THWACK
Into the balls goes the foot.
It is not an impulsive act, nor is it impetuous or unplanned. It is the last, desparate act of a long suffering, defenseless nerd who has finally grown weary of torment. This image I am painting for you is not the nerd, however, because I think, by reading this blog, you've probably been there as many times as me, no, this image is the unfortunate recpient of the thwack.
Down he goes, and slowly, always slowly, and with a variety of expressions on his face that tell the same tale every time. First, there is a moment of shock, where he simply cannot
believe that you had the guts to strike out. Within half a second, however, is the sudden realization that he is very very hurt. The pain of a properly connected ball thwack with the foot is the most intense pain that any human being could ever suffer and remain conscious.
He always does the same thing, at this point. He is not yet resigned to his fate. He remains strong, in the misguided belief that continuing to stand upright is going to be possible for him any time in the near or even distant future.
As he slowly lowers himself to the gound, his consciousness inevitably steers towards the same variety of subjects. First, he is shocked and dismayed that he was so vulnerable in the first place, and that he had no idea that with all of his alpha dog style of domination and torment, that you always had this option available to you.
Second, to his horror, he connects the dots and realizes that not only was he vulnerable in this way, but that he had always been vulnerable in this way, and that you were probably always aware of it. It boggles his mind that you had never exercised this option before, but after all of his torment and infliction of pain and humiliation, that you had had the long suffering patience to avoid taking this avenue until this one final moment.
Then, finally, as he curls into a fetal position on the soggy grass of the soccer field where so recently he had been, in his mind, such an imposing and undefeatable figure, it finally dawns on him that all this time, you had been patiently tolerating him, forgiving him, putting up with him, unwilling to trade your freedom for the violence that you were capable of imparting in a single THWACK, because of which you were most certainly going to spend the rest of the day in the principal's office, and if it was a christian school, particularly the fifth grade (if I remember correctly) you were going to get quite a spanking, but it was all worth it, to show the biggest asshole in the class that he was not anything close to the person that he thought he was.
Life is balance.
-E
Monday, March 31, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
HOW I MET KAREN, AND AM BEING STALKED BY A NEANDERTHAL
IT STARTED WITH BO MOO JABOO
I had an eight foot tall girlfriend one time and although the sex was great, the beatings were a little hard to take. She was also really hairy.
Not that I don't like hairy women, (I especially like going down on a hairy hoo hoo and feeling the hair against my toungue) but she didn't really take care of it and it was kind of tangly and stinky.
To tell the truth, it was when I was in school and we found this paleolithic block of ice from the first ice age (the first ice age of the paleolithic age, so it was from about 80,000 BC) and we unthawed her and she was really nice but very angry about something that she was not able to articulate.
Anyway, we fell in love (I think) and had lots of really good sex but frankly there was a language barrier and also a really big difference in our choice of restaurants (she only ate meat).
The thing that finally tore us apart was when she tried to drive one of our horses over a cliff. Apparently that was something she had done before. I tried to explain to her that I had a perfectly good totinos in the freezer but then it got really violent and she bit me and I never saw her again. She's out there somewhere, and god bless her, but also, frankly, I'm pretty over the drama.
So Karen and I met in siberia in 1996.
How I met Karen
So here is how I met Karen, the love of my life: It began in 1986, when I was the foreign correspondant to the Soviet Union for Classic Rock 97.9 here in Tampa Bay. My boss was a DJ named Ted Pritchard and he sent me there to cover this music festival (the main act was the hot Russian band Productive Minds with their hit single, "You Say Nothing, I Agree"). I was supposed to interview them. Anyway they had this gala awards banquet in the basement of a posh downtown tractor factory and I was arrested for "lewd and unsanitary behavior" (or so they said). I was disguised as a cheap prostitute and crashed the affair and there was some altercation between me and Tip O'neal and Jean Kirkpatrick ... that's another story .. but anyway...
I was sent to this Gulag (which I thought was the russian word for Barbeque, BOY WAS I WRONG ABOUT THAT I SHIT YOU NOT!) so I was there for many years until apparently the Soviet Union fell and they forgot all about us.
Now, our job at this gulag was to make vodka from the potato fields that surrounded it (potatoes don't grow very well in Siberia but we made do). After the Soviets abandoned us, all we had to survive on was vodka. We never had any food or anything, just vodka, but it was ok, I think. I don't really remember too much.
