Best of 2005

Jan­u­ary

Hot For Teacher

Fri­day the 7th

Due to yesterday’s train derail­ment and toxic chlo­rine gas spill, today was a day off for the Aiken County school kids because sev­eral local schools are now hous­ing the dis­placed folks of Gran­iteville. But it was a teacher work-day, where the teach­ers reported to school to do, uh, work. On teacher work­days they get a lot longer lunch break so they can leave the school grounds and dine in local restau­rants. I found this out when Donna and I walked into our favorite Fri­day after­noon off lunch place and it was packed. Sev­eral clues tipped us off that all these extra peo­ple were teach­ers, but what amazed me most was that a lot of these young women were very attrac­tive, espe­cially in their jeans and t-shirts. Funny, I don’t remem­ber my ele­men­tary school teach­ers as being this hot. They were all old ladies.

Then logic took hold and I real­ized that when I was in ele­men­tary school my teach­ers were at least 20 years older than me, which would make them right about as old as these “girls.”

---

Feb­ru­ary

Every Husband’s Dream

Sun­day the 13th

On the eve of Valentine’s Day I received every husband’s dream, wife sanc­tioned inter­net porn search­ing. Donna is a big fan of Trad­ing Spaces and she heard/read some­where that the host­ess of the show, Paige Davis, was canned from the show for the dis­cov­ery of a Paris Hilton style sex tape that was some­where on the net. She asked me to try and find it. I answered promptly, “Yes ma’am, I’ll look in every filthy cor­ner of the net for you.”

It didn’t take long to find out that the tape was not really of her. Or maybe it was the great­est cover up ever per­pe­trated, it was denied it was her, just some one who looks and sounds a lot like her. The tape may (or may not) be real, but appar­ently racy pic­tures of Paige at a gay male char­ity func­tion are not — Paige Davis Gone Wild!

I may have not found any­thing tonight, but if she ever comes in and I’m look­ing at inter­net porn, I can just say I was look­ing for that Paige Davis tape.

---

March

Always Hoped That I’d Be An Apostle

Sun­day the 27th

Knew that I would make it if I tried.
Then when we retire, we can write the Gospels,
So they’ll still talk about us when we’ve died.

Yes­ter­day evening Donna wanted a nap, so I queued up the DVD of Jesus Christ Super­star and kept the sound down low. I really like this movie. I’m not sure if it just that I’m a child of the early 70’s and that is the style of music of my youth or is it because I saw a Broad­way pro­duc­tion of the play on a high school field trip and had great time in NYC, in spite of being left behind. Or maybe it is because we get the whole Jesus fable neatly wrapped up in an hour and 45 minutes.

Today on TCM I stum­bled on the last 40 min­utes of King of Kings and stayed. It was pretty fun to com­pare this 1961 “seri­ous” take to the more irrev­er­ent JCSS telling of the same story.

---

April

Might As Well Just Say “I’m A Loser”

Thurs­day the 7th

They say that imi­ta­tion is the sin­cer­est form of flat­tery, so the folks over at Girls Gone Wild HQ must be pretty happy. I stum­bled onto an infomer­cial for a GGW knock-off this morn­ing called Wild Party Girls. Instead of $9.95 for a video, really usu­ally 2 because they throw in a “free” one, these guys are giv­ing you two DVDs for Free!* (*$5.95 ship­ping and handling)

Not only are the DVDs free, but they are going to toss in a free hat. It is one of those foam trucker hats that have become, for some inex­plic­a­ble rea­son, fash­ion­able again. The hat is bright red with a white front panel. On that white front panel, in match­ing bright red let­ter­ing, are the words “Wild Party Girls.”

It might as well just say “I’m A Loser” on it. This thing screams, “Hey look at me, I’m a schlub! My idea of excite­ment is to watch girls expose their breasts.” The only pur­chasers of these things that can’t be con­sid­ered per­verts are, the peo­ple who aren’t sup­posed to buy them in the first place, boys 17 and under.

Does the buyer of these type of videos think that if he wears that hat around, nubile young women will just lift their shirts and flash him, hop­ing to get a star­ring role in the next series of DVDs?

---

May

Office Sup­ply Milestone

Thurs­day the 5th

At 7:38AM this morn­ing I used the last sta­ple from the box I was given when I started work­ing here 505,267,200 sec­onds ago. To put it in eas­ier to under­stand terms, I started work­ing at ASCO Aiken on May 1st 1989, which was 5,848 days ago. Each box of sta­ples has 5,000 sta­ples, so I have used approx­i­mately .85 sta­ples per day dur­ing my tenure here.

