I was sitting back in my overstuffed recliner (from here on, for brevities sake, to be called Big Green) this weekend dangling my size 12 doggies over the edge and letting them air out while avoiding the initial onslaught and mayhem created by the feral Post-Thanksgiving big-game bargain hunters. While flipping through my 100+ plus digital quality channels I found myself prognosticating that Kevin Kline was about to pump a bullet into Brian Dennehy. I then became conscious that I was not really having a psychic prediction or even déjà vu but that I was instead watching “Silverado” for about the tenth time this month. And though the thought of watching the bad guy get his just rewards again, was tempting, I decided to leave the comfort of Big Green and surf the world-wide Internet. I trudged my way to my dream machine and quickly whisked myself into the wondrous offerings of the Internet. I decisively decided to check my E-mail only to find my self drowning in a quagmire of Spam, and not the grease laden substitute ham substitute, Yikes! There were over one hundred and eighty E-Mails from several nice people all wanting to call my attention to their desire to fulfill my basic primal needs. A quick scan revealed that many of these people felt I needed to meet the “lust of my life” for a one-night fling courtesy of their ability to hook me up! Isn’t technology grand, I no longer have to rely on my personal friends to hook me up with blind dates! The majority of the rest of the correspondences were evidently in cahoots (I have definitely watched “Silverado” and other westerns one too many times this month) with the previously mentioned cyber pimps seeking to provide my carnal wishes for a tidy price, as they felt that I needed to obtain (for a nominal fee of course) a hefty supply of Viagra or Cialis so that I could be prepared to walk the walk and perform on demand. It is so nice to know I have hundreds of people watching over me to see that I can become the next Hugh Hefner. Plus one nice lady in South Africa wanted to send me millions of dollars that was setting unclaimed in her bank. All I had to do was send her my personal banking information and she would transfer that big ol’ wad of cash right to my bank. Whooeee, there sure are a lot of nice people out there just waiting to lend me a helping hand. I was real tempted on the money acquisition, but then I realized that if I let her send me all that money it would put me in a higher tax bracket, so I just decided to let her give away all that money to some other lucky person. I guess I will just have to be satisfied with sitting in Big Green, letting my # 12 doggies breathe and watching my hundred plus channels of reruns and retreads. I suppose I just don’t have the “right stuff” to be the next Hugh Hefner or the next stock market tycoon. Maybe “Unforgiven” might replace “Silverado” soon.You know some hot buttered popcorn would be nice during the movie, anyone know of any quality popcorn spammers out there? SIGH!
Monthly Archives: November 2006
That Most Joyous Holiday of All
Well my fellow Internet Voyagers I had not really planned on posting anything for several more days. But as I sat back this week in my overstuffed recliner with my weary mind and eyes focused on the tasks ahead, my tired feet propped up and gleefully dangling in the air, a 24 oz. bottle of Diet Mt. Dew firmly gripped in my bear like paw and preparing to enjoy one of my favorite Quad City media sources, called The Dispatch, the reality that the Holiday celebrations that will fill us all with “JOY AND LAUGHTER” (I am painfully aware of this spiritual growth because every “Joyous and Laughter” season I am reminded by an onslaught of titillating National Debt Proportion spending of Internet, newspaper, radio and television commercials; all designed to generate this feeling so I will SPEND-SPEND-SPEND) is upon us, fell out on my lap! (Whew! Okay any of you out there; BIG exhale, breathe’in-breathe’out-breathe’in naturally through the nose. Now back to my current 2006 epiphany.) Yahoo, no not the web giant, the hillbilly version of goody-goody-goody! Yes, one of my favorite shopping sites, Farm and Fleet, had actually managed to get me their After-Thanksgiving advertisement a full week ahead of Thanksgiving. This immediately brought joy to my heart as it reminded of that most celebrated and anticipated Holiday of the year, NO NOT Christmas, Black Friday! It has become such a phenomenom that there is even a web site, curiously enough called Black Friday, that offers up to we the consumer, many of the Black Friday Advertisements for your employment.