Anywho, it was 1996, 10 years after my sentence began that Karen was deposited in the Gulag (somehow, I don't know, I thought they had forgotten about us, so that was a big topic of drunkie discussion with the guards, CONSTANTLY) and she had been captured after fighting the Hamas Army in Syria or someplace. She was a sniper, trained by the Chinese Communists who had defected to Israel and was working for the Mosad. They sent her to Syria to take out this training camp and she killed about 800 people before the Russians came in and took her out with some kind of stun rocket thing or whatever, she couldn't really tell me too much about it because she woke up in the gulag.
So we fell in love, after a bunch of times that she tried to kill me, and also this is interesting, she didn't drink so she had to live off of me .... you know, for nourishment, ok I won't go there, but anyway I kept her alive and then finally in 2006 AFTER 20 YEARS we finally escaped. it was quite an adventure.
How we escaped
So, Karen and I had been imprisoned, me for 20 years, her for 10, when the Russians found out that our camp still existed. Someone had discovered it on something called Google Earth (whatever that is). They decided to exterminate all of us by sending us to this place called Kasputan Yar where they had this thing called the Buran that was going to shoot us all into space and crash us into the sun.
Atleast that was what the buzz in the camp was.
Anyway, they put us all into these boxcars and we had been travelling across the tundra for days. They would stop every four hours and let us out for air.
This one time, we were out for air when this dude walks up to me and tells me that he is a US senator and that as an American it was my duty to help him escape.
YEAH RIGHT! TWENTY FUCKING YEARS IN A GULAG WITH NOT ONE SINGLE OUNCE OF HELP FROM MY COUNTRY TO GET ME OUT?
So I said, "OK, Here's what we'll do. I'll create a diversion, and you run for those trees." and then he said that I was a great American.
Guess what? I know I'm a "Great American" and I don't need some fucking weenie senator to tell me that.
So I said "GO!" and he started running.
I created my diversion:
I yelled "Look! That man's escaping!!!"
In all the shouting and gunfire, Karen and I bolted in the opposite direction and before you know it, we were in Finland, eating pickled herring and having monster sex without holding our noses.
So now here we are, and she and I are doing pretty well. I got my old job back, except I've changed my stage name from "Warped Erik" to "LL Cool Beans", and she makes a lot of money from these things called "contracts" (I don't know what that means, but it puts bread on the table) and we've got several kids and have monster sex every night in the chat room. Life couldn't be better!
I have a couple of problems with YOU TWENTY FIRST CENTURY PEOPLE, however:
1) In 22 years, you haven't cured ONE disease, or come up with an improved cough medicine (dextromethorphan and that gufanasinaisnaisn thing, that was from the 1950's for christs sake!!!)
2) There are still no robots or flying cars (OK, someone gave me this thing called a ROOMBA which all it does is crash around the house, get stuck, and bitch at me! Also, whats is your epitome of movies? Star Wars??? I had that 40 years ago! What else? Star Trek? SAME F-ING BULLSHIT)
3) You are using the SAME space shuttle (WTF is up with that??? the SAME space shuttle, and 2 of them blew up???? And you are surprised???)
4) Everyone keeps telling me that something called "cell phones" and "the internet" are the greatest recent achievements of civilization, but these things make no sense to me. Not getting it. Whatever these things are, I think it's all in your heads!)
5) Everyone is BITCHING that gasoline costs 3 bucks a gallon. Are you fucking kidding me? Three dollars? After 35 years since it was TWO dollars? GIVE ME A BREAK YOU BABIES!
6) You have a THOUSAND TV CHANNELS and there's still NOTHING WORTH WATCHING!
Still, I can't complain too much. The Neolithic Revolution, which started at around 10,000 BC produced most of what is still commonplace today, and with the exception of the atom bomb, computer, and apollo program, there hasn't been a nearly comparable advance in civiization since. Think about it: The neolithic period produced agriculture, domestication of animals, construction of houses with wood, stone and clay, marriage, government, religeon, beer, wine, war, property, commerce, factories, borders, kitchen utensils and plates, weapons, art, smoking, sports, cities, writing, furnature, landscaping, plumbing, math, shaving, cloth, proper footwear, maps... the list goes on...
So what have we done since 5000 BC? Not fucking much if you ask me! We've refined these things, made them better, but the one thing that's been around since the dawn of man is still the one thing that Karen and I do five times a day, and once in front of the cam on this thing you call the "internet"...
SEX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL!!!
