The Girl In the Window

This is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read. As much as I think it’s also important in some way I cannot describe I hate to email a link to anyone.

http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2008/reports/danielle/

To Insure Prompt Service

TIPS. Thats what it means. First off I received part of my wages from TIPS for 3 years at a New Cumberland restaurant (that I refuse to eat at). I also enjoy playing Devil’s Advocate and am quite good at it.

Regarding the much hyped “Spice” employees who lost their jobs, they were stupid. Anyone who read the article and can remember names (I’m clearly not the latter) could have recognized they were trying to “make them feel like crap for leaving you anything less than you deserve.” If I were a business owner I’d have viewed them as a liability also.

I like haveing good service, I almost always get it. I like being a regular and knowing the waitresses. I don’t like feeling like a cheap skate and I know that the business owner doesn’t pay them jack and it’s on me (and you) to support them. Molly was right when she said “If you can’t afford to come out, then don’t come out.” But lets remember some servers don’t do a good job. Often it’s the chiefs fault, if they over cook my steak I can’t give a bad tip, It’s not the servers fault. But if the server says “Well I can’t send it back and have them UNcook it” now she’s not getting a tip. I really had a waitress tell me that, and no she didn’t get 15-20% because she didn’t work for it. 

I also had a waitress wait on a large group, knowing 18% would be on the bill by default and she still did a great job. We’ve all seen Clerks or worked in food service. We all know waiters and waitresses don’t like us. And by the by if you send food back consider your self fortunate you only wonder if the chiefs did something to it. 

Bottom line if I heard my waitress say what either of them said they suddenly max out at 10%, unless there REALLY nice to my face. Some people don’t deserve a good tip. But most do so for all our sakes unless you’re server is rude give the devil their due.

Fish Story or Disney Princesses Ugly Stick

I went to a trout derby last Sunday in Juniata County PA. It’s for kids 12 and under, obviously I wasn’t doing much fishing. Actually it’s probably been 15 years since I went fishing last so you know I’m not going to impress anyone.

My friend Crystal’s 4 years old niece, Penny, did the bulk of the fishing. She was assisted in no small part by her grandmother, who is well over 12, and Nick, who passed 12 back in ‘97. Darlene was the one who knew about the event from taking various children there over the past few years. She got and hour in and saw 2 fish landed before going to a wedding under duress.

Now that I’ve introduced the players (of course aliases are used to see if I can remember them from story to story) I’ll start the funny part. Our story begins at 5am, there is nothing funny about that. We all slept over at Grandma’s, a battalion could stay there, they would even have room to fire off a few rounds in the morning. My first 10 words were “Gnaww” and we couldn’t find the coffee. We would have left for breakfast (coffee) but someone (Crystal) needed a half hour shower first. This delayed our coffee, so we sat around and glared at each other until a quarter to 6.

Breakfast got us our coffee and after breakfast Darlene went to her house to get some stuff. Then, just when we needed to be on our way, grandma, Nick, and Penny decided to check their gear. The gear was a pink Disney Princesses fishing rod that was still in the package. Of course there should be hooks, sinkers, bait, and a knife in the unopened package from Toys ‘Backwards-R’ Us. Right? I had a knife (SOG Twitch XL, one of these days I’ll start reviewing my cutlery but probably not today), but surprisingly we didn’t have anything else that is usually useful for fishing.

Nick: Call Darlene, she fishes! She’ll have everything we need!

Me: (on phone) Where’s a bait shop?

An hour later Penny was wack’n ‘em ugly with her pretty princess rod. She landed 5 trout, 2 we didn’t keep because they were too small. Actually they were all a little small but grandma made us keep 3, she doesn’t know about the other 2. Penny has a wild cast what sent me diving for cover on several occasions. I eventually made friends with a crowd of fathers who were standing well off the creek talking about where they would go for beer. It was kind of funny, there were all these little kids in hip waders with real rods and reels, kids who take fishing seriously. Penny caught her limit with the princesses and watched them get gutted.

NOTE: Do not gut fish in-front of lots of little kids! No matter how seriously a kid seems to take fishing, when you brain a trout on a tree and pull out a knife there is going to be crying. In their watery little eyes you will be the guy who killed Bambie’s family.

