to be in the servant class: Denial.

Not Quite a Malaprop, but heading there

A current headline speaks of the Philippines being "battered."

Without the appropriate prepositional phrase, the issue is at that point in doubt. When inanimate objects are 'battered' we need the precision that a prepositional phrase would bring to the issue. Such as, "Philippines being battered by Col. Sanders." See? Now we can complete the mental image.

For some reason 'battered' never gets used in baseball stories. Why is that? We have batteries in baseball, but while it's a fact that baseballs get hit with great frequency, hitters are never complimented for being great batterers.

And someday, in a town or village near you, a husband will batter his wife in mixture of corn meal and chocolate frosting, sprinkle her with almond slivers and then make her every sexual fantasy come true (that don't involve him staying awake after he climaxes).

Once this trend starts, we won't automatically cringe every time we see a headline about a man battering a woman. We can read the story with a sense of hope, and even entitlement!

The 4th of July is on a Friday

Employers especially love it when these non-movable holidays fall on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday.

Because nothing says 'I'm not motivated to work' like a holiday on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. If it falls on a Tuesday, making people come in on Monday is like cutting yourself with a rusty Volkswagen and then rubbing Pontiac into the wound. Same for Thursday holidays, and then expecting people to come to work on Friday.

Wednesday used to be not too bad; people had trouble justifying slacking off two days in a row. But thanks to our burgeoning Slacker Culture, a Wednesday holiday is on it's way to being a whole week lost to 'I deserve the whole week off with pay.

Ask any employer and you'll hear every single atheist, money-grubbing one tell you that EVERY SINGLE gotterdamnrung holiday should be on a Monday, even gotterdamnrung Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years Day, and yes, even the 4th of July.

Thank you.

Nothing to say and no time so say it !!

If you worked at a lumber mill, you can say, "Nothing to saw and no time to saw it" and it would have meaning. To anyone else, it'd just be a double typo, which in Mississippi is often called a double typondre.

As I was typing this I got an email on my Blackberry (I have to sign out of my regular Gmail account and into my Bert Bananas superhero Gmail account to post here). It was a confirmation of an appointment I have to paint some curbs, and they were reminding me that they wanted the numbers in Spanish. (It's in Santa Ana, which is now jointly patrolled by the Santa Ana police and members of the Tijuana PD who won't take drug money and so were hired out to the lowest bidder. Both guys are doing fine.) That just means that instead of a 7, I have to paint a 7 with a line through, which I've just discovered isn't in the Arial font, which cost me about three minutes of my life.

We're baby sitting our next door neighbors' dogs again. If the neighbors don't come home from their cruise, we get to keep the dogs. So if their ship sinks, not everyone will be sad.

Let's give a big round of applause . . .

Yep, let's hear it for me, for finding time to blogitate and bloviate about things near and dear to my underpants.

I've been busy. Which aside from not being a bad thing, eats up a guy's wakened hours. I don't seem to be doing much while sleeping, but I haven't watched the video yet, so I'm only offering this as a hypothesis. If it turns out that the video shows evidence to the contrary, I'll let you know.

Gas is in the $4.50 a gallon range. But I still only pay $40 when I go fill up. So you can see that except for the fact that I fill up twice as many times a week as before, the gas situation has not affected me in the slightest. Take that you oily speculators!

I've scheduled myself for voting for POTUS on 11-04-08. It's still a wide open field in terms of whose name I will be writing in. Those of you wishing my vote should send me a benefits prospectus. But I have to caution you that cartoon superheros have a decided edge; I've voted for Wonder Bra Woman in the last five POTUS elections. She has that certain je ne sais pas that really resonates with me. The thought of being tied up in the golden lasso of truth and telling her exactly what I want is making me feverish just typing it!

Because painting addresses on curbs has slowed down a bit, I've branched out to painting addresses on curves. There's some potential here! Isn't it amazing how adversity breeds innovation? Little know fact: Adversity was the impetus for breading cheap cuts of meat and frying the holy crap out of them. So adversity both breeds and breads, and maybe broads, innovation.