I love my Kindle®. I know it’s stupid to have attachment to a product, but I can’t think of a better word than love. I fucking love my Kindle®. Just thinking about its sleek white casing, its firm yet yielding navigation nub, the way it feels in my big, strong hands — it’s enough to make my pants tight.

I’ve had mine for about two years, and, during those two years, I think I’ve become a better person. Some will say a more smug person, but those people are just jealous because they can’t afford an e-reader with which to read the classics of literature (primarily Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel). 

Therefore, you can imagine my absolute horror when the upper right hand corner of my beloved Kindle® began to chip away. It started first as a small crack — hairline fracture, really — before full pieces began falling off. Now I know what you’re thinking. “You must have dropped it or sat on it on the bus or something”. First of all, I don’t drop my things. I take superlative care of every product that I own. Secondly, I don’t, nor will I ever, use public transportation. The fact of the matter is the cause of the damage is, as far as I know, a complete mystery.

Now, I had read somewhere that Amazon has a lax policy when it comes to Kindle® returns and exchanges. Surely not I, with a warranty so out of date, could receive any kind of assistance! Au contraire, mon frère. After leaving my phone number with Amazon support, a chipper young representative called me almost immediately. Despite being out of warranty, and, to be honest, a shady sounding back story, the rep informed me that a new Kindle® would be overnighted to me post haste! This call was after business hours, but, sure enough, the very next day a new Kindle® was delivered to my doorstep.

To say that I am impressed with Amazon would be an understatement. I can think of no other company with such customer service and such willingness to make a self-proclaimed douche bag like me  happy.

I suspect the reason they do this is because Kindles® are cheap to produce. There’s not a lot of gigawhositz going on inside of these things. Also, keeping dumb old me happy with a new Kindle® is a great way to ensure that I continue to purchase books through them. Books that are priced a tad too high. I’m not saying there profit margin for a 200k digital file that never needs to be printed is ridiculously high, but it’s probably somewhere around a million percent.

The Kindle® needs to hurry up and replace printed books. Anyone that disagrees with the idea of e-readers taking over is a fucking moron. Your entire library can fit on one slim device that is searchable, portable, and fuckable. Books collect dust and are a bitch to move. If you read the kind of books I do (I’m talking real smart, eggheady books), then they’re also super-heavy. The only kind of book that should still be printed is art books.

When e-readers take over, there will be less trees that get cut down and we can print those tasteful nude photo books and really exotic rain forest paper! And that is what the future is all about.

I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won’t let himself get snotty about it.

— Hardboiled noir drunk: Raymond Chandler

I’ll stick with gin.  Champagne is just ginger ale that knows somebody.

— Fictional drunk: Hawkeye from M*A*S*H

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk.  That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

— Literary drunk: Papa Hemingway

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

— Old people thought he was funny way back forever ago drunk: W.C. Fields

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year’s Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you’re married to.

— Old people thought he was funny twenty years ago drunk: P.J. O’Rourke

The coffee shop smell from next door came in at the windows with the soot but failed to make me hungry. So I got out my office bottle and took the drink and let my self-respect ride its own race.

— Bonus badass drunk: Raymond Chandler, from The Big Sleep

Seriously, someone explain this to me. I went to the local Express® to pick up a couple of pairs of extra-small narrow corduroy slacks (XSNCS) and all of the female mannequins were in full-on schwing mode™ (FOSM). Creeped Out? Sure. Did I get wood? You betcha!

Play your cards right, gentlemen, and you may end up going home with one of these hot little numbers. Oh la la, splash!

]]> http://www.godiloveme.com/2010/12/17/why-are-all-these-express%c2%ae-mannequins-thrusting-their-pelvises-at-me/feed/ 1 http://www.godiloveme.com/2010/11/20/mad-magazine-desktop-wallpaper/ http://www.godiloveme.com/2010/11/20/mad-magazine-desktop-wallpaper/#comments Sun, 21 Nov 2010 02:13:39 +0000 Me! http://www.godiloveme.com/?p=1779 When I was a kid, I used to read Mad Magazine obsessively. I even had a subscription (for serious). And when I didn’t have a subscription, one of my brothers did. In fact, I can state with some confidence that from the year 1991 to the year 1998, there wasn’t an issue or Super Special that I missed.