(actually, I hear that the bucs finally won a superbowl, so I guess that's pretty freakin' cool)
LOVE YA!
-E
I had an eight foot tall girlfriend one time and although the sex was great, the beatings were a little hard to take. She was also really hairy.
Not that I don't like hairy women, (I especially like going down on a hairy hoo hoo and feeling the hair against my toungue) but she didn't really take care of it and it was kind of tangly and stinky.
To tell the truth, it was when I was in school and we found this paleolithic block of ice from the first ice age (the first ice age of the paleolithic age, so it was from about 80,000 BC) and we unthawed her and she was really nice but very angry about something that she was not able to articulate.
Anyway, we fell in love (I think) and had lots of really good sex but frankly there was a language barrier and also a really big difference in our choice of restaurants (she only ate meat).
The thing that finally tore us apart was when she tried to drive one of our horses over a cliff. Apparently that was something she had done before. I tried to explain to her that I had a perfectly good totinos in the freezer but then it got really violent and she bit me and I never saw her again. She's out there somewhere, and god bless her, but also, frankly, I'm pretty over the drama.
So Karen and I met in siberia in 1996.
How I met Karen
So here is how I met Karen, the love of my life: It began in 1986, when I was the foreign correspondant to the Soviet Union for Classic Rock 97.9 here in Tampa Bay. My boss was a DJ named Ted Pritchard and he sent me there to cover this music festival (the main act was the hot Russian band Productive Minds with their hit single, "You Say Nothing, I Agree"). I was supposed to interview them. Anyway they had this gala awards banquet in the basement of a posh downtown tractor factory and I was arrested for "lewd and unsanitary behavior" (or so they said). I was disguised as a cheap prostitute and crashed the affair and there was some altercation between me and Tip O'neal and Jean Kirkpatrick ... that's another story .. but anyway...
I was sent to this Gulag (which I thought was the russian word for Barbeque, BOY WAS I WRONG ABOUT THAT I SHIT YOU NOT!) so I was there for many years until apparently the Soviet Union fell and they forgot all about us.
Now, our job at this gulag was to make vodka from the potato fields that surrounded it (potatoes don't grow very well in Siberia but we made do). After the Soviets abandoned us, all we had to survive on was vodka. We never had any food or anything, just vodka, but it was ok, I think. I don't really remember too much.
Anywho, it was 1996, 10 years after my sentence began that Karen was deposited in the Gulag (somehow, I don't know, I thought they had forgotten about us, so that was a big topic of drunkie discussion with the guards, CONSTANTLY) and she had been captured after fighting the Hamas Army in Syria or someplace. She was a sniper, trained by the Chinese Communists who had defected to Israel and was working for the Mosad. They sent her to Syria to take out this training camp and she killed about 800 people before the Russians came in and took her out with some kind of stun rocket thing or whatever, she couldn't really tell me too much about it because she woke up in the gulag.
So we fell in love, after a bunch of times that she tried to kill me, and also this is interesting, she didn't drink so she had to live off of me .... you know, for nourishment, ok I won't go there, but anyway I kept her alive and then finally in 2006 AFTER 20 YEARS we finally escaped. it was quite an adventure.
How we escaped
So, Karen and I had been imprisoned, me for 20 years, her for 10, when the Russians found out that our camp still existed. Someone had discovered it on something called Google Earth (whatever that is). They decided to exterminate all of us by sending us to this place called Kasputan Yar where they had this thing called the Buran that was going to shoot us all into space and crash us into the sun.
Atleast that was what the buzz in the camp was.
Anyway, they put us all into these boxcars and we had been travelling across the tundra for days. They would stop every four hours and let us out for air.
This one time, we were out for air when this dude walks up to me and tells me that he is a US senator and that as an American it was my duty to help him escape.
YEAH RIGHT! TWENTY FUCKING YEARS IN A GULAG WITH NOT ONE SINGLE OUNCE OF HELP FROM MY COUNTRY TO GET ME OUT?
So I said, "OK, Here's what we'll do. I'll create a diversion, and you run for those trees." and then he said that I was a great American.
Guess what? I know I'm a "Great American" and I don't need some fucking weenie senator to tell me that.
So I said "GO!" and he started running.
I created my diversion:
I yelled "Look! That man's escaping!!!"
In all the shouting and gunfire, Karen and I bolted in the opposite direction and before you know it, we were in Finland, eating pickled herring and having monster sex without holding our noses.
