Irrelevant Cheetah

I was being my well-behaved, domesticated self the other day when I noticed something unusual.

Specifically, I was doing laundry. Particularly specifically, I was attempting to remove a combination of blood, motor oil, Rogaine and tapioca pudding from a pair of size 58 mauve polyester pants.

But I digress. Suffice it to say that I was happily humming the theme to “Rocky,” puttering about in the laundry room, when I reached for the industrial-size bottle of Tide that we recently picked up from the local warehouse store.

Printed in great big letters on the side was: “Now – with 40 ounces more vs. the 300 ounce size!”

This gave me pause. Do I need to look at the size of the container? I wondered. Could the people at Tide really be that absurd?

Of course, you know what I did next. I had to look. I had to. Me trying to avoid looking at the size of the container would be like a celibate monk trying to study the carpet pattern on Friday night at the local strip club.

And sure enough, there it was on the side of the container: 340 ounces.

Now, disregarding the fact that this is written using very poor English, who’s surprised? If the container says that it’s 40 ounces more than the 300-ounce size, then any peawit with a third-grade education is going to know how big the container is.

(Well, okay, maybe a sixth-grade education. We are talking about the American public education system, after all.)

And is this really a selling point? “Look! Our 340-ounce size is 40 ounces bigger than our 300-ounce size! Not like those cheap bastards at Cheer! Their 340-ounce container is only 36 ounces bigger than their 300-ounce container!”

Half of my brain is telling me that I should write to them with these observations, half of my brain is telling me to forget about it, and half of my brain is telling me that I seem to have forgotten everything I ever knew about fractions. I think I’m going to file it under “Inane: Observations” and leave it at that.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Tide doesn’t do sh*t for blood/10W-30/Rogaine/pudding stains.

This post is using a washboard over at humor-blogs.com.

On his blog on Saturday, Pinhole resurrected a challenge from a now-defunct blogging site. Somebody offers up a first sentence, and those that feel like participating take that sentence and run with it. I never took part in the original, but I’ve been needing some creative kick-starting lately, and this one just worked for me. So I’d like to present my offer, currently without a title (I’m open to suggestions, because I just might turn this into a full-length story.)

She couldn’t place the accent; it was thick, yet undefined. Accompanying the nearly unintelligible Wet Brother dialect was… What? Scottish? Irish? She couldn’t be sure.

The voice had emanated from the run-down hovel that had come to typify the Wet Brother lifestyle. Similar to the driftwood villages that had flourished in the late 22^nd century, the shanty towns were situated on poles, constructed from varying pieces of flotsam and sitting about a dozen feet over the water at high tide. Sarah knew that a trap door in the floor of the cottage allowed the inhabitant to quickly and easily make the required trips to the depths below.

She leaned closer to the door, straining to hear. “Hello? Are you in there?”

This time the voice was easier to understand, though the unmistakable hiss was distracting. “Come in, Dry Ssisster. I haff not had air-breatherss vissit for ssome time now. Come in.”

Sarah swallowed hard. There hadn’t been any inter-species violence for well over fifty years now, but she was alone, and it was hard to shake the feelings of oppression and dread that tended to hang over the Wet Brother villages.

However, there was nothing to be gained by standing outside in the rain. She gave a slight push and the door swung open on silent hinges. It was too dark to see the interior, so she took a deep breath and stepped into the unknown just as thunder clapped overhead.

  To Be Continued?

I saw a commercial on TV last night that disturbed me.

Not that this is something that doesn’t happen often. I’m disturbed by anybody that dances while they’re trying to sell me something, I’m disturbed by many Skittles advertisements, and I’m disturbed by the vagueness of woman-type advertisements.

Can somebody please tell me what, exactly, “feminine protection” is?

No, never mind. I’d rather not know.

But what disturbed me last night was this: Lincoln Mercury now offers the Micro$oft-powered Sync system in their car mp3 players.

This disturbs me for one reason: I’m not sure I want Micro$oft anywhere near my car.

