General Humor

I occasionally get a moment in which I can think straight enough to make a few observations about life, work, and other miscellany.

For example…

• I do not consider a peach shirt with an indigo bowtie to be professional dress (especially sans jacket), since I don’t consider clowning a profession.  Why is this oddly-dressed gentleman considered qualified to judge whether we’re running a school in a professional manner?
• If I hear one of the football coaches commenting on the cheerleading coach’s bootimus maximus, does that count as Pig Latin?
• Why have three different guys of Far Eastern origin, working at three separate Dairy Queen drive-thrus, commented on how nice my Honda Element looks?  I mean, they’re right, but that particular demographic seems to include my car’s biggest fans.
• How can there be a Lego Rock Band video game when there is no minifig-sized Lego guitar accessory?  Will Lego soon be producing such accessories?
• If retro clothing is such a big thing with every generation, how come the dirndl never made a comeback?
• Before that Central Office employee sent out an angry email denying the huge raise she allegedly received last year, why didn’t she check the public records to see whether her jump from $65,000 in Financial Year 2007 to $89,000 in FY08 might be viewable by pretty much anyone connected to the Internet?  (By the way… it is.)
• How can people justify charging $500 for an improve-your-blog’s-readership course that consists mostly of a two-word message:  “Use Twitter”?
• Will you pay me $500 if I tell you to use Twitter to promote your blog?
• Who has time for Twitter anyway?  Instead of spending hours of your time making flimsy and shallow “connections” with people in 140 characters or less, why not go out and find gainful employment?  The pay is better, and you’ll actually get to know someone.
• If I disappeared right now, everyone I call a friend would join in the search or otherwise assist law enforcement… and they wouldn’t let the search end until I’d been found.
• If Mr. I’m On Twitter disappeared right now, everyone he calls a follower would check Google in a week or two to see if he’s shown up on some other “social media” website… and then they’d forget about him.
• A man with one friend is more fortunate than a man with 1,000 followers.

And most importantly…

• Why did my SAM Infantry units (with bazookas!) on Civilization IV just get trounced by musket-wielding British Redcoats?

One of my oldest, strongest addictions is taking me apart again, brick by brick.

 I could spend time blaming my suppliers and enablers… but I know that really, I am to blame.  It’s my problem, my issue, and no one can take the responsibility away from me.

And now, because of this addiction, I am going to commit the cardinal sin about which I have been warned… against which I have been cautioned… despite all the reasons why I shouldn’t.

To satisfy my born-again need for all things Lego, I will be starting a second blog.  (Ahh, Lego bricks… even better than colored duct tape…)

(It’s awful, I know.)

I know all the reasons why a second blog is a horrible idea.  I know it will provide yet another demand on my already thinly-stretched time.  I know that I’ve only recently returned to this blog after a few weeks of ignoring it (and you, my loyal readers… yes, all three of you).

I’m doing it anyway, and this time I’m going whole-blog — er, “hog”… dabbling in SEO, networking, and similar time-consuming ways of getting “biggified.”  Only, since it’s Lego, it’s more like “Duplofied.”

I’m even going to monetize (somehow… still working on the details) to benefit (hopefully) from the social media marketing I’ll be doing.  I don’t actually expect to earn much… the income will more likely be “minifigures” than “six figures”… but you never know.  If I do make some money, I could use it to buy my wife a nice gift… like some of the classic Paradisa sets she keeps talking about.

Just to make absolutely certain that my last shred of integrity is thrown to the wind, I’m even going to write an occasional post here promoting my new Lego blog.  In fact, I just did.

I know.  Put that way, it makes me want to say horrible, nasty things about myself.

PLEASE don’t give up on me!  I can change!  I can return to the old devil-may-care, keywords-aren’t-important, who-needs-money-anyway Aylad you all know and love!  I can!  I can!  I…

…will keep you informed of the details as things progress.  (C’mon, it’s not like I’ll actually make any money off of it anyway.  People won’t leggo of their cash just because I ask nicely.  Also, does this post, in combination with the one about getting rich quick, make me seem like even more of a hypocrite?  Yes?  Cool…)

I’ll also let you know if I come up with any more horrible Lego puns like the four above…

Taking a page from both Deep Friar and the WILF challenge, I decided to share some of the facts about life which one may gain from playing video games.

