Tag Archives: funny

“Bob and the Black Knight” Now Available!

Sound the horns of plenty and smack your chihuahua’s buttocks with glee! The wait is over; You can now buy Bob and the Black Knight in print from Amazon and Lulu or digitally via Kindle!

In their third escapade, Bob Halibut and his cyber-llama butler, Jeeves, hit the adventuring trail once again, this time in search of the mythical sword Excalibur. As they comb through the remnants of King Arthur’s legacy, they find a world of armored knights, killer cockatrices, an evil sorceress, sweet snacks, salty snacks,  sweet-and-salty snacks, and break-dancing.

If you’re ready to go medieval with Bob and his cyborg quadruped, pick up Bob and the Black Knight today!

Lightsabers, Lightsabers, LIGHTSABERS!!!

When I was but a young lad, I dreamed of owning a lightsaber.

And then the wheel of time turned ever-onward. I grew older and taller and hairier and started noticing young ladies. And I dreamed of owning a lightsaber.

Then I became a man. I put childish ways behind me, put on a suit and tie, and hit the job trail. I built my resume, interviewed at accomplished institutions, and worked diligently to support myself. And I dreamed of owning a lightsaber.

Sure, there were those cheap, plastic ones with the segmented blades that we played with as kids. They broke a lot and stopped working after a few years. But we all knew those weren’t “real” lightsabers and longed for the day we could hold the real thing on our hands and feel like true Jedi.

 

Well, no longer.

Thanks to the folks at Ultrasabers, my roommates and I now possess a genuine, fully-functional, Yoda-worthy lightsabers!

I wouldn’t know, but I imagine this is what the day your child is born feels like. And no, Ultrasabers isn’t sponsoring me to write this post. The sabers are just that awesome.

They’re made of a super-strong, lightweight material that can endure all kinds of punishment. It allows you to engage in full-contact duels and pull off some pretty swanky spinny-moves without damaging your saber or your arms.

Lightsaber dueling is fantastic exercise. If you’re like me and you hate most forms of exercise more than Han Solo hates carbonite, you’ve no doubt morphed into a plump, doughy form over the years. Lightsaber battles are just the thing to bring our your inner ten-year-old and get you moving.

One of the best things about Ultrasabers is the price. People have been able to buy combat-worthy lightsabers for some time, but they’ve had to spend a few hundred bucks. With Ultrasabers, the lightsabers start at around $55, and you can spend as much as you want on them. Sound and a fancy hilt will run up the price tag a bit. Still, you can get a pretty awesome saber with basic sound for around $165.

The sabers also come in just about every color you can imagine: red, green, guardian blue, arctic blue, purple, orange, turquoise, and Aegean silver (or “white” to those of us not enrolled in art school.) The website also sells color discs, which can be used with the white saber to produce a wider variety of colors. I’ve used the discs with my Aegean silver blade to make yellow, emerald green, lime green, puce, light turquoise, silver, gold, “New Hope” blue, and even pink.

However, if really want to engage in some series duels with these things, there are a few facts you’ll want to keep in mind:

  1. The fancier, more expensive hilts, like my “scorpion” handle, contain more metal, which makes the saber heavier. It certainly doesn’t make the saber hard to use, but it will cause your arms to get tired after awhile.
  2. Ultrasabers eat batteries like a sarlacc eats Boba Fetts. When buying your saber, you’ll have a lot of options to adjust before the purchase is complete. You can either get a blade that uses triple-A batteries or some new-age, lithium ion garbage that’s impossible to find. Go with the triple-As. Also, keep in mind that sabers with multiple blades (double-bladed sabers or longsword-style, Kylo Ren-looking sabers) drain the batteries much more quickly.
  3. If you buy a lightsaber with sound (I mean, why wouldn’t you?), you’ll have several different sound options, which increase the cost of the saber exponentially. The basic sound option works great; you don’t need to spend extra money on a fancy-shmancy speaker system.
  4. You can perform basic maintenance on your saber using a tiny alan wrench, which you can buy from Ultrasabers for $1 at checkout. As soon as it arrives, go to a hardware store and buy a few more wrenches of the same size. They’ll inevitably get lost.
  5. The biggest injury risk from lightsaber battles is whacked fingers. A bloody knuckle or black-and-blue thumb will bring your night of fun to an end pretty fast. Unfortunately, there aren’t really any protective gloves designed for lightsaber fighting, so you’ll have to improvise.
  • We’ve found that the best solution is UFC fighting gloves, which have padding above the knuckles  and on the upper part of the fingers. The smooth fabric on the palm can make the saber difficult to grip, but cutting the palm out entirely or adding Velcro (just the soft part) solves that problem pretty effectively.

 

  • The gloves still leave your thumb and the lower part of your fingers exposed, but we’re working on a solution.

Apart from ferret proctology, I’ve never felt something as exhilarating than battling with legitimate lightsabers. If you want to earn a few cool points, get some aerobic exercise, and feel like a Jedi, head over to Ultrasabers and make a purchase. Regret it you will not.

Note: That last sentence made me realize that Microsoft Word’s grammar check doesn’t see anything wrong with Yoda-speak. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either awful or awesome.

