On Motorcycles

I promise a longer, funnier blog in the afternoon.

Until then subsist on this: my riding instructor at motorcycle school looks and talks exactly like John C. Reiley's character, Dr. Steve Brule, from Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job!












So many things wrong with this.

Addendum: So we road this morning. Instructors use constructive criticism. Peers build me up. Apparently having absolutely no idea how to ride a bike or even use a clutch works in my favor. Some kind of tabula rasa situation.

We also took our written test today instead of tomorrow. The "review" session? Instructor Steve reading off the answers instead of asking us. Those answers? Straight off the test we immediately took. 42 of them. Out of 50. I counted. And then I wrote them back down.

Learning is weird.

Even More Nerdy Pick-Up Lines!

I always get more hits with a picture. Somehow images of cute girls do better than average. Odd, huh?


Good Idea:

• "If you looked any more perfect, Greek scholars would have assigned you a letter value defined as an infinitely recursive sum of fractions."
  
  
• "Girl, you so fine I don't even need my course adjustment."
  

Bad Idea:

• "Is that a vuvuzela in your pocket, or are you just really fucking annoying?"
  

Untested:

• "Are you a bluetooth headset? Because I feel like we're paired."

Related posts: One, Another One, Eight More, and Some To Avoid.

On PoshTots

File this in the "So Maybe the Terrorists Do Have A Point" folder, tagged "wasteful spending" and maybe "capitalist pigs."

PoshTots.com


What do you get for the child who has everything except the kind of parental love that fills huge gaping emotional holes? How about a $3000 Pirate bed? That's pretty cool, right? I mean my bed only cost like $900, and that was a full-size on sale. I think a 33"x66" "youth" mattress is a little smaller than a a regular twin, which sounds great for a kid. Plus, there's a deck ladder and a mast with a steering wheel and shit goddam a captain's wheel, shit yeah! What kid wouldn't love this for all of three weeks?

But maybe pirates isn't your thing. Maybe you're a ninja person, I don't know. Maybe three grand is just chump change for someone of your asshole-itude.

A $15,810 island bungalow bunk bed? Gilligan never had it so good! Fake palm trees, two beds and a slide; never has competition for top bunk been so fierce! Someone could take a coconut to the head trying to get up there. For real. I mean I'd totally bean a prepube to get into that tsunami-proof stilt hut.

No? Then say "Fuck that noise!" and go for broke with the Princess Palace Playhouse Bed, only $47,000. Yeah, it has it's own spiral staircase, and a slide with its own banister. And shelves. And frickin' minarets! It has minarets! Spires! Pointy things! Oh yeah, and there's a bed inside.

Still, if you're so rich that it doesn't matter or you are in some bizarre probate plot that requires you to burn throw a million dollars without anything of tangible value to show for it, then maybe you need to order the "La Belle Au Bois Dormant Coach." Might as well forget about this one if you've have even a vague idea of how much money you actually make. This one doesn't even have a price. It just says, "Call for pricing." That's a custom-made pumpkin carriage of cherry and rosewood. Love your little princess? Then stick her into a permanent display of the kind of fleeting, romantic attentions she can expect people to never give her in real life.

But wait, is that bed outside? Sure it is! It's a carriage! If only there were some way to make even more extravagant purchases for our children outdoors … of course! Playhouses! Let's put a $52,000 pirate ship in our back yard, honey. I'm sure the kids will love it. And if the neighbors ever get uppity, we can keelhaul the bastards and use their house pets for canon fodder. Yeah, it's kind of expensive, but we all want the best for our little swashbucklers, don't we?

If that's truly the case, every child would have one of these:
a Tumble Outpost. That's a $122, 730 jungle gym. Really, at that price, how do you even justify not rounding off the the nearest unreasonable sum? I'm sure $123,000 is just and disgusting to shill out for your fundamentalist compound worth of children. And I'm not kidding about that number of kids, either. This is basically a better version of what my elementary school bought to replace the jungle gym they had when I went played there years ago. This utterly insane. They even have a little version for $75,000 with a fock climbing wall. I can't really tell if this version has that, but it pretty clearly has a rope bridge and a cargo net. At this point, I'm starting to think most children would get winded trying to walk around any yard capable of holding these behemoths.

So obviously we need to get our kids some of these: that's a perfect replica Mercedes 500SL. It's a two-seater with working lights and disc break, and it's only $9500. For a thousand less you can get a BMW 325i, you know, like the kind I passed driving down the Long Island Expressway two days ago. No kidding, I passed an old green BMW 325 on the LIE, but in fairness that might have been an S series. Big difference for a true aficionado, I know.

Well screw it, let's just get one of these things and be done with it all:
I wish they had a bigger working picture. That's called, simply, "Children's Off Roader" and looks like an early-nineties model Jeep. According to the description it is capable of going thirty miles an hour and like all the other vehicles should be operated only by children wearing DOT-approved motorcycle helmets. According to my highly knowledgeable and trustworthy sources at iCarly, this $32,350.00 novelty technically qualifies as a legal 'car' under Washington state DMV guidelines. And why not? It's got head, break and tail lights, turn indicators, a horn, upholstered seats and runs on actual gasoline with and electric start and a three-gear, nine horse power 296cc engine. (That's bigger than a small motorcycle.)