I know I don’t use too many sta­ples in my job, but that isn’t much at all. I haven’t worked every sin­gle day straight through since then, so let’s do some, as my math idol Jethro would say, cipherin’. Assum­ing a 5 day work week, we can get much closer to a proper work day num­ber by mul­ti­ply­ing by 5 and then divid­ing by 7. This gives us 4177 or 1.20 SPD (sta­ples per day). What about hol­i­days? Good point, we get 9 paid days off here in Aiken, 9 times 16, so sub­tract 144 days from the total, giv­ing me a 1.24 SPD rank­ing. How about sick time? I bet I miss on aver­age 3 days a year for colds or flu or doc­tor things. Then there was the 2 week recov­ery from knee surgery in 2000. 3 time 16 plus 10, lets take another 58 days off. Best guess is I have used an aver­age 1.26 SPD in my work­ing here. I am so proud.

---

June

So If You Get Hurt And Miss Work, It Won’t Hurt To Miss Work

Wednes­day the 29th

Our friend’s 11-year old son plays on a trav­el­ing base­ball team. No, not like Bingo Long & 20 other guys in an old bus barn­storm­ing the south­east, but more like 20 Chrysler mini­vans with rear seat enter­tain­ment cen­ters filled with sib­lings who go from town to town all over the state every other week­end play­ing more teams just like them­selves in tour­na­ments. The teams have to pay to enter the tour­na­ments and there are uni­forms to buy and umpires to bribe and all man­ner of other expenses that are borne by the par­ents. To help off­set these costs, they do what all kids are taught in school to do from an early age, they sell stuff.

The team’s cur­rent scheme pro­mo­tion is sell­ing raf­fle tick­ets to win a bat that has been signed by Yogi Berra. When we had a visit from them this evening to ask if we would like to take some chances, I asked, “Yogi Berra, isn’t that the guy from those Aflac commercials?”

Jared, just gave me as world-weary a look as an eleven year old could, like he had heard that a mil­lion times before and it wasn’t that funny the first time either, and nod­ded his head to say just fill out the back of the ticket fool.

---

July

All I Want For Christ­mas Is…

Fri­day the 29th

…a sub­scrip­tion to Peo­ple Mag­a­zine. Caught a blurb about this while chan­nel surf­ing the other day and in this morning’s paper there was a small arti­cle about it too. Brit­tany Mur­phy will be the new Jor­dache jeans girl. It was said and writ­ten with almost breath­less excite­ment, so I know that Brit­tney Mur­phy is a famous per­son, I just don’t know what she is famous for. Singer? Actress? Real­ity TV Show Star?

I feel so left out.

---

August

Tem­po­rary Exile

Wednes­day the 3rd

The Miata is our daily dri­ver, which is both a bless­ing and a curse. The really good part is that a fun car makes the most mun­dane drive enjoy­able, even the one to work. The curse part occurs after spend­ing the week­end, like we did this last one, dri­ving the windy, twisty roads in the moun­tains, because when you return home it makes those mun­dane dri­ves mun­dane again.

When dri­ving in the moun­tains you spend a lot of time in 2nd and 3rd gear, wind­ing the engine out close to the red­line as the g-forces through you from side to side in the car. As you turn the wheel, the engine is singing and the car goes right where it is aimed. Occa­sion­ally you approach the lim­its of adhe­sion and the tires start to com­plain, but then you ease off the wheel and give it bit more gas and you swoop through the curve. Barely time to enjoy your accom­plish­ment when you see which way the road bends next and set up for it.

Then you are home. Shift­ing gears returns to a more sedate 4,000 RPM level. All the curves are 90 degree bends on city streets taken at 20 MPH so as to not land in the back seat of the mini­van in front of you. Sigh. I have said it before (I could have sworn I’ve said it here, but a search turns up noth­ing) this must be how women feel after giv­ing birth, a sort of post par­tum depression.

I saw a com­mer­cial the other day on TV for Celebrity Cruise Lines. This older cou­ple return from their cruise and all they can do is remem­ber their “celebrity” treat­ment. “My but­ler knew just how I took my tea,” he says. “I had fresh cut flow­ers every­day,” says she. My favorite part is the man is obvi­ously back in his office and is try­ing to open some ver­ti­cal blinds that aren’t act­ing right, “I like to think of this as a tem­po­rary exile,” he moans. That is what it is like for me to come back from a week­end dri­ving in the mountains…

---

Sep­tem­ber

1 + 1 = 0

Wednes­day the 21st

We recently had a city coun­cil elec­tion here in Aiken where there were 4 peo­ple run­ning for the two open At-Large spots. It was really a Repub­li­can pri­mary, but see­ing as there were no Democ­rats inter­ested in the offices, it turned out to be the actual elec­tion and every reg­is­tered voter was eli­gi­ble to vote. The hot but­ton issue in the elec­tion was the unchecked growth in the city, par­tic­u­larly the south side.