Subway: Subliminal Mind Control in Action

http://www.subway.com/en-us

Who wants to read another post about fast food?

For those of you new to this site, I’ve spoken about most of the elements of fast-foodery, from the hostage negotiation-type scenario that is asking for ketchup to the predatory war of the Yum! Brands franchises. I’ve gone on and on about McDonalds and Taco Bell and Wendy’s and any other fast food franchises you can think of. But I have yet to talk about Subway.

Because Subway scares me.

Subway twists and molds the human mind in a way yet to be understood by the world’s most advanced hypnotists and psychologists. I suspect the whole thing to be an underground experiment in human psychology instigated by a race of underground pink ferret people as preparation for the coming invasion. But that’s just me.

Each Subway establishment houses two employees, who are separated by an invisible wall, what I call the “Iron Condiment.” The employee on the right handles bread, meat, and cheese, while the fellow on the left is in charge of herding the unruly condiments onto the bread. And a strange, psychic phenomenon occurs every time a Subway employee passes through the Iron Condiment.

While an employee is in the bread sector, their short term memory is reduced to a fraction of a second. My typical interaction with a meat quadrant worker is as follows:

Me: Hi, can I please have a chicken bacon ranch sandwich with provolone cheese on Italian herbs and cheese bread?

Employee: What kind of bread?

Me: Italian herbs and cheese. And I’d like a chicken bacon ranch, please.

Employee [after slicing the bread]: What kind of sandwich, again?

Me: Chicken bacon ranch. With provolone cheese.

Employee [after putting the meat on my sandwich]: What kind of cheese?

Me: The kind I just mentioned half a second ago!

But this isn’t simply a case of a bored employee not paying attention. The instant you pass through the Iron Condiment, you’re in an entirely different world: the free world. When you begin speaking to an employee on this side of the invisible partition, something shifts in their brains and they transform from a grunting neanderthal into Rain Man. No matter how many condiments you list, all of them will be placed on your sandwich, in order, without fail. It goes something like this:

Me: Hey, can I have lettuce, tomatoes, olives, green peppers, banana peppers, onions, carrots, avocados, Sasquatch hair, jalapenos, pickles, spinach, a tiny break-dancing Yugoslavian man, and cucumbers?

Employee [proceeding to put each condiment on my sandwich in perfect order]: Sure.

It’s like the employees go through about twenty years of secondary education and brain exercises by moving six inches. The entire thing just creeps me out. I’ll stick to the Quarter Pounders. At least they’re just trying to mess with my arteries.

Century Link and Eternal Damnation

phone-devil

imgur.com/sMeZ042

 Outsourcing. It seems like virtually every corporation has moved its customer service operations out of the United States. Each time I have to call Comcast or Verizon or some other large company, I speak to someone in India or Cairo or Dagobah.

But Century Link is the worst. Period. They’re customer service is so bad, I’ve come to an inescapable conclusion: they’ve moved their customer service not to Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, but to the fiery pits of Hell itself.

I’m no stranger to bad customer service interactions. Whenever I call the customer service department of a large company, I grit my teeth and prepare to have my brain worked over with a metaphorical meat tenderizer. But there’s one interaction with Century Link customer service that, to this day, makes my buttock hairs rigid with fear.

The call started off innocently enough. After navigating a sea of automated menus and waiting on hold for about five hours, I spoke to a customer service representative about setting up new phone service. It was all going swimmingly and I began at last to see light at the end of the tunnel.

The rest of the exchange went something like this:

Customer Service Representative: Okay, sir. I’ve got you set up for the Phone Plus Plan, which includes caller ID and voice mail. Your monthly premium will be $35 per month. Now, I’m just going to transfer you to [unintelligible series of words] department, which will finish setting up your service.

Me: Wait, what?

[silence as call is transferred]

Me: Hello? Hello?!

[continued silence]

New Customer Service Representative: Hello, sir. My name is Brian. Can I please begin by having your date of birth and social security number?

Me: Uh…which department have I reached?

Brian: Hello, sir. My name is Brian. Can I please begin by having your date of birth and social security number?

Me: No, I already heard you. Can you please tell me which department you work for?

Brian: Sir, I have to stick to the script. I’m not allowed to talk to you about anything different than what appears on my script. Now, can I please begin by having your date of birth and social security number?

Me: But I was just talking to Century Link and I thought I’d set my service up completely.

Brian: Sir, I just need your date of birth and social security number.

Me: Brian, which department of Century Link do you work for?

Brian: I don’t work for Century Link, sir. Now, can I please have your date of birth and-”

Me: But I was just talking to Century Link. To set up phone service. And they connected me to you.

Brian: Yes, sir.

Me: So I need to know how you’re related to Century Link and what you have to do with setting up my phone service.

Brian: Sir, I’m required to collect personal information using the script I was given. I have to follow the script and collect the information from you.

Me: Brian, what company do you work for?

Brian: I don’t know, sir.

Me: You don’t know what company you work for?!

Brian: No, sir.

Me: Then why the heck would I give you my personal information?!

