The Point of the Story

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But I Still Love Technology-The Other Odds

12 January 2020 / / 0 Comments
9 Min Read

Editor’s note: This is the companion post to But I Still Love Technology-The Evens/Number Five, and, with their powers combined, form a complete version of The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story. If you haven’t read The Evens yet, you can do so here. For Number Five, click here.

Editor’s additional note: This countdown list is admittedly a bit meta–i.e. a blog post about adventures in blogging. As such, it may be of particular interest to those who are starting up a blog themselves. For the rest of the world, I hope that I’m not getting into the weeds so much that you can’t appreciate the stupidity/frustration/absurdity of these situations. Enjoy! (I’m hoping you do, at least.)

To reiterate what I’m up to:

In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.

And that–spoiler alert–is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.

But I Still Love Technology-The Evens (2020)

Without further ado, I present to you:

The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.

#3: That time my blog thought it was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Back when this fiasco originally went down, I had shared some of it via the Point’s Instagram and Facebook pages, so this might sound familiar to some of you.

Over the summer, I had spent a couple of months putting the Point of the Story together before releasing it into the wild. One of the first things I needed to do was set the time zone for my server.


No problem! It was an easy decision to select Norfolk, thinking “Hey, perfect! That’s only a 3 hour drive from here!”

After that, the first order of business was to put up a “Coming Soon” page–replete even with a countdown timer–for anyone who tried to visit it before the Appointed Time Unto Which All Would Be Made Known.

And that Appointed Time, which all future historians will know by heart, was Thursday, August 29, 2019, precisely at 10 p.m. EDT.

When that day rolled around, and shortly before we went live, I had texted my good friend, known in these parts as “The Doctor,” and asked if he would test things out once the clock struck 10. You know, make sure all the links were functioning and that it wasn’t a general shit-show, etc., etc.

However, around that same time, when I tried going directly to a particular post from a different computer, I wasn’t seeing the “Coming Soon” screen as I had expected. So I pinged the good Doctor to check on it for me:

(Tries tweaking some settings, hoping to somehow get a different result…)

That last line there is an example of “careful what you wish for,” because that was one hope that was definitely fulfilled…apart from the Doctor’s testing, I don’t think I had a single visitor that first day. Womp-womp-womp!

Anyways, as you can tell, I had a prime suspect in mind as to what was causing my woes. Apparently I hadn’t caught on to the fact that the timezone menu was segregated by region:

So yeah, it turns out that there was another Norfolk–the Pacific kine, in fact. And apparently it’s living 16 hours in the future. No wonder the floodgates to the Point were opened early. The ----- thing is happily living its life under the delusion that it’s out in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean.

So, one would think that since I had a number one suspect in mind as to what was causing me yet another time-traveling woe, that I would be able remedy the problem lickity-split and go on my way. Right?

Of course I popped on over to my WordPress dashboard and set my server time to New York City. I figuratively dusted off my hands and said to myself, “Welp! Mission Accomplished! I made quick work of that pesky problem!”

Yet, to my dismay, I kept suffering from premature blog-post-jaculation. Without fail over the next 2 weeks, instead of being published on Sunday morning at 7:15 am, my latest posts would go out to the public at 3:15 pm on Saturday–whether they were in final form or not.

For the sake of those who would come after me, I feel it is of utmost importance–albeit boring–that I reveal just what the hell was going on with my server time, and how I finally fixed that bastard for good.

Eventually, eventually, eventually, after much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth, I found the answer in the stupidest of places.

You see, there is very popular and powerful WordPress plugin called Jetpack that almost everyone uses. It’s got what every blogger/webmaster could ever need for basic site analytics, security, backups…and more!

Well, it turns out that for some reason, Jetpack also lets one set a server time, and who the ----- knows why it’s not automatically the same as what one sets in their WordPress dashboard.

In Summary, the wrong “common-sense” way to set your server time:

…and the correct elitist, No-You-Don’t-Know-What-You-Want-Let-Me-Fix-That-For-You, way to set your server time:1At least in the case where you’re using the otherwise useful Jetpack–made by the WordPress people themselves (hence why the setting is hiding at wordpress.com.