So now here we are, and she and I are doing pretty well. I got my old job back, except I've changed my stage name from "Warped Erik" to "LL Cool Beans", and she makes a lot of money from these things called "contracts" (I don't know what that means, but it puts bread on the table) and we've got several kids and have monster sex every night in the chat room. Life couldn't be better!
I have a couple of problems with YOU TWENTY FIRST CENTURY PEOPLE, however:
1) In 22 years, you haven't cured ONE disease, or come up with an improved cough medicine (dextromethorphan and that gufanasinaisnaisn thing, that was from the 1950's for christs sake!!!)
2) There are still no robots or flying cars (OK, someone gave me this thing called a ROOMBA which all it does is crash around the house, get stuck, and bitch at me! Also, whats is your epitome of movies? Star Wars??? I had that 40 years ago! What else? Star Trek? SAME F-ING BULLSHIT)
3) You are using the SAME space shuttle (WTF is up with that??? the SAME space shuttle, and 2 of them blew up???? And you are surprised???)
4) Everyone keeps telling me that something called "cell phones" and "the internet" are the greatest recent achievements of civilization, but these things make no sense to me. Not getting it. Whatever these things are, I think it's all in your heads!)
5) Everyone is BITCHING that gasoline costs 3 bucks a gallon. Are you fucking kidding me? Three dollars? After 35 years since it was TWO dollars? GIVE ME A BREAK YOU BABIES!
6) You have a THOUSAND TV CHANNELS and there's still NOTHING WORTH WATCHING!
Still, I can't complain too much. The Neolithic Revolution, which started at around 10,000 BC produced most of what is still commonplace today, and with the exception of the atom bomb, computer, and apollo program, there hasn't been a nearly comparable advance in civiization since. Think about it: The neolithic period produced agriculture, domestication of animals, construction of houses with wood, stone and clay, marriage, government, religeon, beer, wine, war, property, commerce, factories, borders, kitchen utensils and plates, weapons, art, smoking, sports, cities, writing, furnature, landscaping, plumbing, math, shaving, cloth, proper footwear, maps... the list goes on...
So what have we done since 5000 BC? Not fucking much if you ask me! We've refined these things, made them better, but the one thing that's been around since the dawn of man is still the one thing that Karen and I do five times a day, and once in front of the cam on this thing you call the "internet"...
SEX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL!!!
(actually, I hear that the bucs finally won a superbowl, so I guess that's pretty freakin' cool)
LOVE YA!
-E
Monday, February 25, 2008
A Brand New Hobby!
I am a 42 year old computer programmer with 5 kids and a beautiful wife. Still, life can get kind of hum-drum and boring. Having regular routines is pretty important, especially for the kids, but sometimes you feel like you are just going to go nuts without some variety.
My wife and I recently discovered something really exciting to do in our spare time, sometimes even spontaneously when we aren't planning it too! We've been doing this for a while now and I have to tell you, it's really put the spice back into our marriage. Our "Naughty" new hobby isn't something we would probably admit to any of our friends either, but I can blog about it because, well, nobody reads my blog.
What is this new hobby, you ask? Maybe I shouldn't talk about this openly. Ah, what the heck. The new hobby that is giving my wife and I such a thrill lately is stealing cars. Thats right, stealing cars is really fun.
Now, you might think that stealing cars is not something that people should be doing, especially if you have kids and responsibilities, but before you judge me you have to think about it a little bit and imagine what it's like. It's a BLAST!
I stole this car yesterday, I think it was a Camry or something, and someone must have noticed my jerking around with the steering wheel column and starting it with a screwdriver because I didn't get four blocks before there were two cops right behind me. You know how when they show on TV the cops in hot persuit, and you someone always says "its stupid to run because you always get caught" but actually that's not true. The truth is you hardly ever get caught. You just can't let the chase go on so long that they got a helicopter involved.
Also, what most people that get caught do wrong is that they stay on the road. Cops are pretty good drivers but get them off the road and they slow down, because they don't want to die. Something else that most people don't know is that if a building isn't made with concrete blocks, it won't even slow down a car going eighty miles an hour.
Lots of times when I'm driving around, going to work, or actually looking for cars to steal, I focus on the neighborhoods and landscapes and check out places where you can take a car off of the road and shake anything that might be chasing you. Sometimes I actually drive my car as though I was being chased, for practice. Sometimes that actually results in starting a chase :D
After a while, simply stealing cars gets boring so you can keep it interesting by doing the kinds of things in a stolen car that would would NEVER do with your own car or a car that belongs to someone you care about. Also, you can do stuff with a stolen car that you would also never do in your own car because someone will get your license plate and the police would be waiting at your house when you got home. You can be completely anonymous in a stolen car, especially if you have a ski mask.
