TEN JACK TEN

Prostitute must be a better job than telemarketer, because some people are actually glad to run across an on-duty prostitute.

Amy Winehouse’s press coverage is disproportionate to her actual talent.

If I had a vistor from outer space, and that visitor did not understand the concept of “body odor,” we could zap ourselves over to Six Flags Over Texas and have several examples for him in less than a minute.

You can put a space for it on the credit card reciept, but I will not be guilted into giving a tip to someone who does nothing for me other than running a cash register.

I’m not white enough to fully appreciate the appeal of Jimmy Buffett and his lifestyle marketing juggernaut.

Text messages are not the proper format for communication that contains any degree of significance.

My promise to myself not to use this blog for whining has resulted in long gaps between posts.

There is no great pearl of wisdom that will come to you as a result of growing to adulthood, other than the realization that no such wisdom exists and that everybody’s trying to muddle through as best they can.

Corporate CEO’s are not highly paid because they are particularly good at what they do, they’re highly paid because everyone with authority over paying them is part of the “let’s all pay each other shitloads of money” club.

You and I are not going to be invited into the aforementioned club.

My cel phone starts ringing on the drive home the other day.  I answer it and it’s a recording telling me that this is my second notice that my car warranty is about to expire and I should hold on to talk to a representative. 

Which is particularly interesting since they don’t say who they are, what kind of car I drive, or what kind of warranty it is.  Just like the last three times they called my cel phone.

This time I press “one” for an operator.  I wait a while, and the guy asks me my car’s make, year, and model.  Still not identifying themselves.

“Yes, I drive a 1983 Quit Calling My FUCKING CELLPHONE.” 

I guess they don’t cover those, because he hung up.

In case you were thinking about taking Canada seriously.

On May 30, [Colleen] Leduc picked [her daughter] Victoria up from school, where she’s enrolled in an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) class with several boys around the same age. When Leduc returned home, there was an urgent call asking her to return to the Livingstone Street East school.

Frightened, Leduc rushed back to the school. She and Victoria entered a room where they were met by the principal, the vice-principal and the teacher.

What did they tell her? That they were investigating the possibility that her daughter was the victim of sexual abuse. Shocking news, but more shocking was the source:

Leduc said they advised her that Victoria’s educational assistant (EA) had visited a psychic, who said a youngster whose name started with “V” was being sexually abused by a man between 23 and 26 years old.

The school administrators say they had no choice but to contact the authorities, but the law actually states that suspected abuse must be reported “if there are reasonable grounds.” Probable cause has one foot in the grave up North.

Presenting the statistical analysis of red-shirted crewman demises on Star Trek:

We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).

Apparently there’s a correlation between Kirk getting friendly with the local chicks and a guy in red taking a phaser bolt.

One of the things you think you can take for granted in Texas is that you can usually find a good steak. You can, of course, but the question is how much you’re willing to pay for that piece of meat. Unfortunately, about half the time, you’ll end up burned — even at a steak house.

Steak One: Texas Land and Cattle. This one came with a side of cheese enchiladas, which could be a warning sign, but I’ve had it before. Or I thought I did. While I wasn’t looking, they changed the cut and I ended up with what looked like skirt steak. Skirt steak is what fajitas have been made out of for years, but that’s because it’s a cheap cut that wasn’t being used for anything better. And it’s cheap because it can be tough and full of gristle, which is what this one was. Fajitas are one thing, they’re cut up and marinated to take the chewy edge off of them. A skirt steak is just cheap. And a skirt steak for $12 is just insulting.

I’ve never taken as much chewed steak out of my mouth as I did that meal. I hate doing that, it makes me feel like a slob. But I also hate gristle. I ended up performing steak surgery on my food to excise what I believed to be a ligament. I didn’t confirm that, though– since that patient was already gone, I didn’t bother sending it to the lab.

Steak Two: Outback Steakhouse. I’ve had a few $30 steaks in my life. One was a New York Strip at Randy’s so good it was food pornography. Another was a Fillet Mignon so dry and tasteless I never went back to Three Forks and told everyone I knew about how bad the food was. One was a Porterhouse that someone else paid for, so I was going to enjoy that one anyway.

And then I’m at Outback, looking at the most expensive steak they have, a $30 New York Strip. A cut I know I like, and the waiter is selling it hard. He tells me it’s special Angus beef, specially handled and prepared. He tells me it’s “tested.”