• The human body can be shot, hacked, burned, frozen, and otherwise mutilated, yet it will be healed completely by a good night’s sleep.
• Being seriously injured doesn’t limit your ability to run, jump, and fight, but it may cause a brief reddish haze to flash across your vision.
• Poison won’t hurt you if you don’t move until the poison wears off.
• Eating bread is better than a good night’s sleep, since it has the same effect but only takes a tenth of a second to accomplish.
• Removing internal organs from an animal you’ve killed is as simple as pulling a clean pair of socks from a drawer.
• That twelve-foot sword you just used to kill a giant rat will fit neatly in your pocket right next to your double-bladed axe, spare set of full-body plate armor, the anvil your neighbor wants you to take to his business partner, and enough gold to overflow Fort Knox.
• Fires don’t require firewood, torches rarely burn out, and no one needs to pay the electric or water bill.
• Nobody goes poo.
• Long falls only hurt you if they happen because you’re careless.  If you fall because of circumstances beyond your control, you will merely be knocked unconscious for a short period of time (during which you are likely to heal fully, as after a good night’s sleep).
• Young, fragile, naïve girls are usually able to magically summon and control beasts that would make the Devil shiver in his boots, if he wore boots.
• Extraordinarily valuable items are left in unlocked, unguarded chests scattered randomly around any villain’s hideout.
• Villains always have elaborate hideouts.
• The key to defeating any villain may be found within his hideout.
• Maps always have a blinking “you are here” dot… no matter where you are.
• Especially tense moments always trigger flashbacks of incredibly important events in your life that you’ve never remembered before.
• Dreams come true, but only if they feature a god, ghost, or demon trying to tell you something.
• Store owners are always as willing to buy your old, used junk as they are to sell you new, top-quality merchandise.
• Whenever things don’t look so good… don’t worry, the sequel’s graphics will be much improved.
• If at first you don’t succeed, check GameFaqs.
• The last of anything is the most powerful of its kind that has ever lived… but, unless it is evil, it needs your help to continue surviving.
• The “reset” button solves everything.
• If the reset button fails to solve something, that’s ok… there’s a cheat code.  You cheater.

You know, I don’t think this post has a point.  Hmm.

*reset* … *reset*reset*reset*

… (Dang!)

As a general rule, I don’t like people who think they can “get rich quick.”  They annoy me.  This includes people who claim that they’ll be millionaires before their thirtieth birthday.  They generally claim that this isn’t a get-rich-quick mindset, since 30 years of age won’t come for, like, six months or more… but they still have that… je ne sais quois… that bloody cockiness in their stride that says “who needs a career?  I have a glib tongue and a plan, baby, a plan.”

Remember that fellow from the Beetle Baily comic strips?  Cosmo was his name.  Wikipedia describes him as “Camp Swampy’s sunglass-wearing resident ‘shady entrepreneur.’”

Yeah.

So this, of course, makes me a total hypocrite when I come up with a new plan (yeah, baby, a plan) for a business venture that is 100% guaranteed to earn fat profits.

Even though I only come up with good plans.

Until I realize the fatal flaw (which usually is the fact that expenses would far outweigh any possible income from the venture).

Like a few weeks ago, I had (in a brilliant flash of insight) an idea that enabled me to stop spam from being posted to this blog.

I had been getting at least a dozen spammed comments per day (pathetically low, I guess, compared to most blogs, but enough to seriously frustrate me).

I implemented my new anti-spam idea.

In the three or four weeks since, I’ve had about three spam messages posted.

Three.  When it should have been three hundred.

I thought I’d found the perfect product… a nearly 100% effective spam blocker (I don’t mean a spam filter, like Akismet… I mean a spam blocker, where the software never even sees the spam).

I was going to make thousands.  Hundreds of thousands.  Millions.

Until I realized that a WordPress plugin for this would effectively be open source (the code would be easily viewable by anyone who wanted to install the same blocker without paying me) and I’m not sure that any value would be added by any related services I could offer.

So unless someone wants to pay me to install a few lines of code in their WordPress theme…

$5,000,000?  $50,000?  $5?  (*psst… it works on other applications too, like forums and such!*)

…I guess it’s back to finding the venture capital for that Spanish-language movie theater I want to open in a local Hispanic-immigrant neighborhood.

(I’ll be rich!)

I have this one student who is a constant thorn in my side.  Every day it’s the same story… he refuses to do work; he talks constantly, even calling out across the room to annoy his classmates; and he doesn’t seem to mind the fact that he’s failing miserably.

I try to deal with this misbehavior, of course.  I fuss at him.  I yell at him.  I threaten to send him to the principal for disrupting his classmates (which usually does stop him from calling out).  I send letters home (after trying and failing to reach his parents by phone) letting them know that he will not receive credit for my class unless he shapes up.

It doesn’t matter.  Three things are always certain:

He will not do his work.

He will continue talking.

He won’t act even slightly resentful toward me.

It bothers me.  It gnaws at me.  Most troublesome students have the decency to get irritated with me from time to time.  They usually act like I’m interfering with their lives when I fuss or yell at them.  Practically all of them at least give me the cold shoulder and a quiet sneer when I crack down on their misdeeds.

Not this one.

He just shrugs and smiles… not sarcastically or rebelliously, but as though I’ve said something mildly humorous.  He’ll quiet down or write a couple of words on his paper, but five minutes later he’s back to talking or staring off into space.

When I run into him after school, he’s completely friendly, as though I’m his favorite teacher.

What the heck is wrong with this kid?

Does he honestly enjoy being in trouble all the time?  Is he glad that I take the time to tell him to shut his mouth and do the work?

It bugs me.  He’s a disgrace to high school dropouts everywhere.

Dang.

Some of our disaffected youth really need to learn how to act like hoodlums.