Here's a fun thing to do: Steal a car and then drive somewhere like a kids sporting event or an outdoor mall where there is a large crowd of people and you drive the stolen car right into the center of the crowd. Before anyone can really do anything, you get out of the car (with the ski mask on) and start firing shots into the air. Unload the whole magazine, really quick, bang bang bang. Watch everyone scatter! All you see is asses and elbows moving away from you in every direction. It's hilarious!
Then there was this other time we stole (sometimes my wife and I do it together, other times we just operate independantly because usually one of us has to be home with the kids) and we drove it all around the inside of parkside mall making a huge mess just like what they did in the Blues Brothers movie. That was a riot, we were passing back and forth the camcorder. I should post that somewhere, maybe if I can figure out how to pixellate our faces.
This other time I took a Ford Explorer and got about 2 miles before I realized there was a kid in the back. He was so scared, I was trying to take a picture of him with my camera phone but it didn't come out. I dropped him of near a fire truck that was parked at 7-11.
Anyway, fun stuff, and I could go on and on but I gotta get up and start picking up around the house before my wife gets home or she'll wonder what the heck I've been doing for the last half hour.
My wife and I recently discovered something really exciting to do in our spare time, sometimes even spontaneously when we aren't planning it too! We've been doing this for a while now and I have to tell you, it's really put the spice back into our marriage. Our "Naughty" new hobby isn't something we would probably admit to any of our friends either, but I can blog about it because, well, nobody reads my blog.
What is this new hobby, you ask? Maybe I shouldn't talk about this openly. Ah, what the heck. The new hobby that is giving my wife and I such a thrill lately is stealing cars. Thats right, stealing cars is really fun.
Now, you might think that stealing cars is not something that people should be doing, especially if you have kids and responsibilities, but before you judge me you have to think about it a little bit and imagine what it's like. It's a BLAST!
I stole this car yesterday, I think it was a Camry or something, and someone must have noticed my jerking around with the steering wheel column and starting it with a screwdriver because I didn't get four blocks before there were two cops right behind me. You know how when they show on TV the cops in hot persuit, and you someone always says "its stupid to run because you always get caught" but actually that's not true. The truth is you hardly ever get caught. You just can't let the chase go on so long that they got a helicopter involved.
Also, what most people that get caught do wrong is that they stay on the road. Cops are pretty good drivers but get them off the road and they slow down, because they don't want to die. Something else that most people don't know is that if a building isn't made with concrete blocks, it won't even slow down a car going eighty miles an hour.
Lots of times when I'm driving around, going to work, or actually looking for cars to steal, I focus on the neighborhoods and landscapes and check out places where you can take a car off of the road and shake anything that might be chasing you. Sometimes I actually drive my car as though I was being chased, for practice. Sometimes that actually results in starting a chase :D
After a while, simply stealing cars gets boring so you can keep it interesting by doing the kinds of things in a stolen car that would would NEVER do with your own car or a car that belongs to someone you care about. Also, you can do stuff with a stolen car that you would also never do in your own car because someone will get your license plate and the police would be waiting at your house when you got home. You can be completely anonymous in a stolen car, especially if you have a ski mask.
Here's a fun thing to do: Steal a car and then drive somewhere like a kids sporting event or an outdoor mall where there is a large crowd of people and you drive the stolen car right into the center of the crowd. Before anyone can really do anything, you get out of the car (with the ski mask on) and start firing shots into the air. Unload the whole magazine, really quick, bang bang bang. Watch everyone scatter! All you see is asses and elbows moving away from you in every direction. It's hilarious!
Then there was this other time we stole (sometimes my wife and I do it together, other times we just operate independantly because usually one of us has to be home with the kids) and we drove it all around the inside of parkside mall making a huge mess just like what they did in the Blues Brothers movie. That was a riot, we were passing back and forth the camcorder. I should post that somewhere, maybe if I can figure out how to pixellate our faces.
This other time I took a Ford Explorer and got about 2 miles before I realized there was a kid in the back. He was so scared, I was trying to take a picture of him with my camera phone but it didn't come out. I dropped him of near a fire truck that was parked at 7-11.
