Odds & Ends & Douchebags

I have little to talk about right now, but I have a lot to give you none the less: bloggable stuff I haven't been able to make entire posts about, so you'll get this little hodge-podge before we return to our regularly scheduled Indiana Jones stuff. 1st, we have this fun little story about the alligator in the woman's kitchen. Of course there is also this nugget about the Spiderman Window Cleaners at the Shanghai Sheraton Hotel. While we're on the subject of China, let's not forget about the 60,000 people who died in Sichuan Province earlier this month. 60,000!!! That's a lot of people. Not the 1,100 from Hurricane Katrina or the 3,000 in the World Trade Center... this is 60,000 people. Unfortunately, that's nothing compared to the more than twice that dead in Myanmar, but when we think about it together, 60,000 + 128,000 = a Hell of a lot of people died in natural disasters lately. At this point, I don't know how to pin this on George W. Bush... but you can believe I'm working on it.

OK, maybe it isn't his fault, but I needed a good transition into douchebaggery so as to bring up these asshats. This family is suing Little League Baseball, Sports Authority, and the bat company after because their kid was hit w/ a line drive a couple years ago and has suffered brain-damage. It wasn't even in a little League game, but since Little League officially endorses the bat, I guess they figure they can get a piece of them too. So while the line drive is the kid's excuse, it seems the verdict is still out on the parents. I mean, come on... when you play a sport the chance of injury is always there. It sucks for the kids that his was so bad, but suing the store that sold the bat? Give me a fucking break!Speaking of Douchebags, you can check out this story about the guys who vandalized Stonehenge last week and then read this little update about myself. Namely, I've gotten a ton of free-shit in the mail lately. I suppose it's bad timing since I'm just gonna have to pack more stuff this week, but getting free stuff is always fun. 1st of all, I finally got my Utilikilt. You may remember that a number of friends, all of whom I'd like to take this moment to thank, got me a gift-certificate for my b-day. I've spent the last 11 months attempting to use it, but they were always out of my size. However, as it turns out, they weren't out of it, it's just that the directions for measurements on the web-site are wrong, so I was measuring an odd size. Once I finally talked to a dude on the phone he explained that I shouldn't follow the directions. This company is as shady as they come, brah. The conversation went like this:
"utilikjfg;khj"
"Is this Utilikilts?"
"Yeah, brah, that's what I said..."
Oh, well, I have a gift certificate, but the web-site says you've been out of my size since June."
"Since June? wow, bro, that's a long time."
"No kidding. I was wondering if you have different things than just what's on the web-site."
"No, brah, just what's on the site. But we do have an outlet in Michigan; you could try that place, bro."
"Well, the gift-certificate says it can only be used @ your location or over the phone."
"oh, yeah bro, I forgot about that."
It went on like this for a 1/2 hour, but in the end, it turned out, they not only had my size, but in fact that had a sale going on so I was able to up-grade from the Original to the Workman's & it ended up being 10 bucks less.The other stuff I've gotten recently is thanks to Amazon.com. The search-portal on my side-bar is supposed to yield a small finder's-fee in gift-cert. form, but over the last few years I've never seen a gift-cert. I looked into it the other day & realized they owed me over 160 bucks so I e-mailed I got the information. Apparently, they'd e-mailed it to me, but it went straight to my junk folder & I missed it. W/ this free cash, I finally got the new Flash Gordon: Saviour of the Universe Edition along w/ a bunch of other stuff: a France soccer shirt & scarf for Euro '08, a memory stick & car charger for my phone, a breast-pump for Stephanie, a Hannah Montana CD for Solstice's b-day, & a book by Umberto Eco: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Thanks to all of you who have actually used that portal to get your Amazon.com shwag... keep it up.

The final little up-date about douchebags is that Douchebag FC, my fantasy team, won my league in a hotly contested battle w/ Jason, Jean, my father, & Solstice. She joined 2 weeks late so even though she didn't win, she may have had she been involved all along. Speaking of her, be sure to check out her poem on her blog.