Things I Hate, #2

I cannot stand it when someone on the road is impeding my progress in some way and when I finally get around them I see they are talking on a cell phone.

I was driving back to work from lunch today and some asshole in a Prius (I'll save that group for a future "Things I Hate") is sitting in front of me at the intersection of Modoc and Las Positas. The light goes green and the Prius doesn't move. I have driven one of these go-karts before so I know that when you hit the gas the sled doesn't necessarily move right away so I gave the guy the benefit of the doubt, for the first five seconds at least. When ten seconds went by I gave him a polite toot of the horn to let him know that all was clear, we can go now. Still nothing. I had to actually pull into the next lane and go past him, and the dude was still sitting there stopped at the green light when I passed and noticed him talking into his personal communications device.

Motherfucker. I hope you get pulled over tomorrow when the law goes into effect and when the cop searches your mini-car he finds your 18 inch double headed black mamba in your hatchback.

Saturday, oh Saturday

A pal o' mine celebrated his birthday Saturday night with a surprise get together of about 20 of us over at Paradise Cafe. I should have left around 12, considering most of the self-inflicted damage I suffered came after that hour. I didn't feel like I drank a ton of beers, but that was rendered moot by the fact that I decided it was a good idea to rock an Irish Car Bomb at Dargans and then back it up with a monster Tequila shot across the street at the Press Room, all this after 1 A.M.

If the Irish were into inter-breeding with the Mexicans I can assure you that the child would be one pissed off little monster, complete with a full-time raging headache. My head still hurts this morning.

I Like to, #1

I like to sleep with a top sheet. I'm a sweater most nights, and I feel it's more sanitary to have that top sheet to leak into while I'm dozing and secreting all of the toxins I ingest every single day. My wife does not like a top sheet. It's just the fitted sheet and a comforter for her. She ends up kicking the top sheet down to the foot of the bed within the first 45 minutes of its placement on a day I've installed it there. It's really annoying.

This is a metaphor for my marriage and a reason we're in therapy.

Things I Hate, #1

In no particular order with these, but just as they come to me.

The guy in the line ahead of you at Subway who has orders for everyone in the office, six inchers, footlongs, with cheese, no cheese, half are toasted, all the different condiment configurations, and not one normal, regular order.

God I hate that guy.

Death Pool

My wife and a couple of her friends, plus myself, thought it would be fun to do a death pool. We determined a draft order and we each chose five famous people who we thought would die in the next year. There were some interesting choices, to be sure. The picks were weighted. For example, should my first round pick suddenly expire I would receive five scratch tickets from each of the players for my good fortune. If my second round pick croaked I would get four tickets from each player, etc. down to the fifth round pick's demise earning me one scratch ticket from each person. I already have a winner, since I picked Bo Diddley (may he rest in peace) with my fourth round pick.

Here are the results of our draft, first round picks being listed first:

Ty's picks
John Wooden
Margaret Thatcher
Dick Clark
Beverly Cleary
Dick Cheney






Susanne's picks
Britney Spears
Fidel Castro
Nancy Reagan
Michael Richards
Queen Elizabeth II




Kristi's picks
Amy Winehouse
Kirk Douglas
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Barack Hussein Obama
Madonna






MC Confrontation's picks
Patrick Swayze
George Steinbrenner
Ariel Sharon
Bo Diddley DEAD!
Pervez Musharraf

God bless his ass for making classic films like The Outsiders and Roadhouse, but Patrick, will you take a dirt nap already? Please?

Kobe, How 's My Ass Taste

This is quite possibly the greatest thing I've seen or heard in ten years.



I will patiently await the inevitable backlash. If only Kobe could rap then we would have a whole brand new hip-hop war. I imagine Kobe could kick a few lines like this:

Hey yo Shaq I can guess how your ass taste
Like the couch you been sittin on since May
I'd like to break the news to the world today
Shaq's gettin a divorce because he's gay

Question, #1

Pilfered from one of my favorite comics, I heard this question asked about 20 years ago and to this day it haunts me. That is why I am featuring it here as the first question of this blog.

How do blind people know when they're done wiping their ass?

A Primer, Part 2

Part of what I wish to accomplish in this undertaking is to answer the questions that I have about things I experience in everyday life.

Another part of it is to answer questions that you, the readers may have.

A third part of this blog will be anecdotes, stories, book reviews, movie reviews, jokes, or whatever interests me in that moment. It is pretty open-ended. It is a lot more open ended than my last project, where I pretty much had to wait for something to happen before I could comment on it. It seemed that right around the time my child was born, a whole host of other stuff that I cared about seemed pretty insignificant, thus the lull in content.

That will not happen here. You can expect many more posts than the SBMR, perhaps even several in a day. I am hoping to run the gambit from quick hit one liners to full on investigative reporting on a full range of subjects. One day I could write about practical joke activity on the illegal immigrant labor line and the next I could cover obese women who wear high heels. The sky is the limit people. I will also entertain requests.

I am your muse people, and this is your mouthpiece. Behold My 33 Cents.

A Primer

Welcome! If you're here then you probably know who I am. If you don't know who I am, well, I'm not telling so forget about it. I used to post to a blog called The Santa Barbara Minority Report, but after a six month hiatus between January and June 2008 I decided to take things in another direction. There are just not enough funny things going on in local politics to drive that brand. Of course I can still offer you my insight on those subjects, but I felt it was finally necessary to mine other prospects for material. I therefore present to you My 33 Cents.

You might say to yourself, "Why 33 cents?" to which I would answer that I tried to secure two cents, then three, then four, all the way up to nine, until I decided to pick a really high number that I figured nobody had taken. I think about Larry Bird a lot, so I picked the number 33.



The gist of this blog will be nothing more than commentary on the things I see and hear around me. I will ask questions, and I will answer questions. I will ruminate on the profane and the absurd, and on the mundane and the boring. I am a verbophile, which makes me a spelling and a grammar cop, so be careful if you don't want to get flamed, but of course please feel free to expose your abject stupidity to the masses by not knowing the difference between then and than, affect and effect, if you must.

I encourage as much feedback as I can get from the readership, so please feel free to contribute in the comments sections of the upcoming posts. I hereby declare that anything goes in the comments, and unless I personally find your comments to be seriously offensive to me personally, they will stand. If you know me at all, then you know it will take some pretty horrendous shit for me to hit the delete button on your comment, so have at it you abortion cannibals.

I'm back.