Anyway, fun stuff, and I could go on and on but I gotta get up and start picking up around the house before my wife gets home or she'll wonder what the heck I've been doing for the last half hour.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Nancy Hulda Morris Olson Mahusay Palantios 1937-2008
My mother was born to a family of Norwegian immigrants in Boston. When she grew up she fell in love with a greek man named George Palantios. They wanted to get married but because he was greek her father refused to allow it. Instead, she was allowed to marry the son of Swedish immigrants from Brooklyn. She was studying medicine and he was studying biology but later it was revealed that he had been harboring a secret desire to be a dirt poor paster of the smallest little church in the tiniest town he could find in Vermont and live like the Amish without actually being Amish.
Much to his chagrin, she managed to achieve a masters degree from UVM where she also learned, to her surprise, that she had rights. She also learned that she really didn't like being the wife of a dirt poor paster of the smallest church in the smallest town in Vermont so they decided to see if moving the shittiest town in Florida and getting horrible government jobs working at a state mental institution and tazering their children with culture shock would help their marriage.
Surprisingly it did not. A few years after their divorce, my mother married a Phillipino psychiatrist and also discovered anti depressant drugs. For about 15 happy years they lived and worked together, starting their own practice in a less shitty Florida town. She earned her PhD in psychology and even developed a proficiency with Novell Netware. He passed away, and she retired.
But her heart had been broken now for fifty years. She never forgot, yet never spoke of George Palantios.
George never forgot her either. For fifty years George had remained unmarried, and everything he experienced, for better or for worse, he often imagined being able to experience it with Nancy. He talked about Nancy often. Fifty years after his heart had been broken, he was sharing an old story with an friend where he was now living, in Burlington, Vermont, and his friend surprised him with Nancy's phone number.
They talked on the phone for a year. Then they got married. They had a little time together.
Much to his chagrin, she managed to achieve a masters degree from UVM where she also learned, to her surprise, that she had rights. She also learned that she really didn't like being the wife of a dirt poor paster of the smallest church in the smallest town in Vermont so they decided to see if moving the shittiest town in Florida and getting horrible government jobs working at a state mental institution and tazering their children with culture shock would help their marriage.
Surprisingly it did not. A few years after their divorce, my mother married a Phillipino psychiatrist and also discovered anti depressant drugs. For about 15 happy years they lived and worked together, starting their own practice in a less shitty Florida town. She earned her PhD in psychology and even developed a proficiency with Novell Netware. He passed away, and she retired.
But her heart had been broken now for fifty years. She never forgot, yet never spoke of George Palantios.
George never forgot her either. For fifty years George had remained unmarried, and everything he experienced, for better or for worse, he often imagined being able to experience it with Nancy. He talked about Nancy often. Fifty years after his heart had been broken, he was sharing an old story with an friend where he was now living, in Burlington, Vermont, and his friend surprised him with Nancy's phone number.
They talked on the phone for a year. Then they got married. They had a little time together.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
It was the damnedest thing
Telephone ringing
AFB: Public Affairs, Sergeant Reed.
Joe: Hi, my name is Joe Jones, I’m with the Globe.
AFB: What can I do for you Mr. Jones?
Joe: I’m following up on a story and I was just wondering if I could get some information on some events that occurred last night?
AFB: OK.
Joe: We had several people call the paper and I’ve talk to some others who say they saw some kind of UFO in the sky around 6 o’clock last night. I’m trying to coordinate the stories and decipher whether or not they mistook some kind of military or commercial aircraft… you know…
AFB: OK. What can I tell you?
Joe: Well? I talked to the airport up in the city and they said they didn’t have any flights over the town last night, they all go north, you know…
AFB: I know, they can’t fly over the base.
Joe: Exactly, so it must have been some kind of military aircraft. Can you tell me if you have any activity in the area last night that could have been mistook for a UFO?
AFB: I don’t know, we’ve got a lot of things. Can you be more specific?
Joe: Well folks in town say they saw something, some of them described it as a lot of lights. This one guy, he’s a pilot, he said it wasn’t a plane. Said it was a mile long and moved like nothing he’d ever seen. Couple of fellas said they thought they saw some jets chasing it.
AFB: Yeah.
Joe: Then it just took off. Said it went straight up.
AFB: Yeah.
Joe. Yeah, what?
AFB: Yeah. That happened.
Joe: What happened?
AFB: It was the damnedest thing. They said we got this thing on radar coming straight at us, and it wasn’t a mile long but it was pretty big.