The point is beware of all the fancy “helpful” plugins you may be tempted to install. You never know which one of them asshats–ahem, I’m looking at you, Jetpack–might be a control freak, overriding your settings and then hiding the One True Setting in some obscure place.

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

#1: That time I tried to solicit an erotic photographer on Facebook.

So far, the dumb predicaments that errant technology has put me in have been without much real-world consequence. However, there has been one glaring exception to that rule.

A while back I told a tale of attempting to land a Craigslist gig of debugging a treasure hunt, as recounted in Blog Like Nobody’s Reading.

For those of you have read it–and those of you who just now hopped on over there to read it–you may recall the bonus story I just could not resist including.

In it I shared the tragic tale of some poor chap who had a perpetual Craigslist ad in the Gigs section, who for the life of him could not find someone to take erotic photographs of him at the behest of his wife.

You know, nothing fancy, just something low-key and tasteful like this:

“Lover Boy! You are a Lover Boy!”2Source: https://giphy.com/gifs/hulu-seinfeld-l0MYGEgd1I8ueXG8w

And since I know you’re all dying for an update on his status, I came across his ad AGAIN just a few days go, meaning that he has been critically under-erotically-photographed for at least 7 months now.

It’s somehow one of the saddest yet most hilarious things I’ve personally witnessed on Craigslist. So of course I couldn’t deprive the rest of the world of the chuckles to be found upon reflecting on his situation.

But as I’ve already well established, Karma is one bad-ass beach and pity anyone who should provoke her justice.

Things started to go sideways for me when I first had the idea to even include this beautiful vignette. Originally, in an early draft of the post, I had rudely interrupted myself in the middle of the main story and dropped it right in there. You know, train-wreck-of-thought/stream-of-consciousness and all that jazz.

And of course I had to include the critical piece of evidence, a screenshot of the ad. Again, to be clear, this is NOT my ad, NOT my words, NOT my marriage that is hinging on some tasteful male erotica:

Although later I would move that story to a bonus addendum at the end of the post, I had set the post up to be published while it was still in its first draft form, in case I didn’t have the chance to go back and revise it before my self-imposed deadline. So at the time, this screenshot was the first picture in the post, a detail that would come back to haunt my lily-white ass later on.

A neat feature on WordPress is that you can connect your social media accounts–Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.–and have an announcement go out on those platforms concurrently with your blog post when you have it scheduled to be published at a certain time (as I regularly do):

Automation sure is great, isn’t it? Thanks, Technology! Because of you, I don’t have to wake up at 7:15 on Sunday mornings and hop frantically from WordPress to Facebook to Twitter just to blast out my latest liturgical3I’m pretty certain that that does not mean what I’m trying to make it mean, but just don’t have it in me to do 5 second of internet research. offering.

If I recall correctly, I stayed up until around 3 in the morning the Saturday night/Sunday morning before Blog Like Nobody’s Reading was set to be published, indubitably trying to get it ready to be unveiled to the world, as is par for the course around here.

And thanks to all the publishing bells and whistles WordPress offers, I could get some much needed rest and sleep in late, knowing that all would be shared at the appointed time without any need for further human intervention.

It wasn’t until around noon that Sunday before I decided to check in on my Facebook post to see if was getting much action from my followers.

To my dismay, this is what I found being planted in their Facebook feeds:

Did ever express to you my insistence that context matters matters matters? If not: click here or here.

And now how meta is it that we have ourselves a real-live example of its importance, in the flesh!

Not only did stupid WordPress/Facebook decide to grab the first image from the first draft, but it decided to nicely crop it such that, even if you happened to notice the link and preview at the bottom of the picture, it sure looks like I’m straight-up pleading with everyone I know on Facebook to please, please, PLEASE, oh please take some nudie pics of me.

After this, this will be the image of me burned forever in their minds:

*Face-palm-emoji*

Although, I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or disappointed that no one took me up on my offer…

Anyways, as you can imagine, I immediately tried to edit it and change the picture, but you wouldn’t believe how unimaginably impossible that was. After 30 bonus minutes of that inaccurate solicitation continuing to pepper people’s Facebook feeds, I finally had to give up and just delete it, and post a new one altogether.

The lesson I learned here is trust nobody: if you want to embarrass yourself right, you’re going to have to do it yourself.