Sure, they’ve got admirable goals: Sync will dial 911 in the event your airbags are deployed. And sure, it’s just in the music player, right? But it’s Micro$oft. I guarantee that if you have MS Anything loaded as an operating system on your car’s mp3 player, it won’t be long before pre-pubescent emo kids in Pakistan will be able to exploit a heretofore unknown vulnerability and take over control of your anti-lock braking system.

Not to mention the possibility of a crash (pun intended.) I don’t want to be tooling down the highway when an error message pops up on the dashboard: “A fatal exception 0F has occurred at 00457:000040B1.” What? Listen, I’m a geek and that message scares the hell out of me when it pops up on my laptop; show me that message on my dashboard when I’m going 75 and I’ll show you a geek who needs to change his underwear.

Oh, and yes – I tool down the highway. I don’t drive, I don’t cruise. I tool. Deal with it.

So in the interests of keeping my underwear clean, I think I’m going to avoid the Lincoln and its pre-installed Micro$oft Sync software. I’m not too worried about my geek cred yet – I have plans to install a wi-fi antenna and a laptop running Linux in my Jeep.

And that laptop won’t go anywhere near my Jeep’s brain unless I chaperone.

When Pinhole informed me that he had awarded me the ROAR award, my first thought was “Oh, isn’t that nice of him?” My second thought was “He’s obviously lost his marbles. I need to send a nice bouquet to his rubber room. I wonder if FTD has something thematically appropriate – like poppies.” My third thought, of course, was “Oh, thank the Llamas! I desperately needed something to blog about!”

The ROAR award, in case you’re clueless (I was) is awarded by bloggers to fellow bloggers whom they feel exemplify the standards of writing. In other words, it’s a meme, but nicely dressed in Armani and carrying a bottle of Jack Daniels. Recipients of this esteemed award must, in their acceptance blog, list three “writing tips” which have contributed to their success in winning memes awards.

Now, asking me about writing calls to mind the following:

Q: How do porcupines have sex?

A: Very, very carefully.

And that’s how I write: very, very carefully, and occasionally it all works out and I’m left with something vaguely resembling success, if not vaguely resembling baby porcupines. Still, if I had to list three “writing tips” (and I do, according to the rules of the award,) I guess they would be as follows:

1. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one) Just WRITE! You can read books about writing by writers for would-be writers published by wanna-be writers, but nothing is a good substitute for sitting your ass down in the chair and hitting keys (hopefully in the right order, but that’s what spell-check is for.)
2. Read! Everything you can get your hands on. I’m partial to fantasy, sci-fi, particle physics textbooks and used bus passes.
3. Free-write. You may have heard of this. I just recently tried it, and it’s amazing. Basically, you sit down, choose whatever topic you like, shut off your internal editor and just start typing. Sometimes there’s treasure in the gobbledegook that emerges. Here’s an excerpt from my last attempt:

While exuding communicable diseases like a common man disturbs the plague from its 1099 form, the botfly can often be found sucking on a Slurpee purchased via debit card from the local convenience store under the shadow of Notre Dame, also known as “My Fair Lady” by Gilbert and Sullivan.

Well, I didn’t say “free-writing” always works. Just sometimes.

Okay, as Miss North Carolina once said, enough said. Well, she didn’t say that, but she should have. I must nominate five fellow bloggers, and I hereby call the following to front-and-center. If you’ve already been awarded, or choose not to participate, just bask in the glow. Bask in the glow.

Brent, from Ominous Comma. I’d like to know how he does what he does, though I’m not certain if it’s because I’d like to imitate him or because I need to know what to watch out for.

Diesel, from Mattress Police. This guy has written a book! With a cover, even! And because this probably qualifies as a meme, it will bring out his Nazgul, Grundir, whose writings I sorely miss.

WordVixen. She’s fast becoming a working freelancer, and tips from her might save someone else some grief.

J.A.Konrath, another author. If you haven’t checked out his blog yet, you should. It gives the rest of us some hope. I hope he has time to play.

Moooooog35. Another humorist I’d love to emulate, even though I haven’t gotten around to adding him to my blogroll yet.

So there you have it. Now I’m off to free-write and try to think of my next post.

This post is also over at humor-blogs dot com, because I’d like more people to know how awesome I am. I’d settle for two people.