Joe: What… I…
AFB: Then they scrambled a couple of fighters we had, we always have two on alert. They chased the damn thing like fifty miles but then…. Pffft.
Joe:
AFB: Couldn’t catch it, I guess. It was pretty weird.
Joe: You’re joking with me, aren’t you?
AFB: No, not at all. That actually happened. I can’t explain it. Nobody can. That shit happens all the time, we’re just not supposed to lie about it anymore because, what’s the point of that? This thing came down, clipped a few treetops at about two thousand miles per hour and then…. Flew away.
Joe: You’re serious?
AFB: Yes, godammit. I don’t know what else to fucking tell you. It’s not like we can do anything about it. This shit happens all the time and I don’t know what else to fucking tell you, alright? Now is there anything else I can do for you today, Mr. Jones?
Joe: No, I guess not. But…
AFB: What?
Joe: Nothing. Thanks. Goodbye.
AFB: Have a nice day.
Click.
AFB: Public Affairs, Sergeant Reed.
Joe: Hi, my name is Joe Jones, I’m with the Globe.
AFB: What can I do for you Mr. Jones?
Joe: I’m following up on a story and I was just wondering if I could get some information on some events that occurred last night?
AFB: OK.
Joe: We had several people call the paper and I’ve talk to some others who say they saw some kind of UFO in the sky around 6 o’clock last night. I’m trying to coordinate the stories and decipher whether or not they mistook some kind of military or commercial aircraft… you know…
AFB: OK. What can I tell you?
Joe: Well? I talked to the airport up in the city and they said they didn’t have any flights over the town last night, they all go north, you know…
AFB: I know, they can’t fly over the base.
Joe: Exactly, so it must have been some kind of military aircraft. Can you tell me if you have any activity in the area last night that could have been mistook for a UFO?
AFB: I don’t know, we’ve got a lot of things. Can you be more specific?
Joe: Well folks in town say they saw something, some of them described it as a lot of lights. This one guy, he’s a pilot, he said it wasn’t a plane. Said it was a mile long and moved like nothing he’d ever seen. Couple of fellas said they thought they saw some jets chasing it.
AFB: Yeah.
Joe: Then it just took off. Said it went straight up.
AFB: Yeah.
Joe. Yeah, what?
AFB: Yeah. That happened.
Joe: What happened?
AFB: It was the damnedest thing. They said we got this thing on radar coming straight at us, and it wasn’t a mile long but it was pretty big.
Joe: What… I…
AFB: Then they scrambled a couple of fighters we had, we always have two on alert. They chased the damn thing like fifty miles but then…. Pffft.
Joe:
AFB: Couldn’t catch it, I guess. It was pretty weird.
Joe: You’re joking with me, aren’t you?
AFB: No, not at all. That actually happened. I can’t explain it. Nobody can. That shit happens all the time, we’re just not supposed to lie about it anymore because, what’s the point of that? This thing came down, clipped a few treetops at about two thousand miles per hour and then…. Flew away.
Joe: You’re serious?
AFB: Yes, godammit. I don’t know what else to fucking tell you. It’s not like we can do anything about it. This shit happens all the time and I don’t know what else to fucking tell you, alright? Now is there anything else I can do for you today, Mr. Jones?
Joe: No, I guess not. But…
AFB: What?
Joe: Nothing. Thanks. Goodbye.
AFB: Have a nice day.
Click.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Microsoft Releases Internal Tools
After nearly two decades of rigorously enforced secrecy, Microsoft has released a large collection of proprietary development tools (which had been used to skyrocket the company to the undisputed top of the software food chain) to outside developers. In an effort to quell lagging support in the international judicial arena, and to help combat the popular open-source movement, programmers will now have access to the same function libraries, source codes, and other design tools previously known only to the software giant's inner core of developers.
Participants of this year's Comdex convention will be given a sneek peek at the full package that will become available to the public at large later in the month. Literature which accompanied the announcement did not give all of the details, but described some of the highlights of what will be contained in the first release. These items include:
1) RamHole (rm) - This is a suite of tools that can be implemented in a variety of different ways, however the primary objective is to locate what is known as a "hole" in an application's memory management system, and then begin dumping tens of thousands of megabytes of random data into it.
2) AlphaThread (tm) - An SDK which can be used by any application (or web page) to obtain 100% control of the user's PC, helping to prevent any other thread from executing until the machine is rebooted or several hours pass.
