Get Off My Lawn

by myerman

Okay, so I’ve been recovering from both SxSW and the post-SxSW crud, and I’ve planned a whole bunch of new GOML goodness for next week…..but this one couldn’t wait.

You people who don’t use business cards….what are you, broke ass? I don’t mean people (like myself, naturally) who might occasionally forget their business cards or run out of business cards, I mean you folks who run around without any business cards at all…..say what?

I understand that smart phones might allow you to follow me on twitter or friend me on facebook or even capture something about me on a QR code (dammit, I forgot to wear my t-shirt with that QR code again) but honestly, nothing beats that simple little piece of paper.

Yes, yes, I’m the slayer of fucking rain forests without limit, et cetera, a useless, helpless backward hick who don’t understand nothin’ about yer high-falutin’ technology….but honestly if you don’t have business cards you’re conveying a range of unappetizing options:

1) I’m unemployed and didn’t have the forethought to even print out those serrated numbers off my desktop laser printer.

2) I’m running a startup that only has $23.00 in the main checking account, God knows how I’m gonna get my ass home from this event.

3) I really don’t want to have any future discussions with you unless of course it’s only on Twitter or Hashable and besides, I can bug you later for your phone number or email when it’s convenient for me, right?

It’s not the year 2258 when we can telepathically beam information to each other’s cloud profiles via retinal implants. We still use paper to try to help our little simian brains process the act of meeting for the first time in a business context.

Chance are, I won’t remember who you are even if you hand me a business card, but at least with it I have half a chance of recognizing you at the next event.

by myerman

I live in Texas, so every once in a while I get to see these guys walk into a store with a huge wallet in their back pocket. The kind of wallet with a big metal somethin’ on it. They’re so big they just stick out of their pockets.

These wallets are the redneck equivalent to the droopy pants thing. If you’re lucky, you get to see one with a chain attached to it, those are the DEEEELUXE wallets.

I really don’t understand why people do this. The United Nations already recognizes your status as redneck because you’re wearing a Texas A&M t-shirt, dirty jeans, and shit-kicker boots, and just stepped out of a huge goddamn F-350 pickup truck.

Someone help me understand.

by myerman

Dear King of the Pig People,

Yes, you, the guy who just used a public restroom and left without so much as glancing at the sink. You’re the guy with all that fecal bacteria layered on your hands. You touch your kids with those hands? Touch your significant other? Yeah?

Well first, you’re going to touch the doorknob on the bathroom (thanks, now I have to use a paper towel to get out of here!), then you’re going to touch the restaurant/bar table top, and the chairs, and utensils, and the menus (which never get wiped down THANKS AGAIN!) and gah! I can barely think about how fucking gross you are!

I’m not a germophobe, or someone who is obsessive about hygiene. But for Odin’s sake, I wash my hands after wiping my ass or using the urinal, or hell, just because I walked into a public bathroom.

Depending on the quality of said bathroom, I feel like washing my hands AFTER I’ve already washed my hands and then touched the paper towel dispenser.

But not you. You think your privates come with a little built-in anti-bacterial misting device or something. GUESS AGAIN!

And ladies, don’t think I don’t know about some of you just because I’m a guy. I’ve been married 18 years, and the stories my wife tells me of the kind of shit you pull (no pun intended) in public restrooms and then leave without washing your hands…it’s enough to make me swear off human contact forever.

Maybe if restaurants and bars installed alarm systems that detect when people don’t wash their hands….

by MamaKat

No, I’m not going to rant anything pro- or anti- legalization. Although that’d fit right in with the list I’m about to publish here. I’m going to rant about Facebook friends that Beat! Me! Over! The! Head! with their bullshit causes.

Let me backpedal a sec to clarify that I don’t take issue with the causes themselves, and in fact, agree with the sentiment behind most of them. What I take issue with is the machine gun-like succession of these posts taking up linear meters of space on my News Feed.