It was ’round the turn of the century that I started getting laid proper, and all of a suddden Al Jaffe’s fold-ins didn’t hold the same appeal that, and I don’t know how to put this delicately, my girlfriend’s fold-ins (and by that I mean genitals) did. So that pretty much ended my love of Mad Magazine. That, and then 9/11 happened, which, as I understand it, changed everything.

So you should download this fucking wallpaper that I made. It comes in four widescreen resolutions (because only poor people have non-widescreen computers) and a super duper special iPhone® edition. It’s the nuts.

Resolution: 2560×1600 / 1920×1200 / 1680×1050 / 1280×800 / iPhone®

When you live La Vida Lohan, you button all the way to the top.

I don’t care about Lindsay Lohan. I know she switched places with Jamie Lee Curtis in that Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen movie that I liked. Also, I heard she does Gary Busey-levels of cocaine, which doesn’t bother me, and is perfectly understandable considering she has a twin sister that is a sleazy stripper — a problem which is further compounded by the fact that all the popular girls are mean to her at her new school. So, yeah, nothing she does bothers me.

What does bother me is smarmy obnoxious headlines like: ”Lindsay’s lawyer is living La Vida Lohan.”

What a sad, crushing existence it must be being the editing wizard that came up with that one. He drags his ass into the office on a Monday morning, doesn’t even have a chance to drink his first cup of stale office coffee, and, before he even sits down, he has some bitch-ass traffic manager breathing down his neck making this request:

We need a witty headline for our eleventy-twelfth Lohan article. Something really clever that will really catch the puffy eye of Jane Franzia Fridge Pack and get us that online ad revenue we so desperately crave. We need something condescending and trite that also manages to tie a washed up cokehead actress with a washed up formerly-closeted Latin pop sensation from 10 years ago. It also needs to be patently offensive to anyone with a thought in their head.”

If I were him, I’d probably be huffing industrial cleaning solvent in the supply closet.

The other nightmare possibility is that it took an office meeting of oh-so-clever copy editors to shit out this obnoxious headline before their traditional Monday lunch at P.F. Chang’s. And if it is true that it took a congress of pop culture dullards to come up with that subnormal headline, then I don’t know what to do, except go back to bed and never wake up.

Matikeef “Makh” Daniels, 28, of Pacifica, was ejected from the 2003 Chevrolet van, which had been heading south on Interstate 5 north of Medford at 5:30 a.m. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

According to Oregon State Police, the driver – 24-year-old Justin Garcia of Fresno – fell asleep and allowed the van to drift off the right shoulder of the freeway.

Police Lt. Gregg Hastings said the van carried five members of Daniels’ band, Early Graves, as well as four members of Garcia’s band, Funeral Pyre, which is based in La Habra (Orange County). The men had played at a weekend concert in Eugene and were en route to Reno.

If only this had happened in the early 90s. Then that waif Ethan Hawke could have just showed this to that other waif Winona Ryder.

No. fucking. shit.

I shouldn’t be so hard on Discovery News, what with their recent hard-hitting exposé “Sun, Kristy Swanson: Both Hot but for Different Reasons”. It’s understandable that after such exhaustive investigative reporting, the crack team at Discovery would want to downshift and report on something people have known about since, oh, I don’t know, for-fucking-ever.

Pay attention, dipshit. It's science!

My favorite part of the article is a little feature Discovery News calls “The Gist”. You see, “The Gist” is a really clever way for  those of us who are too busy with the workaday world to really get down to the brass tacks of an article.