Honestly, as crazy as that price tag is you might as well buy your preteen a Harley. They cost the same and A Davidson leaves a bigger smear when you crash into your giant fort.

On Real Life Conversations VI: Grandmothers

Not my grandma, but she looks the part. If I were holding open-casting for a grandma, this lady would be a front-runner alongside Betty White and Mel Brooks in a wig.


My grandmother has a typically Bronx-Jew idiosyncratic speech pattern.

For one thing, she's fairly incapable or saying Ts in the middle of a word. "Mitten" comes out as "Mì'en," with a hiccupy linguistic hiatus in the middle.

On another note: when verbs affect verbs, her grammatical syntax reverts to Yiddish.

"Do you want me to…" becomes, "You want I should…?"

This would make sense in some Romance languages, where the expressions "You want" and "I should" can each be expressed as single, conjugated nouns without necessary pronouns, then modified into a question simply by adding an inquisitive inflection. For example, the Spanish "¿Quiere me deber?" literally means "[Do] you want [that] I should?" However this still makes no sense, considering that Yiddish is mostly German (written in Hebrew) and English itself is a Germanic language as far as syntax is concerned.


Fun for the whole family is trying to discern What the Hell Is Grandma Trying To Say?! (from Parker Brothers)!

"You know how to hang Venetians?"

Proper response: "Yes, Grandma, I know how to hang Venetian curtains."

Rejected response: "What? Like people? Yeah, I know how to lynch a Guinea."

On Banks II

Still not about Elizabeth Banks. Sorry.

*A thematic sequel to "On Banks."*


My credit card number got stolen recently. I might have mentioned this.

Only two charges were made, even then only for $11.08 total and one do a shady LLC didn't even get processed because I canceled the card and changed my pin fast enough. How fast? The charges were made as I was balancing my checkbook online at 3:30 a.m.

I almost think it was all stolen by a friend or something, because the one charge that did go through was for an eco-friendly light bulb that was going to be shipped to me house. If not a joke, this was the worst credit fraud ever.


Anyway, I decided it was high time I jump ship on this old account anyway. There are no local branches, no ATMs and I'm getting tired of their crappy online policies. I went down to the Chase Bank in my local supermarket and opened up a checking account that actually has fraud protection where I say, "Stop this from happening," and their response is, "Okay," not, "We can't until it's already happened."

And do you know what they did for me? They told me the wrong way to make out my initial deposit, so they just let me have all that money early. Then they tried to get me to sign up for a credit card. I told them I'm a horrible credit risk with zero taxable income. They laughed. They put through my checking account and then decided that was enough to qualify me for every card they have. With low rates. And bonus points. And extra points. For no yearly. You know those commercials in black-and-white with the guy from the dog food commercials and the woman from Pam Anderson's old show V.I.P.? Of course you do. Well I have that card now. With a ridiculous limit. It's insane. I can literally charge something like seven times my actual net worth. I don't know what they smoke down at Chase, but whatever it is I hope they're dealing too because they would make a fortune.

I tried to close down the old evil bank for good the other day. You know what they said? A transaction I made Friday afternoon had yet to be processed by Monday afternoon. A full business day and you haven't approved $45? Really? Maybe if you stayed open past 3 p.m. you could get some shit done.

Speaking of shit, the closest branch I was able to go to (well, the closest branch I could go to without getting shot for driving through the area)? Massive shithole. The building is grubby. It's not even a bank. There's a bank across the street. There's an other Chase right next door. This bank? No, it's a shopfront in a mini-mall. It has some chairs and a couple lamps, with some bad paintings of sailboats on the wall next to large framed ads. There are to little kiosks. No bulletproof glass, no locked doors, just a fat, middle-aged white woman and a chubby, slightly younger Indian woman. They sit around in shabby store that looks like it was decorated in early-smoking-lounge chique and tell me I can't take my money away from their shit security because they haven't finished playing with some of it just yet.

I swear this bank would be better run by a couple of kindergartners and a Fisher Price cash register.

On Stormtroopers

The in-universe answer is 'by the time of A New Hope, a good percentage of Stormtroopers were being grown from the genetic material of inferior specimens, through nepotism and political favors.'

The industry answer is part of Law of Japanese Animation # 16, The Law of Inverse Accuracy:

"The accuracy of the 'Bad Guys' when operating fire-arms decreases when the difficulty of the shot decreases. (Also known as the 'Stormtrooper Effect.)"

The short answer is if Stormtroopers were such good shots, a naturally gifted water farmer wouldn't be able to slaughter them and that would end the story pretty fast.


I was informed today that I'm not a true Star Wars fan because I don't own Stormtrooper body armor. Fuck. That. It's like two grand for a real set. Hell of a pain to make it yourself, and still it's expensive. Frankly? I haven't been tall enough to fit into that until possibly last year.

I am a little short for a Stormtrooper.

Things My Degree Has Gotten Me

Things My Degree Has Gotten Me:

• Practice hanging frames
• An ulcer from picking out not-pretentious frames
• The ability to write off paper, books and certain movies on my taxes
• Confidence in my use of the semicolon