we now return to our regularly scheduled programming

“I got a threshold for the abuse that I will take. Now, right now, I’m a fuckin’ race car, right, and you got me the red. And I’m just sayin’, I’m just sayin’ that it’s fuckin’ dangerous to have a race car in the fuckin’ red. That’s all. I could blow.”

I think of this every time I see someone fuck up the four-letter abbreviation for “and others”. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp. When writing a list that need not be detailed in full, one is perfectly allowed (yet, surprisingly, not always capable) to finish it early with “et al.” (See above for the literal translation.) Simply because our dilution and abuse of the language of the Romans has resulted in the combination of “et” and “cetera” into the acceptable “etc.”, it does not mean that you can do it with its cousin. It is not “etal.”, “et. al.”, or any other horrible concoction of the two words.

Getting back to “et cetera”, its literal translation is “and other things”. Don’t ever add an extra “etc.” to your sentence or list. Do you really mean “and other things, and other things”? Sounds redundant, doesn’t it? Do you know why it sounds redundant? It’s because IT IS FUCKING REDUNDANT!

This is nothing compared to how a new phenomenon makes me feel. Whenever I see what I’m about to describe, I turn into Jules: “Well, I’m a mushroom-cloud-layin’ motherfucker, motherfucker! I’m Superfly T.N.T. I’m the Guns of the Navarone!” When did it become the latest horrible rage to put a space between the last word of a sentence and the punctuation that ends said sentence? Offenders, you know who you are. End this disgusting habit quickly before I die a premature death.

oh, no tonsils (shudder then shower)

What a let down. Today is supposed to be movie club day. Normally that means reading and writing pithy reviews of bad (but good) cheeky horror/scary movies. However, you will find no reviews a coordinated denunciation of the latest pick (Black Devil Doll) other than in addition to what little I’m about to write. First of all, I would like to apologize to my movie club mates for making such a horrible choice with this “movie”. It wasn’t a movie at all. It was basically pornographic crap.  It was 63 minutes of nothing but hate. Women bore the brunt of the majority of this hate, though Patrick Dempsey took his fair share, too.  I wish that I could un-watch this in its entirety. Sixty-three minutes of TS’ life and my life were wasted. 54 did her best to block it out by occupying herself on the internet while TS and I shot each other awkward and horrified glances in hopes of averting our eyes from the nastiness being spewed from my television. My brain needs a shower.

four years of undergrad plus four years of med school equals what?

This simple equation apparently does not equal eight years of how to use common sense. Making up words and trying to pass them off as real doesn’t work. Ask GW. You’ll just end up being the butt of lots of jokes in the mainstream media. (It sort of worked for Heidegger, but that was before a 24-hour news cycle was instilled. Plus, no one truly understands what the fuck he’s writing about, so it comes off more as bad poetry than his intended earth-shattering philosophical stances.)

What the fuck am I talking about? A little background is in order. I currently work adjacent to the healthcare industry. I am employed by an independent medical review organization. Our clients are health insurance companies and hospitals. We provide independent reviews regarding their clients (patients) and let them know whether or not a certain treatment is appropriate or if one of their doctors is royally screwing the pooch. Don’t worry – I’m not the one doing any sort of reviewing. Once a case has been reviewed by a doctor in the appropriate specialty, I edit it in such a way that it reads more like prose than an IKEA instruction manual. I am the Grammarian.

Every one of these reviews is authored by a doctor. You might think it wrong to belittle these physicians for not knowing where his/her last patient’s anal cavity stops and where a semicolon should be inserted, but I derive great pleasure in doing so. Besides, this is not today’s point. I quite often find in reviews little gems in the form of newly invented words. Earlier this morning I came across “quantitate”. This physician obviously had meant to use quantify, but came up about nine yards short of the first down.

From now on, I’m going to try to come up with definitions for the newly minted words. My brother and I have already defined today’s beauty. Quantitate: to eat a large quantity of something. For example: I quantitated so many chicken wings at 25-cent wing night! I’m so hungry right now that I could quantitate a small army of horses.