You know, now that I think about it, I’d hate to eat a cow that got less than a 1200 on his SATs. So I take the risk and pay almost twice as much as I ordinarily would. And as life is fond of teaching us, some risks don’t pan out.  It’s not that it was bad as much as it was ordinary. A good steak shouldn’t require more than a knife, a fork, and a little salt. I should not feel the urge to put Heinz 57 on a $30 steak. But there I was, eating a steak the waiter told me was top of the line, but tasted like a C student at best.

I should have known better than to go with the top of the line at a chain restaurant. Their profit is my disappointment.

Unless the person in question has actually invaded another country, set up concentration camps, or has attempted genocide, comparing them to Hitler is a silly exaggeration that undermines your argument.

If I were famous, someone would point to the above statement and claim I was defending Hitler.

If this country is not going to allow any new mining, drilling, refining, or nuclear plants, it really has no business whining about the cost of energy.

Team Fortress 2 is seriously addictive.

No matter how many more times they go through the washer, those new towels aren’t going to get more absorbent.

Nobody’s going to give you a book contract to say nice things about your Republican former boss.

My belief that $4/gal. gasoline would reduce my commuting time by thinning out the other people on the highways was incorrect.

There are two kinds of people in politics:  the ones who care about issues, and the ones who care about being in politics.  The latter ones tend to give up in disgust less often.

Once a podcast goes over the 1 hour mark, it’s a warning sign that self indulgence has won the battle over entertaining the audience.

Grand Theft Auto IV doesn’t deserve those 10/10 reviews. 

Michael Pfleger is a radical priest in Chicago. You probably wouldn’t know about him if he hadn’t gone to Obama’s old church and mocked Hillary Clinton (see the vid).

That’s against Catholic Church policy, which bans partisan politics. It’s also against Pfleger’s instructions from his Cardinal, who told him not to mention candidates by name. He’s already been suspended from his parish post.

Why did he do it? Because he thought there wouldn’t be any consequences:

. . . how, as a friend and passionate supporter of Obama’s campaign for president, could he do what he did, with cameras rolling?

Pfleger’s short answer? He didn’t think the service and his “conversation” — a more casual address than a classic sermon, he explained — were being broadcast live online, as Trinity often does.

“They told me it was down,” Pfleger said. “Their live streaming had been down all day, and they didn’t know whether it was back up. . . . I regret the dramatization that I was naive enough to believe was just going to be kept among that church.”

Just in case you had any sympathy for the guy, he finishes with a reminder that he’s the real victim here:

“This is a dangerous time in America, the freest country in the world,” Pfleger says, “where you have to whisper your thoughts.”

Actually, Pfleger, it’s a dangerous time for people who won’t do what their boss tells them to do. But then, it’s pretty much always been a dangerous time to do that.

The US government’s Office of Personnel Management paid Hewitt Associates $21 million to create a system that would calculate federal employees’ retirement benefits, speeding up a complicated process that was (and still is) being done by hand.  The result?  Crap.

The OPM has said the new system would have to be capable of making up to 150 distinct calculations because federal employees are covered by different retirement rules. The formula for figuring the annuity of a law enforcement officer is different from the rules applied to a postal worker, for example.

Hewitt and the OPM launched the system in February, and the OPM said the system successfully delivered on 15 of the most common retirement calculations.

But the OPM contracting team decided to call a temporary halt to the project when tests showed that the system could handle only five of the next 61 functions. The calculator produced wrong answers some or all of the time or failed to even calculate an annuity.

The math:  20 correct calculations divided by 76 total calculations = a 26.3 % success rate.  Or, approximately $1 million per working calculation (but then they did start with the easy ones).  Ever wonder where they got the phrase “close enough for government work?”

My first thought when I heard that Clay Aiken was expecting a child was:  “Who’s the father?”

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About once or twice a month, I get spam that is identified as coming from my own work email address.  So, either they’re using my address to spam from (which I regard as unlikely) or they’re using a spoof that makes it look like the recipient is the sender.  I think responding to spam is stupid in the first place, but honestly, responding to spam from your own address is double stupid with a backflip and a side of stupid sauce.

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After re-watching it with the kids, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was by far the weakest of the original three movies, and it’s due to two factors:  (1)  Kate Capshaw’s constant whining, and (2) the high number of unnecessary gross-out moments.  I blame Speilberg for the first, Lucas for the latter.  The boys loved Short Round, though.