Let me tell you, if finding out that booze makes you think ugly people are prettier comes as a shock to you, then these little factoids are going to blow your fucking mind. The only item that might be new information is number 3, and that’s only if you’ve never gotten a girl drunk enough to sleep with you, and, let’s be honest, everyone has — except maybe mormons or al qaeda or their offshoot splinter group/improv troupe: mormqaeda .

Although, all of this is pretty meaningless to me. I’m pretty easy. I’d fuck a tree — two, if I could afford it. I probably wouldn’t even have to be drunk, as long as it’s symmetrical.

Seriously, this guy looks like he’s at least 23% monosodium glutamate. Do you really think you needed to perpetrate a Shock and Awe campaign to get this guy to wolf down some of your (what we laughingly refer to as) pizza pie? You don’t think that at some point, at some moment of desperation and gluttonous self-loathing that is probably all too common in the fictional Shoyer household, that Scott wouldn’t eventually have compelled his area food poisoning dispensary to make good on their “30 Minutes or Less” policy?

And why does the big greasy tucking in come off like a promo spot for “To Catch a Predator”?

Personally delivering to all area slumber parties

Pizza commercials creep me the fuck out. Look no further than literally any commercial for Papa John’s, which, for some reason I can’t fathom, always feature the company’s founder looking lecherous as all-get-out. Never mind that eating their pizza is pretty much the equivalent of  committing incredibly prolonged suicide, this guy looks like a total creep. I’m not one to cast any dispersions, but his name is Papa John for chrissakes. “There, there. Grab another slice of Papa’s totally rohypnol-free triple meat pizza and tell ol’ Papa all about how your boyfriend doesn’t understand you. Just make sure to eat it real fast — you don’t want it to get cold.” They advertise a specialty pizza called the “Big Papa”. Let that sink in. Just make sure you wash it down with their authentic Special Garlic Dipping Sauce®. It’s so authentic, you’d swear you were in a real New York City pizzeria eating retrofitted industrial lubricant and salt.

It was on a recent grocery trip, when it dawned on me: why not mix Mexican hot sauce with peanuts? You see, the Sachs company makes a Tobasco® Hot Sauce flavored peanut that is pretty good, and I figured, if a multi-national corporation with over 100 years of food industry experience, advanced industrial food preparation equipment, and experienced food technicians at its disposal can do it, so can I.

The Peanuts: I just used the cheapest I could find at the store. Make sure you get raw peanuts, unless you want to get über crazy and buy already roasted peanuts and go for a refried bean type deal. I don’t think it will work, but if you’re that much of a loose cannon, you’re probably already saying to yourself, “Fuck this guy. He doesn’t get me. No one does,” before hauling ass on your motorcycle (Vespa scooter) to pick your stripper girlfriend (Applebees waitress). If you’re law-abiding and don’t steal your hot sauce from burrito restaurants, you’ll want to pick up your Cholula® while you’re at the store.

I know they look gross. Kind of like bloody alien testicles. Try getting that image out of your mind.

Sauce and Stuff: 2 tablespoons of oil and 2 bottles of Cholula® sauce is all you need. Soak the peanuts in the mixture.

Put the peanuts on a cookie sheet and sprinkle generously with salt. Cook at 350° for a long goddamn time. The peanut packaging say cook for 15-20 minutes, but that’s pretty much bogus after you’ve drenched them in hot sauce. I cooked them for about an hour.

Result: Not great. Basically the peanuts taste like unsalted roasted peanuts. I thought maybe the coating, because it rubs off on your fingers, would rub off on the peanuts, but no. I think maybe if I had soaked them longer, say several hours, they would have turned out better. I’ll probably try that next and report my findings never. They are pretty good if you eat them with the shell. That’s also a great way to get some extra fiber in your diet, and we all could use some more fiber in our diets. I know I sure could.

My love of Cholula® remains unabated, as does my love of oral copulation, girls with skinned knees, and genuine Liberian legal tender. My desire to cook things, however, is severely abated.

Anyway, here’s an item-by-item counterpoint:

Put down the cell phone if you’re ready to order.