3) WinMystery (tm) - More of a concept, rather than an SDK, but with plenty of examples! Display a white window somewhere on the screen, with no contents, and no way to close it. When the mouse hovers over this "mystery window" the cursor becomes an hourglass or better yet, a cursor image that no user has ever seen before (like a plus sign with one of those "no" circles around it an an arrow or whatever). CPU usage can range all the way up to 100% however the examples do not show how to get the window to show up in any kind of task list.
4) "no" (tm)(R) - Allows developers to include Microsoft's famous "no"(tm)(R) feature in which the user can click on any control (usually just a few at random but sometimes it can be all controls within the application) and the computer simply does nothing. "no"(tm)(R) also incorporates "again"(tm)(R) in which the control does nothing the first time, but will function as expected if clicked again within the space of a minute or so.
5) MouseRace(tm) - You can create a message saying "Click here" such as when an error occurs of the cause of the error can be revealed by clicking on a brief and uninformative error message (i.e. "an error occurred"). Windows automatically detects when the user's mouse begins to move and "It's On!", that is, being the race to get to the message before the message vanishes. Users LOVE this.
6) EverUpdate(tm) - Allows applications to want to be upgraded ever time they are lauched, regardless of how many times the user attempts the upgrade (this technology has already been licensed to Apple(R) and Adobe(R))
Other items were also listed but lacked precise explainations. These included Control-lock, Alt-lock, SingleRandomShiftedCharacter, ExitNever, ExitToRAM, SuperTree, IndexAway, TheCurrentDriveIsNoLongerValid, SystemError53HasOccurred, TheErrorNumberIsTheErrorMessage, PressF1ForNoKeyboard, ErrorOther, and UnknownDeviceFinder.
When asked if releasing this many internal secret weapons to their competors would ultimately wind up hurting their sales, an anonymous spokesman for Microsoft simply responded, "Have you seen Windows Vista?"
Participants of this year's Comdex convention will be given a sneek peek at the full package that will become available to the public at large later in the month. Literature which accompanied the announcement did not give all of the details, but described some of the highlights of what will be contained in the first release. These items include:
1) RamHole (rm) - This is a suite of tools that can be implemented in a variety of different ways, however the primary objective is to locate what is known as a "hole" in an application's memory management system, and then begin dumping tens of thousands of megabytes of random data into it.
2) AlphaThread (tm) - An SDK which can be used by any application (or web page) to obtain 100% control of the user's PC, helping to prevent any other thread from executing until the machine is rebooted or several hours pass.
3) WinMystery (tm) - More of a concept, rather than an SDK, but with plenty of examples! Display a white window somewhere on the screen, with no contents, and no way to close it. When the mouse hovers over this "mystery window" the cursor becomes an hourglass or better yet, a cursor image that no user has ever seen before (like a plus sign with one of those "no" circles around it an an arrow or whatever). CPU usage can range all the way up to 100% however the examples do not show how to get the window to show up in any kind of task list.
4) "no" (tm)(R) - Allows developers to include Microsoft's famous "no"(tm)(R) feature in which the user can click on any control (usually just a few at random but sometimes it can be all controls within the application) and the computer simply does nothing. "no"(tm)(R) also incorporates "again"(tm)(R) in which the control does nothing the first time, but will function as expected if clicked again within the space of a minute or so.
5) MouseRace(tm) - You can create a message saying "Click here" such as when an error occurs of the cause of the error can be revealed by clicking on a brief and uninformative error message (i.e. "an error occurred"). Windows automatically detects when the user's mouse begins to move and "It's On!", that is, being the race to get to the message before the message vanishes. Users LOVE this.
6) EverUpdate(tm) - Allows applications to want to be upgraded ever time they are lauched, regardless of how many times the user attempts the upgrade (this technology has already been licensed to Apple(R) and Adobe(R))
Other items were also listed but lacked precise explainations. These included Control-lock, Alt-lock, SingleRandomShiftedCharacter, ExitNever, ExitToRAM, SuperTree, IndexAway, TheCurrentDriveIsNoLongerValid, SystemError53HasOccurred, TheErrorNumberIsTheErrorMessage, PressF1ForNoKeyboard, ErrorOther, and UnknownDeviceFinder.
When asked if releasing this many internal secret weapons to their competors would ultimately wind up hurting their sales, an anonymous spokesman for Microsoft simply responded, "Have you seen Windows Vista?"
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