I am pleased to report that the first return from a google image search for “face ass strangling” is none other than 
our governor here in North Carolina, Bev Perdue. I am uncertain what this says about our governess’ aides, but she seems pretty pleased with herself and her peanut gallery appears to offer a modest congratulatory clap. Face ass strangling is a bit of a doozy when it comes to syntax. The construction begs for a hyphen or two: face-ass strangling; face ass-strangling, or face-ass-strangling. A simple boolean search for these iterations satisfies even the most incurious among us. Our first return links to 
an image (Img.2) of a woman, NeNe, accused of strangling another woman, Kim, with a smirk on her face. Our second return lands us in a gym 
filled with individuals presumably having finished the act of face ass-strangling. Finally, we point google image search to the grail of this absurd construction and return again to the image at right: a gym filled with face ass-stranglers and face-ass-stranglers. While the significance of this pleasant discovery remains at large, I am pleased to report that a back of the hand estimate of face ass strangl* fanciers in the world is approximately between 3 and 30 after making adjustments for background noise.
Filed under: Craigslist
I just posted more junk on Craigslist with some anticipation cut with anxiety. I meet weird people through the online bulletin board. When I first moved back to the States I ended up living with some nutter, Mark, of Annapolis, MD. Mark survived inspired 3 divorces and decorated the downstairs of his home with the wreckage. Mark is an alcoholic. Mark owns several beer cozies. I thought beer cozies were a joke – who actually has a fit about a cold beer bottle?
Souless, empty, and alone. Like Mark.
Each time Mark returned from bars early in the AM, I would wake to the sound of beer cans spilling out of the truck cab. Now, this is not an exaggeration. Not a fuckton, not an assload, maybe just a shitpound of beer cans, but they would fall out of the truck cab when he opened the driver side door. Next he would stagger towards the house clutching a beer (in a cozy- as an aside, I think Mark could benefit from a beerneck), slamming the front door, followed by a frozen food disastering in the kitchen, and screaming at me about having my windows open, or whatever else was on his mind. In sum, a performance driven encapsulation of the sentiment, “Fuck my life.”
Not a beer cozy.
Craigslist also introduced me to some pretty outlandish scams driven by opportunists with a feeble grasp of “opportunity” in common parlance. I have put items up for sale – an IKEA chair say – and heard back from individuals who really want that chair – really want that chair – but are deaf, dumb, blind, and living several States distant. I believe a scam is best when it’s at least plausible. Tailoring an email for a check-scam or escrow-scam is believable for something over 200 dollars. But a 5 dollar chair?
Today I expect great things. Don’t disappoint me Craig, get me on that list and get with the strange.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I chew gum because I’m stupid. I have never been able to get it in my head that I’m chawing on non-food for some feeble sense of oral pleasure. I don’t even like gum. My jaw hurts after noshing the stuff and I feel cheated. So long gum, I’m done with you. After this piece.
This is the tagline from an ad-campaign for Oreo something or other running the wall of some lonely roadside filling station in Pennsylvania. There is a lesson in here somewhere that revolves around wins and losses for the end-user; the individual at the bottom of a consumer chain.
A powerful message from Hershey, PA
My partner is convinced I go around looking for sneaky penises, so I won’t even bother with the ejaculatory, mammographic, or other evacuatory references. Moving on from the sophomoric – I’ll be honest, I have no idea how this kind of message could compel an individual to buy anything, food least of all. Foodstuffs that could be ‘bursting with more stuff,’ should really be limited to items prepared with stuffing, i.e. ‘bursting with more stuffing.’ I could imagine a fancy tech instrument bursting with more stuff – stuff that is so fancy and new-fangled that I couldn’t hope to understand – and, keep talking, I might loosen my purse strings. A bank account could be “bursting with more stuff,” as could a stock portfolio. My best estimate is that this kind of advertising is a flavor of the Linen’s n Shit brand marketing where R&D dollars were spent on bad ideas and shifty designer drugs trips with bad endings.
This kind of advertising was already questionable after Ben & Jerry’s first showed up on the heavy end of the culinary scene. (As an aside, it’s not often that I daydream of bellyflops, but these two men…) Ben & Jerry’s accomplished two things: first, it raised the baseline for mass-batch produced ice cream. Second, it lowered that bar by stuffing ice cream full of candy bars, brownies, marshmallows, cheesecake, and small children. I remember the first time I had “Phish Food” and shortly thereafter I recall something about the veneer of the bathroom in which I tossed my cookies.
Food?
Another palatable interpretation of “bursting with more stuff” involves my buddy, Sarah, who once encountered an overly zealous airport security guard sometime in 2002. This individual confiscated Sarah’s grapefruit, citing security concerns. When Sarah offered to eat the grapefruit, the security guard said, “no, we will detonate your grapefruit.” Bursting with more stuff. Exploding fruit and stock portfolios. Possibly pornography, but this kind of promise spoils the punchline.