As it shook out, the four can­di­dates became aligned into two groups of two, one pair for lim­it­ing the growth some what and one pair for encour­ag­ing all the growth pos­si­ble. As usual, quite a few front yards sprouted cam­paign signs and every lawn that had signs, had them in pairs rep­re­sent­ing one group or the other.

Usu­ally when a can­di­date wins an elec­tion, the peo­ple who had signs up for the win­ner leave their signs up proudly. It could be to let us know how smart they are for back­ing a win­ner or it could be just rub­bing the los­ing supporter’s noses in it. Heck, there are still a few Bush-Chenney bumper stick­ers on local cars…

How it hap­pened I’ll never know, espe­cially if the sign group­ings were actu­ally rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the vot­ing intent, but in the elec­tion, one can­di­date from each group won a seat. Within a cou­ple of days after the elec­tion, 99.99% of the cam­paign signs were gone. I guess no one felt like admit­ting they were a half assed polit­i­cal prognosticator.

---

Octo­ber

Ques­tion For Eng­lish Majors

Sun­day the 2nd

Is irony used cor­rectly in the fol­low­ing sentence?

Dur­ing a Cleav­land Indian at bat in the fifth inning, with a fan pound­ing rhyth­mi­cally on an Indian type drum in the out­field sup­port­ing an offen­sive rally, was the pub­lic address sys­tem oper­a­tor being ironic by play­ing a record­ing of the bugle call Charge at the same time?

---

Novem­ber

Shades of Milli Vanilli

Sat­ur­day the 12th

Due to cir­cum­stances beyond my con­trol I attended the Aiken Kid­ney Ben­e­fit pro­duc­tion of Oliver tonight. Cock­ney accent, nearly incom­pre­hen­si­ble. South­ern accent, some­times dif­fi­cult to under­stand. Res­i­dents of Aiken, South Car­olina play­ing Lon­don­ers, unintelligible.

I can only hope there was a good rea­son for it, Fagin was lip-syncing his songs. At inter­mis­sion I told Donna that I thought he was doing just that, but I wasn’t pos­i­tive. In the sec­ond act Fagin has sev­eral solo num­bers and it was con­firmed in Ash­lee Simpson-like fash­ion when the actor stum­bled on a cou­ple of words and the song never skipped a beat…

---

Decem­ber

Lake City, Where?

Thurs­day the 22nd

When Donna and I planned this lit­tle Hol­i­day trip we decide to take two days down and one back up. To pick a place to stay that was about half way I used the sci­en­tific method of stretch­ing my fin­ger from Point Aiken to Point Stu­art and looked at a spot about half-way for the overnight stay, unfor­tu­nately that point was in the mid­dle of the Oke­feno­kee Swamp. Went a lit­tle past half, to make the sec­ond day’s dri­ving eas­ier, and set­tled on Lake City, FL. Made a reser­va­tion at the Hol­i­day Inn Express there and started count­ing down the days until I would get a cin­na­mon bun for breakfast.

After we had eaten lunch and gone for a hike in the Lit­tle Ocmul­gee State Park, Donna took out the reser­va­tion sheet for the Hol­i­day Inn Express and went to check the direc­tions to get there. For the life of her, no mat­ter how hard she looked, she couldn’t find US52 nor US378 any­where near Lake City, FL. It was then that she noticed the address on the reser­va­tion con­fir­ma­tion I had printed out, Lake City, SC. At first I thought it had to be a mis­print, but then I noticed the hotel’s phone num­ber and sure enough I rec­og­nized it as a SC area code. DOH!

Got on the cell phone and called Lake City, SC and can­celed my reser­va­tion. Asked the clerk there to give me the phone num­ber of the Hol­i­day Inn Express in Lake City, FL. There was not an Express, but there was a plain ol’ Hol­i­day Inn, with a vacancy, so we reserved a night there. I wasn’t going to get my cin­na­mon bun, but at least we would be stay­ing in a room on the way to Stu­art, FL not 300 miles away in the wrong direc­tion.

---