Yes Black Friday, the most anticipated Holiday of the year. That day following Thanksgiving when you can see General Managers and CEO’s across this great nation allow smiles of happiness and tears of joy to roll down their normally Scrooge-like scowled faces. It is their time of cheer and good will as they happily listen to the cha-ching of the cash registers, to the tune of Cash-Check-or Credit card please, as the merry (and some not so merry) After-Thanksgiving overly carb-fueled shoppers rush out to fill their mini-vans and SUVs with the many shopping treasures made available for their use and consumption in exchange for some of their hard earned cash! Oh the joy we Samaritans shall bring to the deprived souls of these Scrooges as we splurge our cash and dignity to purchase the treasures made available to us and start the push of their net gain profit out of the red-line loss margins and above into the black-line of profit. Many of us will be dragging our nearly carbed-comatose selves out of bed at hours we never thought possible. Though in years past that meant arriving at the store of choice an hour early or so, the mega-giant box stores have changed that pattern. The MegaMonster 24/7 Box stores like Wal Mart have upped the ante forcing the other retail stores to follow their lead and thus those of us wishing to strike purchasing item gold will have to beat the Just-Say-No to flying-south-for-the-winter-birds out of bed. And so instead of reaching for that snooze button on the alarm clock, that we all reset the maximum amount of times mechanically allowed during the workweek, many of us will instead force our weary bodies from bed and stand in line with the rest of the early bird shoppers hoping to be one of the few chosen ones to get their hands on those last few ‘Tickle Me Elmo’ wannabe and bargain items. I say to you all, have fun!
But buyers beware! Many of the scoundrels of the market will lure you to their stores with the promise of unbelievable opportunities for items, preying on your lustful spending urges to get a bargain, only for you to find out they have run out of the limited availability items. Check your advertisements and times those items are available closely. Try and determine what stores have matching items that also price match and their rules of engagement in your price match end-around, and then purchase at a location and time where the item will not have the whole population of your city lined up seeking the same prize. And do not forget to properly scold any scoundrel GM of a store where they pull those semi-bait and switch tricks (ignore tromping on the heads of the sales clerks over this problem (that is exactlty the impotent gesture the GM will hope for, as usually the clerks are caught up in the same web of grand misdirection you are). Ah but we do not wish to get too indepth about bait and switch as that is another tale worth telling and worth giving the proper recognition deserved.
HAVE A HAPPY BLACK FRIDAY EVERYONE!!!!
(and save me one of those raspberry filled sugar cookies in case I am late getting to the mall)
We now interrupt our regular programming to post this important bulletin!
While diligently working on my next post (sandwiched in between the Chicago Bear’s vs. NY Giants game and the Mr. Monk’s holiday episode) I was sidetracked by late breaking news from the state of Illinois’ political scalawag division. It seems that our state scalawags must have found the wizards formula for turning lead into gold. I assume this because despite being informed for a lengthy time now by our fearless leaders that the state was in dire need of money. Enough so that many payments to health services have been long delayed. Enough so, that our educational system is in need of a funds transfusion to offer all our students a quality education. Enough so, that our Governor has been debating about selling the cash cow lottery system to save the same education system it was supposed to save in the first place from its advertised selling points to the public. Yet despite the elected shepards of our cash and well-being shedding rivers of tears and cries of anguish 
about the lack of cash available earlier in the year, many of our political scalawags made late pre-election promises of pork projects to various ventures in the state and region. And as of this Thursday those crafty scalawag magicians have managed to pull more cash funding out of their magical hat to be able to increase their personal salary by 13%. Yahoo, their money tree is bearing fruit again! So since it has just been months since our illustrious Governor and political bodies were bemoaning the lack of amassed wealth of our state to fill the needs of their constituents, The State’s Money Tree along with local citizens in need such as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard were bare, so I have to assume they have finally stumbled upon that age old lost formula for transmutation of turning lead into gold. Happy days are evidently here again!!!!! I do hope none of them get lead poisoning in the transforming process.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming without commercial interruption: “Amazon Women on the Moon”! (Blatant uncompensated plug for one of my favorite cult movies)
An Overdue Acknowledgment of Past Services Rendered