Well, no shit, Dick Tracy. Everyone knows that (everyone reading your article, at least), and even if they don’t, they have no obligation to offer the cashier more than their order. From the article:

I think it helps if the customer acknowledges the worker right off the bat, like asking, “How are you?” rather than just barking the order and not making eye contact,” Renae says. “A little skotche of humanity.”

“A skotche of humanity.” Just say that to yourself. “A skotche.” You are a cashier. Your job is to take my order, barked or otherwise. If I can do that and operate a phone at the same time, more power to me. Something that also bothers me, is this idea that, as a customer, I have to acknowledge the cashier “right off the bat” with some form of banal pleasantry. Let me get this straight, you work part time for an hourly wage that is above minimum, you get insurance, and, on top of that, you want tips, and I’m the one that is supposed to initiate conversation?  Fuck that. I don’t want to pull a Mel Gibson, but shouldn’t you also blow me?

Realize that menus aren’t universal or open to interpretation.

“Take a minute to evaluate where you are when you step through the doors,” begins this idiotic Pro-Tip®. Turns out these baristas can’t handle it if you order a frappuccino and all they offer is a mochaccino, even if it’s exactly the same concept. Also, know your sizes. Don’t be up in my coffee shop ordering some Venti® Frappuccino® bullshit when all we gots is Mochaccinos® and, it’s Large® here, not Venti®. You know where the only place I get size bullshit is? Starbucks. I don’t go to a different coffee shop and order anything other than standard sizes (small, medium, large). Only at Starbucks do I get obnoxiously corrected: Smalls are Tall, Mediums become Grande, and larges of course are Venti. The best thing is that this information is cheerfully relayed to me in the same fashion as an under-the-breath “fuck you”, after I order. They know what I mean, they just have to correct me. It’s probably corporate policy.

Don’t treat the shop as your personal space.

Actually, I don’t need to quote anything from the article for this. I’m just going to give you a big Pro-Tip®: Treat the shop as your personal space. That’s exactly why they have upholstered couches and free wi-fi. They want you to stay because the longer you stay, the more likely you are to buy more of their shit. That’s their whole plan, so hang out, charge your laptop, surf the interGoogles®. See if they kick your ass out. Starbucks subsidizes these expenses through their overpriced food items, coffee mugs, and shit heel Kenny-G/Alanis Morissette “That’s What I Call Easy Listening” CDs. It pisses their cashiers off, because if you’re on the interGoogles® updating your FaceSpace® twattles, you’re not tipping them. Also, their advice uses the phrase “follow protocol” at. a. fucking. coffee. shop. Follow protocol and fuck right off.

Tip when it’s necessary, and sometimes even when it’s not.

Don’t tip when it’s not necessary. It defeats the purpose of tipping.

And check out this gem: “It takes a village to get you that cup of coffee.” Woah, shit. I had no idea. They’re right, though. It takes a village of underpaid, underfed child laborers to get you that cup of coffee. I kid, but I kid with hate. It also takes a village to get you that Arch Deluxe® and fries too, but I guess that’s beside the point. Other things that take a village to bring to you include your mail, your cable TV, and your groceries, so get to tithing motherfucker. I guess those things aren’t delivered by a chipper, acne-free face with a plastic smile so fuck them, right?

Be patient.

It takes time to concoct your beverage. It’s not just a cup of coffee with some cream on top of it. That’s some handcrafted bullshit right there. It’s not like corporate doesn’t have that shit on lock down. No way! It takes years to learn how to properly concoct these caffeinated libations. The apprenticeship program alone takes upwards of four hours a day for nearly a week of training just to work yourself up to ice mochas. So you’re going to want to be patient. I know to the untrained eye it just looks like they’re pouring liquid from one container into another container, blending that liquid, and transferring it to another container, but really there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that you’re not seeing.

Side note:

Every time I end up ordering something at a coffee shop, I’m reminded of this: