Welcome to the world of the mentally deranged.

Whilst you fritter away your hours searching for ways to make your improve your life and the life of those around you, there are others who seek to undermine all your create.

People who create clothing for animals.

There is no escape from this place

We are, all of us, the damned.

I do love me some internet memes.

I have been tagged by RememberTheMidwest.  The rules of the tag are as follows:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

And so in the immortal words of Waldo: “Here I am.”

The book I am currently reading is The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.  It is the chosen book for the fifth iteration for the perhaps poorly conceived “Fantasy/Sci-Fi Bookclub” I started with some hometown friends.  It is the first book in the history of the club which I enjoyed thoroughly.

Eventually, I told my mother exactly that.  “Who cares if a Modegan viscount outranks a Vintish spara-thain?” I protested.

Hmm.  Perhaps not the best sentence to accompany a thumbs-up review.

Here are five blogs I read.  Tag, you’re it.

T. Ruth
Potentate
DI$CO
WHB n’ Friends (ie. Kool & the Gang)
C. “What does the Z stand for” F.

I’m on Twitter now.

Must… expand… network…

@jakespice

“I want you to click me as hard as you can.”

Came across this video yesterday about a “real fight club” organized between blue-collar workers in Silicon Valley.Link to ESPN video

Couple things I’d like to say, in list form:

• Fight Club was published as a book before it was a movie, so the claim that this was an original idea may be spurious.
• The pre-footage of the board room reeked of play-acted outrage.
• It looks more real than the footage in Fight Club in the way that these work-a-day douches are obviously untrained in any sort of martial arts, boxing, etc. To quote Turkish from Snatch: “What the f*ck are you doing, Mickey? You’re dancing like a fairy. [...] Get out there and hurt him!”
• Two fat men smashing dustbusters and cookie sheets over each other was comical in a sad way. But two fat men jabbing each other with blunt knives was just disturbing.
• The dude wearing the head-to-toe flame outfit looks like he’s going to compete at a DDR tournament at the mall. If you’re going to brawl with someone take off the flowing shirt and wrap it around your damn knuckles.
• I have equal parts respect and disrespect for this. If you want to beat on each other with magazines in a garage that looks like it once housed the single sad performance of an 80s-themed neon version of West Side Story, more power to you. My ex-wife and I did the same thing regularly in the bedroom. OR, or… now hear me out… you could join a boxing gym and learn how to box. Or you could learn judo. Or kendo. Or thai boxing if you really want to be a badass. This is just sad.
• Obligatory Fight Club quote: And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you’ve known for years. Someone very, very close to you.

To the Man on the Stairmaster beside me this evening,

I’ve taken the time to jot down a transcript of your speech this evening.  You looked pretty intent on what you were doing, well, too intent to make notes yourself anyway, so I figured I’d do it for you.  I apologize that it is mainly in a sort of plebian onomatopoeia, a plebomatopoebian dialect if you will, but it seemed most appropriate vehicle to capture not only the wordage of your oratory, but the spirit of the subject matter as well.

Yours,
Guy Next To You

“Ungh.  Mmmmmmfff.  Mfff.  Mfff.  Ohh.  Oooh.  Ooh.  Ooh.  Mfff.  Yeah.  Ooh.  Mfff.  Fffffhhhhh.  Omphhh.  Mffff.  C’mon.  Mfff.  Mfff.  Ooh.  Ooh.  C’mon.  Mfff.  Ooh.  Ooh.  Ooh.  Ooh. Ooh.  Ooh.  Mff.  Fffffhhhh.  Fffffffffffffffffffhhh.  Ooh.  Ooh.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Ungh.  Ungh.  Mfff.  Ooh.   Ooh, mfff.  Mfff.  Fffffffhhh.  Four and a half.  Mmmfff.  Ungh, ungh, ungh. Mfff — yeah. Ooh.  Ooh.  Ooh.  God, yeah, mfff.”

Mr. Cool ICE is quite popular on the internet. A friend showed me this other blog which posted something similar to me 19 days after my original post. Not that I trademarked the word “douche” or the use of that photo of “Mr. Cool ICE”. This is a just a good example of what blogging is about: robbing everyone else on the internet.

Mr. Cool ICE is German. (I think?) And as far as I can tell, quite proud of his tattoos. For now. If anyone speaks german, I’d love a transcript of some of this video.

“Ich bin Mr. Cool ICE”

I has them.

WordPress.com is cool. I’ve used Blogger before but I like WordPress better. They’ve added some nice upgrades over the past years. On of them is the “Blog Stats” option, which shows you a simple set of metrics on how people find your site. There is a section for “search terms” used to find your site (ie. from Google, Yahoo, whatever) and also for which sites directly linked to you. You can see what people clicked on, number of hits daily, etc.

All that kind of thing.

The last site I had, (now defunct), got a lot of traffic from search engines because I had jokingly mentioned Kirstie Alley once. When I say “a lot” I mean over 10 hits a day, which is a goodly chunk for a small time douche blogger like myself. Most hits on this site now seem to come from the search “Bon Iver” (or something related.) That is awesome because people need to listen to his music. Now.

Anyway, today as I work/blog from home I saw I got a hit from a link here:

http://nioutaik.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15

The post is in French. GoogleTranslated, it reads:

Repost perhaps, but I tell myself that there is in there for lolknuts matter … (I also found, yesterday, provided he has not thought about filing the patent …)
link

The thought of a French person (or anyone) searching for “lolknut” pictures made me chuckle.

Woot.

In 2005 M. Ward recorded a version of CCR’s “Green River”, released on a similarly titled single.  It’s pretty dang fly.

Listen here for free.

I just got into the Black Keys earlier this month, after seeing a random post on Stereogum. I then proceeded to listen to their albums “Magic Potion” and “Thickfreakness” almost every day via Rhapsody. I saw they had a new album coming out, which means 1 thing: Tour!

However at this point, it was already too late to get tickets to their show at First Ave, as it was sold out.

I checked Ticketmaster. I checked First Avenue’s website. I checked Nick’s Sports World and the Electric Fetus. No tickets to be found. I cursed the gods of Poor Timing.

I went to minneapolis.craigslist.org.

Many poor souls like myself were searching for tickets. I finally found a post of an individual who was selling 4 tickets for $50 each. This was an $18 a ticket dollar show.

A bit steep. But when it comes down to it, I liked this band, and the possibility of bootlegging their show was worth $50 to me. In addition, I have, in the past, been known to buy extra tickets to popular shows and resell them at higher cost. Some unenlightened souls may call this practice Scalping.

I also call it Scalping.

So at this point, $50… I figure: what goes around comes around. No dice though, Mr. Craigslist was also sold out. So I checked eBay.

Scalping is now legal in Minnesota which means there are ticket dealers and websites dedicated to scalping. Such a website did have tickets available. The price?

$175.00 each.

I fold.

There is a phone on my desk at work.  No one ever, in my tenure here, has called me on it.

To clarify, called me on it looking for me.

Today the phone rang softly, as it is pushed to the farthest corner of the desk, forlorn and forgotten.  It was again, a wrong number.  The conversation went as follows:

Her: “Hello may I speak to your customer service representative?”
Me: “I think you have the wrong number.  Who are you trying to reach?”
Her: “Progressive?”
Me: “You have the wrong number.”
Her: “I mean, I’m from Progressive.  I’m calling for <my company>.”
Me: “Ok.  Well we don’t have a customer service department.”
Her: “Well who would I speak to if I had a problem with your product?”
Me: “Which product would that be?”

There is a pause before she says: “…Any?”

I chuckle softly and answer “Well I guess I don’t know.”