What’s more is that this one works with virtually any verb! “Oh man, I’m so hungover right now. I definitely shouldn’t have quantidrunk that many beers last night.” It even works with activities that don’t involve eating or drinking! “I’ve got a big weekend of training coming up, so I’d better prepare for some quantiriding.”

More examples:

• quantipee (for those with larger bladders)
• quantispeak (for the loquacious)
• quantilove (for the smitten)
• quantileap (for kangaroos)
• quantihate (for the racist)
• quantifret (for the nervous)
• quanticuss (for the sailor in you!)

Now you try!

dear _____, i hate your stinking guts. you make me vomit. you’re the scum between my toes. love, _____

Like the majority of humankind, I have a few (many) things that irk me to no end. Most people refer to these as pet peeves. Mine generally have to do with grammar (written and spoken) and table manners. However, there is one that falls outside these lines (though it still ties in loosely with language): continuing to use a word or phrase that has been overused. An incomplete list of the offending parties:

• Epic – used by the cycling community to describe any ride with more than 200′ of climbing or any ride during which a cloud passes overhead.
• Main Street vs. Wall Street – used more during the ‘08 presidential race than Giuliani has ever uttered “9/11″
• 9/11 – I most recently saw this being used in a profile on the website of a cycling coach from New York.
• Woot – No explanation needed. Hearing this makes me want to punch things.

There are more, but I want to move on to something else I’ve noticed lately. This is the misappropriation of the phrase “beg the question”. It is a philosophical phrase used to denote a type of logical fallacy (the assumption of a premise without any evidence other than the premise itself). It is NOT the act of raising an obvious question. Understood? Now go forth and speak correctly and less annoyingly.

movie club: santa’s slay

This past weekend was a whopper. Three and a half days off in a row that don’t happen to be a part of a vacation is hard to get through. You start that first night off with a bang because it’s a weekend. Then you push through the next day with the same idea, but you’re moving a bit slower because that first night really got you good. The second full day ought to be used wisely (i.e., not punishing your liver further), but you continue to make poor decisions because you still have another full day to get back up to normal operating speed before starting the next work week. By the time the last day of the extended weekend rolls around, your body is only good for about two hours out of the entire 16 (assuming that you sleep eight hours). The other 14 hours of awake time can only be used for watching back-to-back episodes of a good TV show or napping. There’s only one other thing for which this day can be truly used: movie club!

Santa’s Slay was chosen because it’s cold outside. Or maybe because it’s the end of December. I don’t know. I didn’t choose it, but I wish I had. It was amazingly awful. To say that the characters were painted with broad strokes would be an understatement. Every character was a caricature of the stereotype that s/he represented. Nuance was not a word known by the writer/director. However, I didn’t expect or want this movie to be as such. I wanted death by icicle, flagrant boobie exposure, and Santa’s folklore backstory to involve Satan and an nondescript woman named “Erika”. I know that’s quite detailed and very narrow, but this movie hit each mark with precise precision.

The opening scene saw Sonny Corleone, The Nanny, Corky Romano, Julie Freeman, and two no-name actresses who were both in Special Unit 2 (whatever that was) meet their ultimate demise at the hands of a deranged Santa. (These were the only semi-recognizable big-name cast members that would make an appearance. We all agreed that killing off your biggest actors in the opening scene is a great way to start a movie.) This horribly wonderful Santa is actually a demon who was spawned by Satan himself and some woman named Erika, according to the Book of Klaus. Before Christmas was a holiday about putting gifts underneath an evergreen tree, it was a day of reckoning. Instead of spreading holiday cheer, Santa prefers to instill “yuletide fear”. I don’t recall the specifics, but there were human sacrifices and mass killings. In 1005 C.E., Santa lost a bet that involved the great sport of curling to an archangel and he was forced to abstain from the usual massacres for 1000 years. This apparently is difficult for someone who looks like he should be a professional wrestler:

The archangel gave up his angelic ways somewhere around 1940 C.E. so that he could boink a mortal female. They begot someone whom we never meet and who has a kid of his/her own. The grandchild of the archangel (who is regarded by the population of the township in Hell [the name of the town in which the movie is set] as a crazy old kook) has intimacy problems with Claire from Lost because he was raised by his quirky archangel-grandfather. In 2005 C.E., the bet is over and Santa wants revenge on the archangel-grandfather. He kills a bunch of people on the way:

