More Meme Thievery

I’ll be taking that, thank you very much!!

TECHNOLOGY

Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer? Work: A picture of my kid’s softball team. Home: My kid, of course.

Q. How many televisions you havek in your house? 3

BIOLOGY

Q. Are you right-handed or left-handed? Lefty!!!

Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body? A pre-cancerous mole.

Q. What is the last heavy item you lifted? Does my kid count?

Q. Have you ever been knocked out? I think I was out for about 30 seconds once.

BULLSHITOLOGY

Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die? No way!

Q. If you could change your name, what would you change it to? I like my name thank you.

Q. What color do you think looks best on you? Blue, burnt orange, brown or coral.

Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item? I seem to recall swallowing a dime, or some other type of coin.

DAREOLOGY

Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100? I guess so.

Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000? No.

Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000? Heck yes.
Q. Would you pose naked in a magazine for $250,000? Nope.

Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1000? Maybe.

Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000? No.

DUMBOLOGY

Q: What is in your left pocket? Nothing.

Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good movie? Huh? Never saw it. Never heard of it.

Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house? Hardwood of the faux variety.

Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower? Stand.

Q: How many pairs of flip flops do you own? Just one. Not a big fan of flip-flops.

LASTOLOGY

Q: Last person who texted you? Sigh. No one. I can’t accept text messages…long story.

Q: Last person who called you? Work: Priscilla; Home: Mom

Q: Person you hugged? My kid.

FAVORITOLOGY

Q: Number? 21

Q: Season? Fall.

Q: Color? Green.

CURRENTOLOGY

Q: Missing someone? Of course.

Q: Mood? A combo of being stressed and overwhelmed.

Q: Listening to? The Today Show

Q: Watching? The clock…same here. Have to put kid on the bus.

Q: Worrying about? Cleaning up my house for my step-daughter’s confirmation party tomorrow.

Q: Wearing? Jeans, black and grey flower shirt and wedges. Gotta love casual Fridays.

RANDOMOLOGY

Q: First place you went this morning? To the shower. Haven’t left the house yet.

Q: What can you not wait to do? Leave the office at 5pm today.

Q: Do you smile often? I try to.

Going, going, GONE!

I am once again jumping the Friday Funny by posting a ha-ha on Thursday, but what can you do?   The Onion rules. 

My good friend Sweetpea is a DC resident and Nats fan, so this is for her.

Nationals Book It After Foul Ball Accidentally Smashes Capitol Rotunda

WASHINGTON, DC—An 8,976-foot foul ball off the bat of Washington third baseman Ryan Zimmerman crashed through the U.S. Capitol Building rotunda Sunday afternoon, prompting both the Nationals and the opposing Pittsburgh Pirates to gasp, turn…

Watch Out! He’s “Concerned”!

After months of complete silence on the subject from the White House, the Prez finally had something moronic to say about the soaring gas prices.

Bush said the rising cost of gas “troubles me a lot” because it is “like a tax on the working people.”

Oh good.   I’m so glad he’s “troubled”.  (And what an absolutely stupid remark to boot!)   I fully admit that there isn’t a lot that he or the government can do but he hasn’t had a darn thing to say about it for months!   How about a little sympathy there, Dubya!   Sheesh.   Never has a President seemed so completely out of touch with reality than this clown has. Unreal.

I can’t even put together a rational and grammatically correct sentence to respond to this! That’s how irritated I am.

Even my husband, who is a Republican and voted for him, could not defend him on this. He is fed up as well.  He said to me last night, “Could the guy at least PRETEND to be doing something about the gas prices?  Lie to us even, but at least acknowledge that we’re getting pummeled out here!”.

‘Nuf said.

Here a Chick, There a Chick…

We may be here in SmAlbany but darnnit, we have Peregrine Falcon chicks! 

I’m not a bird-watcher by any stretch, but I think it’s pretty neat. They are roosting in a nest under the Dunn Memorial Bridge which spans the Hudson River between Albany and Rensselaer counties.

I can’t find a way to embed the webcam image here so you’ll have to click on the link to see the nest.

The Friday Funny

I goofed.  I should have posted yesterday’s post today.

Duh.