Nick has a good cast, and he’s secure (gay) enough to do it with a pink Disney Princesses rod. He also gets carried away. We kept pointing out that he was over 12 and didn’t have a fish license. And don’t lend him a knife with out getting all the details on what he intends to do with it. Can-openers are for opening cans, knives are for cutting things, fish, fingers, fishing line, etc.

We stayed for an hour and 45 minutes, longer than I expected her little attention span to last. During that time I drank 3 12oz cups of VERY WEAK coffee. They have come a long way with port-a-jons and I have to say I’m impressed.

Fish cleaned and in Grandma’s freezer I decided I wanted to go fishing. So I’m going to Pinchot Park with my Sunday like we used to do when I was little. Were going in the evening, 5am is for the birds.

Hopefully he’s lost my old Disney Princesses fishing rod.

My Point Exactly

“Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.”
 - Edward Gibbon

Now stop your whining and be grateful it’s just a blog and not something that endures!

Only in America

Wow. I can’t say anything to support or discredit the offer, just wow.

US car dealer in free gun offer

A car dealership in the United States is offering a free handgun with every vehicle sold.

Max Motors in Butler, Missouri, says sales have quadrupled since the start of the offer.

Customers can choose between a gun or a $250 (£125) gas card, but most so far have chosen the gun.

Learning a New Way to Mash Potatoes

Every family approaches things differently. I’ll cut to the chase though, this is the internet and I have to compete with porn for your attention. A friend of mine, we’ll call her Darlene, learned that I had never had a potato gun as a child. This got the reaction that a normal person would save for a child who was abused. Like I said, families are different.

A week passed and I found my self in Darlene’s Brother’s basement. I should clarify that the reason I’m giving my friends aliases is not to protect the innocent. As you will see no one really had any malicious intent, but there are no innocent. If nothing else living puts you in league with some pretty disreputable characters. Hence through “Guilt by association” we are all screwed. The reason I am assigning aliases is because my friends bought them. No one wants to be mentioned by name (address, phone number, Social Security Number, etc.) in a published column (or crappy blog) so I changer a reasonable rate for their privacy.

So there Jordan and I were in his basement, located at 340 Walnut St., Lewistown PA, with a grill igniter and $40 of PVC pipe. And beer, can’t forget the beer. It was purchased with Jordan’s credit card (5485 5568 7825 4116) which he needs to renew by January 2010. Twenty minutes later (lets just say I’m not skilled labor) and we had a working potato gun. I also wished my father had taken the approach to “you’ll blow your fingers off” items that Darlene and Jordan’s dad had. His approach was more “your holding it wrong” while my dad had favored “NO!” whenever the topic of home-made-artillery had come up.

Unfortunately I have not had many chances to do ballistics tests (play) but this is my initial assessment. <sound of maniacal laughter here>

While I would be the last man standing in a gun fight, this would be due largely to the fact that the other combatants would view me less as a threat and more as scenery. The velocity of the round was slightly faster than an unjuiced Barry Bonds fast ball.

The range was about 10 yards though accuracy was lacking. This may be due to any number of subtle factors known to modern ballistics. However it could probably be attributed most to the fact that it shoots POTATOES.

All in all this would be a great father son project for any father with a good health plan. It was a fun afternoon. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who doesn’t live near me. Just remember this caution, give me money to keep your name out of my rantings.

Hello

This is how most relationships begin. Of course I’ve done this with all of you by now. Lets face it the only people reading this are the 2 or 3 friends I was comfortable telling about my attempt to write. This is guaranteed to be embarrassing.

The idea is to use it to either get a syndicated column like Dave Barry or be a paid contributor to Wired or Lifehacker or something. Also I intend to set up some discrete Google ads in a further attempt to get money for not doing real work. Obviously the goal is to not actually do anything for a living. There are a lot of idiots with blogs out there hoping to make money by ranting like they were on meth, and thats why I’m linking to everything I can in the vain hope of increasing my Google ranking.

I’ve go a humor rant done that I’ll post when I’ve got editorial feed back. I’ll also be writing a tech column soon. I also have a head cold right now so my writing style may change when the cold medicine wears off.

Thanks for your time reading this, please don’t send me snappy emails telling me about spelling and grammatical errors ’cause I ain’t care that much. And before I forget if you would like to sponsor me feel free to send me and obscenely huge check and I’ll be sure to give you a mention in a future article. Remember thats an OBSCENELY HUGE check. A reasonable amount will only get you a nod.