• the above-mentioned family
• a mean, little old lady with a penchant for antisemitism and good cusses
• a couple of truckers patronizing a titty-bar and a the boobie-showing “dancers”
• the valet and bartender at the skin bar
• the Jewish deli owner
• a bunch of carolers
• a preacher played by Dave Thomas
• two foul-mouthed kids opening their gifts

Snowmobiles, a bison dressed as a “hell-deer”, a rocket launcher, a chestnut-shooting nutcracker, a lot of really good/bad holiday jokes, and another curling bet made up the rest of the movie. The door was left open for at least one more sequel. It was probably the sixth best Christmas horror movie after the other five that were made. I give it two exhausted eyes that stayed open for the whole movie. Now go read the others at Tiny, Emma, and SoSo. I hope they blew as much eggnog out of their noses as I did!

wordpress wins again.

It’s that time again. I’ve been signed out by WordPress, so it’s been too long since my last post. A shitload of different shit has happened since then. We’ll see how many I can link together with varying degrees of effective segue methodology. After wading our way through Shanghai in its perpetually-under-construction-just-like-the-rest-of-China way, we hit up the oh-so-posh United Airlines Red Carpet Club on our way out of the Far Eastern country. Here we enjoyed toilets with seats pre-warmed to our bottoms’ delights and built-in bidets for when the nasty was finished, unlimited free food and wine, and stacks of magazines for us to swipe for in-flight reading material.

Ironically, the upscale members-only airport club (we’re not members – 54’s father is, though, and was kind enough to let us enjoy the spoils before our long flight) is where 54 contracted a spot of food poisoning that would go into high gear about an hour and a half into our trans-pacific flight. After heaving several times, a kind British flight attendant moved her into business class to relax a bit. Her ailments seemed to resolve of their own volition before the flight ended, though her tummy remained a bit peeved about the ingestion of tainted foods for another 24 hours.

Once stateside again, we went back to our workaday work week. A poor decision to eat a tuna salad sandwich from Subway for lunch one day that week led to my turn riding the porcelain pony at both ends. (An aside: This was the second time in as many years that I have endured the effects of food poisoning that was the result of an idiotic decision to eat a tuna salad sandwich from a less-than-reputable source – the first was from a 7-11 in Chicago.) Needless to say, I ventured no further than 20 feet from our bathroom for a good 16 hours. Around hour 10, I had a little mishap. To borrow a line, I took a gamble on a fart and I lost. 54 was fortunate enough to watch the face of her husband-to-be fill with fear and surprise right before he jumped up and raced to the bathroom in an attempt to minimize the damage wreaked upon his shorts.

Even without the brutality of blowing tater tots out of my nose, my stomach never takes kindly to changes in timezones, especially such drastic ones. It took me nearly two weeks to get back on my normal BM schedule after the start of the trip. It didn’t help at all that 54’s parent’s apartment in Shanghai has glass doors on both bathrooms; to be fair, one of the doors is frosted, but you can definitely tell which deed is being done behind the curtain, so to speak. You try taking your turn on the can little more than a pane of glass away directly after informing your future in-laws that you plan on proposing to their only daughter in the immediate future.

How’s that for a shitload of different shit? I’ll bet you didn’t think I was going to be so literal! (I’m really glad that WordPress, and by extension this post, is inaccessible through the firewall of state-run internet censors in China, lest 54’s parents read about the various intestinal problems experienced by yours truly.)

eyeball vs. tree limb

Yesterday morning my brother and I went out for an early ride before our respective workdays. It was well before sunrise when we left and I opted not to wear protective glasses (sunglasses or other). This proved to be a rather large mistake. Halfway through the ride, before the sun was providing any useful light, I managed to ride my eye straight into an index finger-sized tree limb:

Luckily I managed to keep it upright; otherwise, I would have crashed both myself and my brother.

so much stuff

We got back from Shanghai yesterday. I have a lot of things about which to write: traffic, pollution, population density, Chinglish, etc. I saw one bike that wasn’t about to collapse into a pile of rust. I asked 54 to marry me and she answered in the affirmative. I learned a wee bit of Mandarin (I now want to learn a lot more). There will be much, much more said about this trip. However, I have neither the energy nor wits to do it now. My body is not yet adjusted to the time difference. Say hello to Haibou:

cutdown! countdown!