Brian: Sir, I’m required to collect–”

Me: Brian, for all I know, you work for some evil, sphincter-eating cult and you want my personal information so you can break into my house tonight with a pair of disemboweling tweezers and some ketchup and have at my colon! Goodbye!

And then I took a shower. Because that conversation made me feel violated.

My only explanation for this phenomenon is that, desperate to cut costs, Century Link decided to move its customer service operations to an otherworldly plane of fiery torment. Some middle-manager probably packed a sacrificial dagger and a goat into the back of his Suburban (as middle-managers are wont to do), dragged them into the office, and slapped them down on the stone altar right between the coffee maker and the copy machine.

Then the whole office probable chanted something in backwards Latin and drew pentagrams in goat blood on all their manila folders until a fiery portal emerged in the middle of the altar, into which they cast a few dozen VOIP phones and headsets.

Nothing quite encapsulates the phrase “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” like listening to a six second loop of hold music for four hours.

Gerbils: Cannibalistic Cretin of the Pet World

evil-gerbil

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Gerbyllium

Lots of people have fond memories of their childhood pets. They remember a favorite dog or cat or bunny that brought them joy and merriment for many years. But as appealing as that idea is, there’s one species that, instead of creating precious memories, will scar your children on a deep, emotional level.

Never buy your kids gerbils. They are disgusting, vile creatures that kill their own families indiscriminately and reproduce like Catholic rabbits on Viagra.

When I was about six years old, my parents brought me to the pet store to buy some gerbils. I picked out two, a black one and a white one with brown spots, which the sixteen-year-old zoologist behind the counter assured us were both male. And pretty soon, we had about thirty gerbils.

That wouldn’t have been such a big deal, since they all stayed in their cage, but as I came to find out, that black, mother gerbil made Jeffrey Dahmer look like Mister Rogers.

The first thing six-year-old me wanted to do when I saw the dozen-or-so baby gerbils was pick them up and pet them. So, like any other kid would, I picked up one of the baby gerbils and let it crawl across my fingers. Then, the next day, I went to the gerbil cage to find the baby gerbil lying motionless, its neck gashed open, and the mother gerbil’s whiskers coated in blood.

All it takes is the slight scent of a human being to make a mother gerbil brutally murder its child in a way that would make Jason Vorhees squeamish. I tried handling the baby gerbils with gloves or only petting them lightly. But every time, it led to gerbil infanticide and an impromptu gerbil funeral in the back yard.

The last straw came when Herman, the father gerbil, died. The mother gerbil continued having babies, even though the only other gerbils in her cage were her children. Then all my gerbils mysterious disappeared. I guess my parents drew the line at gerbils with an Oedipus complex.

The label on the gerbils’ home said “gerbil cage.” It should’ve said “Blood Sport Pit.”

So go ahead; buy pets for your kids. Buy them loving dogs or indifferent cats or smelly rabbits. But unless you want your children to have the combined visual experiences of Game of Thrones, Deliverance, and Se7en, don’t bring any of these little demons into your home.

Elmo’s Hostile Takeover

elmos-bloodlusthttp://knowyourmeme.com/photos/938780-bertstrips

Remember Sesame Street? Of course you do. The colorful puppets, songs, and memorable characters have educated and entertained millions of children. Many people learned to speak English by watching Sesame Street and there are some who otherwise wouldn’t have learned to read or count.

It’s too bad that, in the ‘90s, Sesame Street experienced a bloody coup and now finds itself ground under the fuzzy heel of a brutal dictator.

Those of you who grew up in the ‘90s may remember some of the changes that beset Sesame Street during that time period. The biggest one was a small, red puppet name Elmo who, narcissist that he was, always referred to himself in the third person.

At first, Elmo appeared only occasionally, but after a year or so, some of the other puppets began to disappear. Oscar, the Cookie Monster, and even Big Bird were rarely seen. And there was more Elmo. A lot more Elmo.

Elmo started showing up in practically every sketch, song, or other segment and the likes of Grover and the Count slowly went away. If you look closely, you can see Elmo handing out tiny copies of his manifesto to the other muppets and, in a rare deleted scene, using brutal interrogation techniques to teach Ernie to count to ten.

It was truly becoming Elmo’s World.

Then, a lot of the Muppets started to disappear. There came a time when Prairie Dawn, the Amazing Mumford, and others went away entirely. Mr. Hooper died under suspicious circumstances and Gordon was silenced. New Muppets—Zoe, Telly, and Lil’ Stalin— marched through the streets and indoctrinated the children with their message of a new world order.

As is the case with most hostile takeovers, the evidence was largely hidden away and destroyed by the powers that be. A great wall was built and people, Muppets, and information alike were kept inside (ever notice how no one on Sesame Street seems to walk beyond those fences in the background?)

The worst of it was the effect on the children; ever noticed how, every few years, Sesame Street gets a completely new crop of youngsters to interact with the puppets and teach important lessons? It’s only a matter of time before those kids learn too much.

No one said it better than George Orwell: Today’s episode was brought to you by the number twelve. Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the Muppets. The Tellitubbies outside looked from Muppet to man and from man to Muppet, and from Muppet to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”