So I looked around on the internet for something else that was funny and found this.

As a former bank teller, I found this amusing.  I mean really….how stupid do you have to be to try and forge a check for $360 billion dollars?  Did he really think that the bank teller would be that stupid too?

Express Yourself

If you want to discover a new and fresh comic strip, go visit Basic Instructions.   I stumbled across it while reading Scott Adams’ Dilbert Blog, another favorite strip of mine.  Turns out that Scott discovered this comic strip and has been advising this guy ever since.  I figured if Scott Adams likes it, it was worth checking out, and it is.  Good stuff!

Today’s strip was hilarious and relevant to my previous post on individuality .   Geeks unite!!

What I found more hilarious was the biker reference, as I am a Biker Bitch Wannabe….my husband is the real Harley driver, I’m just a passenger. But I found it funny nonetheless:

Now Turn Around and Explain it to Your Neighbor

THAT particularly peculiar quote comes courtesy of my whacky economics teacher from high school. He’d go on and on about an economics concept, pause, and then literally tell us each to explain it to the person behind or next to you.

I suppose it made sense from a teaching method perspective. If you can explain it, then you learned it and understood it. However, many of us argue that his ” slighly” unorthodox method of teaching could have had its origins from his experiences in the 60s. Just sayin’.

ANYHOO….the whole point of today’s lecture post is to address the notion of the “Gas Tax Holiday” that is being proposed at both the state and federal levels today.  Strange coincidence?  Doesn’t matter really because it won’t work.

At first, I admit, I got excited that there was a proposal to remove the gas tax temporarily to aleve the summer driving season but immediately following this elation, my economics classes came whooshing back to me in a sudden rush of an anvil crashing down on my head.

It is a matter of simple economics relating to supply and demand.  It.just.won’t.work.

Lowering the price via a tax cut will increase demand due to lower prices, further deplete supply, and then BINGO!  Tax-free prices go up again, thereby washing out the tax cut and leaving us worse off from when we started.   Make sense?  There are a lot more factors that go into this but that’s the most basic way to explain it.

If the price of gas suddenly goes down, would you seriously go on conserving?  Probably not.  It’s human nature to snap it up while the going is good.  At the risk of sounding like a leftist environmentalist, the only way to bring down the price of oil and gasoline is to cut demand, not not by cutting the price, especially via a tax cut.

Gas tax is something that never should have been abused in the first place (read: raised) by state and federal governments for the sake of raising revenues.   Now it simply adds to the problem and removing it will only make matters worse.  It can only be phased out or cut back AFTER the nominal price goes down, if it ever does.

No, I have no other viable solution to offer today, but then neither does the President and I’m not so sure he’s even aware that we are *this close* to $4.00/gallon at this very moment!

It’s Only April

That is what all baseball enthusiasts say when their team flounders about like a fish out of water in the opening month of baseball season.

“It’s too cold still for pitching/hitting to be effective”

“They still have to work out the kinks”

or in the case of my beloved Red Sox,

“The flu is running rampant in the clubhouse”

Otherwise, how on earth do you explain THIS??!!

Eastern Division
Team           W   L   GB
Baltimore    14  11   -
Tampa Bay  14 11    -
Boston        15 12    -
New York   13 13    1.5
Toronto      11 15    3.5

I do believe that there is an unwritten law out there that Tampa Bay must be in last place at all times. ALL TIMES!!!

Yes, it’s only April with a long way to go til October but c’mon! This is just unnatural.
 

You and Me Are Free to Be…You and Me.

My Boss has a degree in psychology and therefore is always trying to figure out what makes people tick. (How this goes along with his other degree in accounting and Master’s in Public Administration, I’ll never understand!) I am amused and endlessly entertained by his (occasionally snarky) observations of human behavior, which he shares with me from time to to time.

As I am his direct assistant, he also tries to figure me out, especially now since we are in the middle of performance evaluations. The fun (and challenge) in it for me is to always keep him guessing, since I’m not always so inclined to be psycho-analyzed. Gotta maintain that professional distance and the aura of feminine mystique, right?