In less than 24 hours 54 and and I are heading to the Far East. We’ll be spending 10 days in Shanghai with her parents (who live there) executing a laundry list of things to do. Seriously, the list is long, and it contains errands that may surprise (teeth cleaning, to name one). We’ll be there over the Thanksgiving holiday, though as much as we like to think of the U.S. being the center of the world, the Chinese don’t celebrate that holiday. Next week will host just another regular ass Thursday and Friday. I digress.

If there ever is a day for cruise control at work, it’s the day before a 10-day vacation. I love this feeling of anticipation. Sure, today’s work day is going to seem like forever and I’m going to glance at the clock in the corner of my screen every 30 seconds, but it’s a good thing. Today has a different feel to it than almost any other day (except, of course, other days before a decent vacation or some other event to which you’re looking forward). My mind is sluggish, my body feels tired, my legs are heavy…oh wait, that’s just the fact that I’ve crammed 17 hours of training into the last week when I’ve been doing 13-14 hours/week for the last month-and-a-half. I hurt. This is another plus, though. It means that I’ll be able to enjoy…no, that’s not the right word…SLEEP for the majority of the 17-hour flight to China. The wine and muscle relaxants won’t hurt either.

+

 

Anyway, it’s not as though I post regularly enough for anyone to miss these delightful ramblings (and it’s not as though my readership extends far and wide), but I will have plenty to say upon my return (we’ll see if it actually makes it to post). Tsai chien…

movie club: big meat eater

It was my turn to pick the movie and I thought I had a winner. But Blockbuster failed miserably and I had to limit my options to what was available on Netflix watch instantly. However, I’m pretty sure that my second choice was even better than my first. I chose Big Meat Eater (I hope you could figure that one out by the title of this post) purely because, well, just look at it! Seriously, if you haven’t seen this movie, you need to do so as quickly as possible. It’s well worth your hour and 20 minutes that it will take. With that, I don’t want to ruin too much for you, but I still need to put something up about it.

 

 

Come to think of it, I don’t know if I could really ruin anything for you. I fell asleep about 40 minutes into this gem (not because it’s bad – it is, but in that “holy hell, I can’t not watch the rest of this amazingly awful kind-of-a-musical-but-not-really-even-though-the-characters-break-into-song-every-now-and-again” way – but because I have a hard time staying up past 9:30p and we started watching it at 8:45p), so I don’t know how it ends. Don’t worry, I’m going to watch the rest of it tonight.

Getting back to the meat and potatoes of this little write-up, I found myself at a loss of words while watching this movie. From the nerdy butcher who has invented a universal language for humanity to adopt in the event (which turns out to be more likely than one would postulate) that aliens make contact opening the film by talking into the camera to the enormous B.B. King look-alike wearing a fez hat diving into a nearly incomprehensible song while working in a boiler room and the all-too-skinny belly dancers who apparently reside in the boiler room come out during said song for an exhibition, I was thoroughly confused and delighted (as I hope you are, too, by the time you reach the end of this sentence). The best part of the half of the movie I watched was the morbidly obese homicidal B.B. King being offered a job at the butcher shop by repeatedly grunting “hungry” to the shop owner (which, I guess, could be read as an extremely racist part of the movie) and subsequently turning on (sexually) two little old ladies by grinding a flank steak by hand (and while breaking into song about being a meat-eater and wanting ham!) when she ordered ground chuck.

 

 

There was also some sub-plot line about the son of a corrupt gypsy trying to be the first to the moon and aliens, but this is when I started to drift. Perhaps I’ll finish this after watching the rest tonight.

Rating so far: Two very tired eyes trying desperately to stay awake for more hilarious confusion!

Now go check out Tiniest Sprinter, emmanation, and SoSoVelo for their reviews!