This morning I ran across another instance of a food that is overfilled with stuffiness, and no one wins. Admittedly, I shopped around for one this morning in hopes of skipping out good health for the next month, but here we are:
Rocking hard at 2,600 calories, 135 grams of fat (59 saturated), 263 grams of sugar and 1,700 milligrams of sodium
No gourmet restaurant would advertise a single item on their menu as “bursting with more stuff.” No self- or other-respecting cook would tell his or her dinner guests that the food they had just enjoyed was “bursting with more stuff.” I have encountered fast-food restaurants that promise shit burgers with more stuff, but never to the point of bursting. Why would you stick something like this in your mouth? Enlighten me.
Filed under: toilets
People get away with too much when their sensitivity to social peril trumps moral and ethical obligations to biological function. Specific, yes, but perfectly captured on the faces of people fleeing single-occupancy unisex bathrooms in restaurants, schools, and other public spaces around the world. People know shame, and on some level I suspect the fecal flee-er is running away from disgust at his or her own inability to properly defecate.
5 out of 6 humans should be eliminated on the basis that they cannot correctly sit their ass down.
But someone does clean up the mess. And while you might think (yes Ms. Pink Dress at 10:48am) that it’s someone else’s job to clean up the heaving septic maw, certainly less time would be spent cleaning up your mess if you just let someone know. Or if, you know, you didn’t try flushing your pad.
An embarrassingly high bar is set for humans.
While I would like to think there is a shared social standard for public defecation (please, shit how you want in your own home), I think the issue is complicated immeasurably by the stigma attached to defecation. Perhaps every step in a direction away from the public bathroom strips a degree of obligation from the conscience of the progenitor – fleeing his or her biological creation disparages human baseness in a a kind of proactive biological commentary. And you don’t have to clean that shit up.
On the subject of toilets – I present you with the toilet snorkel, which Inconsult would have you believe works as an aqua lung in the case that you’re stuck in a burning building or in the event of atmospheric dispersal of an airborne pathogen. 
If you can survive the embarassment of being found by a rescue team huffing sewage fumage – fine – but you better get things sorted with the people shitting all over your emergency plan.
Filed under: Restaurants
Corks is a bad restaurant. I had dinner there with a friend approximately 1.5 years ago and the fare was decent, but certainly not worth the price tag. Following their management shift I figured my chances would be reasonable, and given its proximity to Pub Dog I figured I couldn’t lose. And I wasn’t wrong – Pub Dog remains fantastic from the service to the atmosphere. Corks is still a bad restaurant. The fare is unreasonably priced and no joy whatsoever to eat under the wait staff. Our waitress poured pellegrino in our wine glasses. Then left them on the table – you know … so we could… get the extra buzz from the polluted wine? The fuck? So after dismal appetizers (bitter greens with an unbalanced vinagrette and no paired sugars – no candied nuts, no pears, no cheese, etc.) and limp beets we had main courses that would make Petit Louis look like 3 star Michelin fare. Totally unimpressed, our waitress then swung by and offered to comp our problems by offering us free dessert.
Why, and this is a general question that goes out to most restaurant owners, would you EVER consider prolonging the stay of unhappy patrons? You will not make their evening better by offering more food from a menu they dislike under service they dislike in a room they’ve come to dislike. If anything, you comp the check, or part of it, and send them off with your apologies. To be perfectly fair – the peppers were delicious, and I’ve marked the menu items with green for good and red for bad. Notice the green marks are by and large items prepared by other entities.
Corks, you broke my heart twice. Get your act together. Stop charging for services not rendered. Until then, eat at Pub Dog. Good salads, good beer, and take a couple grand marnier shots – delicious.
Filed under: Bowling
Duckpin bowling was first developed in Maryland, which is generally considered a flag – might be red; waved in semaphore; perhaps hung limp like a truce. Other things invented in Maryland include the beerneck. And nothing else. Either way, arriving at a duckpin bowling alley perfectly captures the emerging cognition that someone fucked up and wants you to obscure their mistake with stilted conversation and lite beer.
Romantic as stoned, white-Russian-drinking Lebowski’s might have it in their heads, yeah it’s painful to admit it, but bowling is less an activity and more an acquiescence to someone’s bad planning. Bowling generally has little gravity for the casual passerby; people don’t walk past an alley and decide, “fuck it, why not go bowling?”
Regardless, I love bowling, and if no one else is willing to claim exception, here I am. I enjoy a game that hardly penalizes high BAC. I digress – the vitriol here is reserved for duckpin bowling,
A youth enjoys inebriation and casual parenting.
which has about as much merit in terms of sport as hurling a croquet ball at a fence post. Some might deign to harsh the mellow of Candlepin bowling, but this is as an interesting take on traditional bowling and satisfies most of the skill set associated with 10-pin bowling albeit with Canada’s Spartan flair.
Duckpin bowling begins and ends with disappointment. Fun is elusive at the start, and 12 drinks into fun-finding nets about as much delight as the wincing recovery from stomach flu. Someone might leave something fun on the ground, but it’s your job to scrape that crap up and enjoy it. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough.