So last week he labeled me “complicated” because I must have done something that contradicted his assessment of my character. He also called me “one tough cookie”, when I “eloquently” rebuffed his teasing over my less-than-perfect filing skills. (I will point out here that a cluttered desk is the sure sign of a genius.)

Ha! Little does he know that THAT was not always the case. However, it did get me thinking as to what exactly has made me who I am today. I didn’t get much time to ponder that because the office work got in the way. I hate it when that happens.

Fast forward to today….we are renovating our spare room (read: junk room where anything that didn’t have a place gets tossed!) and I am going through boxes of stuff. Lots of stuff since I am a packrat. I then came across an absolute GEM from my childhood, Free to Be..You and Me songbook. I started flipping through it invoking all sorts of memories of singing the songs, acting out the poetry, etc. I grabbed the cd, which I had not listened to in ages, and popped it into the cd player. Ahhhh, it was like talking to an old friend.

If there was ever a soundtrack to my life and a catalyst to my personality while growing up, this is it. As a child I was always encouraged to be myself. Think for myself and not be limited to gender stereotypes. Nothing reinforced this better than the soundtrack to Free to Be…You and Me, which I listened to almost on a daily basis while growing up in the 70s.

Don’t Dress Your Cat in an Apron

Don’t dress your cat in an apron
Just ’cause he’s learning to bake.
Don’t put your horse in a nightgown
Just ’cause he can’t stay awake.
Don’t dress your snake in a mu-mu
Just ’cause he’s off on a cruise.
Don’t dress your whale in galoshes
If she really prefers overshoes.

A person should wear what he wants to
And not just what other folks say.
A person should do what she likes to–
A person’s a person that way.

My Dog is a Plumber

My dog is a plumber; he must be a boy,
Although I must tell you, his favourite toy
Is a little play stove with pans and with pots,
Which he really must love, ’cause he plays with it lots.
So perhaps he’s a girl, which kind of make sense,
Since he can’t through a ball, and he can’t climb a fence.
But neither can dad, and I know he’s a man,
And mom is a woman and she drives a van.
Maybe the problem is in trying to tell
Just what someone is by what he does well.

Yup…and we all wondered why I resisted taking ballet lessons in favor of climbing trees and playing baseball! I was always on the outside at school, walked to the beat of my own drum and didn’t exactly follow the latest fashions (though I do admit to owning leg warmers in the 80s). It never bothered me and still doesn’t to this day thanks to these poems and songs. As strange as it sounds, things happen in my life and these lyrics and phrases immediately pop into my head as a sort of reinforcement that it’s perfectly fine to be who I am. I think Marlo Thomas would be proud.

My husband loves this about me, most of the time. Through my Free To Be upbringing and experiences in life, I truly am absolutely comfortable in my own skin and confident about who I am. I think it makes for a better marriage. However, my feminist upbringing does occasionally clash with his June Cleaver household childhood. (With absolutely NO disrespect intended towards my late mother-in-law, of whom I am in constant awe of even to this day.) And yes, he has me completely and utterly figured out.

There was only one story that I wish I could have emulated more and that was Atalanta. I’m sure it would have saved me from some of the heartbreak that I suffered later in my life thanks to the fact that I was a romantic dreamer as well as being a tomboy. Hey, we can’t all be perfect feminists.

There are so many songs and poems on this song track, and even more in the songbook, that I could talk about so they are so much a part of me but this post would become the equivalent of a feminist dissertation, so I will end here with my ode to It’s Alright to Cry. There was nothing more fascinating to me than to watch a big ole football player tell me that it was alright to cry.

So. Perhaps I should bring the soundtrack into work and give my Boss the Key to My Personality to satisfy the psychologist in him?

Naaaaah. I’ll just keep him guessing.

Friday Funny: To Comma or Not To Comma

I needed a “thing” for my blog, so I’m going to try out the Friday Funny feature.  The inaugural  installment comes courtesy of The Onion.

The Boss and I frequently clash over his usage of the comma when collaborating on his written briefings.  I think he uses it excessively and he thinks I’m….well….wrong.  

Now I feel slightly vindicated, sort of.

Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere

WASHINGTON—In the midst of a crisis that may have reached a breaking, point Tuesday afternoon, linguists, and grammarians, everywhere say they…