I have tried to consider what subject to post on first. I have intentionally withheld my entry in to the blogosphere so as to avoid allowing myself to get entangled in political rhetoric spewing so early in this blogs birth. Have no fear that with a blog named as this one is, politically infused apparitions are bound to materialize their ugly specter into the blog’s program. Just not this quick! Instead my first post will be an attempt to honor those Good Samaritans, other than my parents and family, whom helped direct and enlighten my path towards adulthood; junior-high and high-school teachers. It really is a thankless vocation at times. They are a mostly good people (sure there are a few stinkers in the mix but mostly they are a helping hand society) who want to serve the public by hoping to impart wisdom, knowledge and guidance upon those whose lives they touch. And this they do, in varying degrees. A lot of this degree is determined by how many heads-of-granite, such as myself, which they run into in their quest to spread knowledge. Lets face it, for every one bright-eyed bushy-tailed attentive student in class there was just as many of us sitting in class like statues pretending to listen to the pearls of wisdom being tossed our way, while worrying more about how many touchdowns we were going to score on and off the field, than we were worrying about our next test score. Plus they have to put up with the child’s growth posturing and attitude that often includes unfounded scorn and disparagement to those same would be helping hand teachers. It is amazing that teachers are willing to put up with the entire nuisance and pests, like myself, that goes with the job. Those are truly times when youth is often wasted on and by a lot of the youth. It has caused the discouragement and eventual loss to other fields of vocation by more than on would be educator of children. So in this my inaugural post I choose to salute those teachers who not only put up with my shenanigans but also somehow managed to impart enough knowledge in this thick skull to graduate and survive in this crazy world. They all were memorable in some way. Some like my early science teacher Mr. Schmidt (a giant of a man who managed to duck inside and drive a VW bug), who worked tirelessly at ways of trying to reinvent science to make it interesting to all students, who also had to find ways to overcome short attention spanned avid clockwatchers, such as myself, with his “new and improved clockwatchers show” taped over the clock. Try being a teacher, like Mr. Moens, that had to drum world geography into a sieve of a mind like mine, that is a trade mined with misery. There were teachers like Mr. Watts, Mr. Hein and Mr. Lyle that thankfully drilled mathematical problem solving abilities into our mostly uninhabited school-hour brains. There were teachers like Mr. Otis who taught us studying history (more important than golf?) and its seeming need to repeat itself, is important to survival and necessary to understand the how, who, what and where we are and came from. Who knew learning and speaking other languages other languages can be fun and entertaining, evidently Mr. Mcknight did. How would you like a job like Mrs. Besse, who got stuck with teaching soon to be released on the world male-delinquents how to cook (it is amazing the food that can be prepared that doesn’t come from a prepared canned good) and other bachelor survival tactics (I could even sew, just not in a straight line). And perhaps the most shocking of all, that teachers like Mr. Ludwig and Mrs. Latham, exposed young adults that there was far better reading available than the monthly copy of Playboy or Penthouse that was hidden in our spiral notebooks. Who knew there were books from authors like Conrad, Verne, Frost, Huxley and some guy named Shakespeare that could entertain and teach at the same time. Unbelievable! And coaches like Mr. Gray and Mr. Hainlain taught us physical education and football, could be fun as well as good for our health. And I always thought wrestling was something performed by guys named Hulk and Dirty Dusty until a Science teacher, named Mr. Vail, taught us that amateur wrestling involved science and skill not barnyard brawling. But there were far too many wise and knowledgeable Good Samaritan teachers diligently working their butts off pushing this lazy butt down the path of education, to name them all. So if any of you happen to wander through this site, I wish to pay homage and say thank you to all the teachers of the school systems for finding ways to instill knowledge into this knucklehead, despite my often disregard and numerous attempts at avoiding my educational requirements and duties. By the way Luds, my grammar and punctuation is still atrocious! Sorry about that! But my content is nearly tolerable though still way over the word-count limits. I also salute all the teachers who work tirelessly to keep this country educated and directed towards the tree of knowledge.
Welcome to My World
To all sojourners and weary voyagers of the World-Wide Internet that stumble upon this site I say: Welcome to my world! I live on the third rock from the Sun, on a planet called Earth, in a two state (IA/IL) multi-city sprawl, conurbation wannabe, called the Quad Cities in the USA. I have worn many different robes of life and I hope to wear many more before life’s road ends. I have been both saint and sinner. I am both conservative and liberal. I have been and still am both optimist and cynic. I am something of a Zelig, blending in with my social and physical surroundings. This is to be compilation of my views of personal and current events and the individuals that shape those events. Caution, some of my content may be found not suitable for human consumption. Also “readers beware” of poor spelling, bad grammar, useless articulation, outdated terminology, colloquialisms and other nefarious acts committed to the English Language that may be present on this site.
In the most fundamental of descriptions, I am just a simple Joe Average USA citizen, like the majority of the citizens of this country, trying to travel life’s road with my fellow Samaritans on pathways that are congested with Scoundrels and Scalawags whom are trying to find sheep to fleece.