I’ve seen a smattering of these repeated by various “friends,” but I’d like to publish a list, pulled from ONE particular friend’s page – and this isn’t spread out over time, these posts, in some cases, were literally minutes apart:

• Sign a petition to help the Sierra Club stop polluters!
• Sign a petition to freeze Mubarak’s illegally-gained fortune!
• Petition Obama to say No GMO’s to Monsanto!
• Save Social Security!
• Don’t let Congress silence PBS and NPR!
• No handouts for corporate polluters!
• Let the Patriot Act expire!
• Save the Yellowstone buffalos!
• Save the wolves!
• Keep diesel out of our drinking water!
• Say “NO” to fracking!
• Don’t let the gov’t take our abortion rights away!
• Don’t let the gov’t redefine RAPE!
• Let the gays get married!
• Say NO to the internet kill switch!
• Don’t say the word “retard!”

Did you get all that? If you honestly read that entire list, and gave even a millisecond of thought to each item, much less formed a solid fact-based opinion for each issue introduced, then you are a better person than I am. I get as far as item #3, my eyes glaze over, and I feel a visceral despair for the state of the world. How can so many things be going so terribly wrong? And all at the same time??? We’ll never be able to fix this! Might as well shoot myself in the fucking head and escape the miserable bonds of this mortal coil.

But wait! There’s hope, you say? If I push “Like” and create that little thumbs-up icon, and then “Share” the same article with all of my friends, we can turn all of this around? That there’s a government-appointed “Facebook Monitor” sitting in an office somewhere, diligently watching the tally rise, waiting for that perfect moment he can rush into the Oval Office and say, “Mr. President, ONE MILLION Facebook users have officially “liked” the idea of squelching Monsanto’s evil influence. It’s time to take action! Let’s Roll.”

Listen, I think it’s great to champion a cause. It’s great to be proactive, and educated, and aware of what’s going on in the world around you. Hell, it’s great that you’re not posting updates about where you ate lunch, or what color your kid’s poop was today. But just because YOU made a New Year’s Resolution to “Make A Difference” or “What The Fuck Ever,” does not mean that I want to be a part of it.

Now… in the words of Bill Cosby, I told you that story so that I could tell you this one:

I, too, am championing a cause. But contrary to our friend above, I’m not being a lazy little bitch about it. I’ve put over 40 hours (so far) into creating and maintaining a blog of my own, more hours of face time into approaching people directly about it, and even more time personally thanking everyone who has gotten involved. Oh, yeah, and I feel strongly enough about it that I’m planning to shave my head.

Want to see what it’s all about? (And who I am, behind this curtain of internet anonymity?) Click here: www.StBaldricks.org/participants/MamaKat

Namaste.

by myerman

I’m going to take a lot of heat for this, and it doesn’t matter if I explain myself beforehand because people are knee-jerk reactionaries no matter what, but…..here goes.

I rather enjoy music. I write and code with headphones going at full tilt–probably Blues or maybe Tchaikovsky. When I run, I make sure that my Shuffle is powered up and full of 80s Pop (it’s mindless and provides the right beat for 3-4 hour runs during marathon training).

I have wide musical interests, ranging from Bach to Duke Ellington to Ray Charles to Metallica and Stevie Ray Vaughn and the Eagles and the Doobie Brothers and The Police and BLAH BLAH BLAH.

Occasionally, although I suffer a bit from tinnitus (that’s a painful ringing in the ears, caused by a very loud heavy metal band in 1992) I will go to a concert. I especially like the Mother Truckers. And so on, and so forth.

What I do not enjoy is this compulsion that Austin has to stick a fucking musician in every available nook and cranny you can think of.

I go to a coffee shop, and there’s a guy with his six-string and an amp, obviously needing a lot more practice but hey he’s GOT A CD oh christ. I go to a networking event, looking forward to good conversation and connecting with folks, BUT I CAN’T HEAR ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE BALLS-OUT BAND GOING AT 300 FUCKING DECIBELS.

I wrote that last part in ALL CAPS to give you some idea of how I feel during that event, mostly because I’m shouting the entire time to be heard and understood. I also find myself leaning in to people’s personal space a great deal to hear and understand them, a situation that I find extremely uncomfortable.

In other words, I resent showing up to an event that I thought was non-musical and find out there’s a guy in the corner playing his instrument badly. If I want music, I’ll go to a concert, or I’ll put on my headphones and enjoy AC/DC or the Doobie Brothers.

That’s it, now bring on the flames.

by myerman

So I went for a run a few Sundays back, mostly in my neighborhood. I saw these two teenage boys going door to door with flyers. Not an unusual occurrence. I had three more miles to run when I saw them, so I forgot about them.

When I got home, my lovely wife mentioned that some kid had put something on my car. So I go back out to the driveway and take a look. Sure enough, the kids I saw walking around the neighborhood before had put a flyer on my car.

Not under my windshield, but on my car door. At first I thought it was stuck there with some kind of adhesive, but no, it was attached with a magnet. Real classy. This kind of shit is intolerable.

I wonder if Papa John’s Pizza is aware that this is going on? And I also wonder if they think I’m ever going to order pizza from them ever.

by myerman

I got stuck the other day listening to a guy drone on and on about how “Obama was ruining the country and bringing about socialism blah blah derp derp.”

I try to not get involved with saying anything in person, because I end up losing IQ points like Charlie Sheen on an all-expenses-paid getaway weekend.

But something this guy said right after the Noun-Verb-Socialism construct that really struck me. He was talking about his two boys playing in Little League, and how all the teams got trophies at the end of the season. His youngest son’s team came in 12th place, dead last, but they got to take home a nice little trophy.

Okay, motherfucker, if you want to talk about the thing that will destroy the fabric of our “free market meritocratic achievement-based capitalistic society” it ain’t a President who ain’t a Socialist and ain’t practicing Socialism or even coming remotely close to anything Socialism like.

It’s you and your little entitled white-bread SUV-driving suburbanite dumbass brethren who have somehow conspired to mollycoddle an entire generation of snot-nosed dipshit children who we’ll all have to deal with when they realize, at age 25 or 35 or whenever, that the WORLD DOES NOT GIVE OUT TROPHIES FOR DEAD LAST.

But by that time, I guess, Rush Limbaugh will have refreshed your talking points memory cache, and you’ll be talking about something else equally inane.

GET OFF MY LAWN!

by myerman

Okay, if you do that thing on Facebook where you’re using a nictating lizard eye, a building, your own forehead (or knees, or ass, or back of head), a cartoon character, or a QR code (for fuck’s sake) as your profile picture, then I have to assume one of the following about you:

1) You’re in federal witness protection, but then I wonder why you’re still on Facebook.

2) You’re one of those slacktivist people who thinks changing their avatar to Foghorn Leghorn will stop a motherfucker from beating up their kid, in which case I’m not really sure what to think.

3) You really really REALLY want my poor little brain to work hard to remember who the fuck you are, I can barely remember names for cryin’ out loud, show me that lovely face so I can figure out who you are!

Anyway, Happy Valentine’s Day, and change your profile pic, dipshit.

by myerman

Yes, I’m talking to you. Don’t look at me all innocent. You’re the one wearing two and a half gallons of that cheap-ass stinky perfume, the kind that fills an elevator to capacity with its stench.

Ever notice that every single person around you is constantly sneezing and coughing? It isn’t because of cedar allergies (although that’s certainly a worthwhile topic for a later day). It isn’t because of smog or the burning fields in Mexico. It’s simpler than that.

It’s you! You’re a perfume ho. You’re that person (and both genders do it!) that pours on so much stench that the rest of us can smell you in your vehicle. While you’re busy parking. And we’re inside the fucking building. OKAY?

Here’s a piece of advice. Instead of pouring on the crappy perfume or cologne, how about just a little dab behind the ears, maybe a bit on the collar bone. Oh, and maybe upgrade to a more expensive fragrance so you won’t use it as much, okay?

There’s really no need to bathe in it, then apply stinky underarm deoderant and then put on clothes that have been washed with stinky ass detergent.

If you’re trying to mask another smell, say your smoking habit, I think it’s safe to say that I’d rather smell that than smell your stinky perfume. At this point, hell, I’d rather smell your stinky unwashed ass than the stinky perfume.

GAH!

by myerman

Not only are you the type of person who would own a big giant truck, but you also park in spaces marked COMPACT CAR ONLY.

Once, just once, I’d like to catch you in the act of actually pulling into one of these spaces and just stand there and shout, “REALLY? You’re really going to park there?”

Of course, you’ll probably just back over my compact car and drive away, but I’ll still shake my fist at you from under the wreckage.