And that is also why you always see some poorly cut-and-pasted image with my Big Lip logo plastered on it accompanying ever ----- post I publish. No matter how tangentially related to the story, I always make some picture to be set as my Featured Image (another WordPress setting–I’ll spare you the screenshot for now), that way I know exactly what will be showing up in people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.

After all, I have a meticulously manicured public image to maintain…

Content created on: 4/6/10/11 January 2020 (Saturday/Monday/Friday/Saturday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

But I Still Love Technology-Number Five

9 January 2020 / / 0 Comments
5 Min Read

Editor’s note: This is a companion post to But I Still Love Technology-The Evens & But I Still Love Technology-The Other Odds, and, with their powers combined, form a complete version of The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story. If you haven’t read The Evens yet, you can do so here. The Other Odds will be forthcoming in a few short days.

Editor’s additional note: This countdown list is admittedly a bit meta–i.e. a blog post about adventures in blogging. As such, it may be of particular interest to those who are starting up a blog themselves. For the rest of the world, I hope that I’m not getting into the weeds so much that you can’t appreciate the stupidity/frustration/absurdity of these situations. Enjoy! (I’m hoping you do, at least.)

To reiterate what I’m up to:

In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.

And that–spoiler alert–is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.

But I Still Love Technology-The Evens (2020)

Without further ado, I present to you:

The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.

#5: That time I accidentally warped the fabric of space and time.

Shortly after debuting the Point in late August 2019, I was chatting up one of my friends, “Sonny B.,” whom I was hoping to include in an upcoming post, Shotgun Wedding, set to be published September 15th.

To my delight, she had been binging my content, and after she told me what all she had read, I pointed out that the only post she had missed was Bum Sandwich, which was the next-to-most-recent post of mine.

However, she didn’t know what the hell I was talking about…

Now, I don’t have a screenshot to demonstrate this, but I’ll recreate the issue just for y’all.

Let’s just say you type in thepointofthestory.com directly, and go to our homepage. When things are amiss, instead of getting the latest post (“The Evens” post), you see a very judgmental ----- Clark1Did “D1ck” just get censored?!? I bet it just got censored, didn’t it. ----- this ham-fisted Censorship plugin! instead:

Here, I’ll zoom in so you can actually see it:

As you can see, January 5th, 2020 is clearly “more recent” than December 29 or 31, 2019.

Apparently, I had managed to break the fundamental linearity of time as we experience it…

Part of the reason this was particularly frustrating is that potentially my new posts would never show up on the home page, leading most visitors to believe that I’ve stopped posting–and in turn losing critical new readers! (No one wants to read a stale blog, right?)

Anyways, no matter how much I tried tweaking the publishing date, unpublishing/republishing, etc. I could not get the most recent post to show up.

Well, I spent at least a good two weeks of Googling “WordPress posts out of order” and other similar searches to absolutely no avail. I could not find any evidence at all of anyone else in the rather-large WordPress community (millions+) ever having this problem.

Seriously?!? Not one other person had had this egregious problem?

Over and over, all the posts said the same thing: get your dates straight, and all should be copacetic, as this, and this alone, determines “post order.”

As you can (maybe) see in the screenshot of my Posts dashboard, The Evens have the correct date and everything, yet will still show up in the wrong chronological order…arggghhhh! This Universe doesn’t make any ----- sense any more.

I even bravely forged my way into the underlying code, and the function that was mis-fuck-tioning (translated simply into lay-terms) was simply “get next post” or “get previous post.” There was nowhere where the stupid thing could be breaking especially just for little ol’ me…could there?

One evening, when I was staring blankly at this dashboard in daze of hopelessness and despair, I noticed something tiny yet oh-so-slightly off:

It may not seem like much, but that’s my cursor showing up as a 4-directional arrow instead of your regular old pointer arrow.

Suspecting that this was a clue to this ridiculous madness, I clicked on the trouble-making post, and sure as shit, found that I could drag it and freely re-order the posts in such a manner.

I dragged that little bastard to the top of the list where it should be if it were chronological (i.e. FIRST), reloaded my homepage, and held my breath:

HUZZAH! Problem solved! Insanity averted!

But one mystery remained: why was nothing of the sort ever mentioned when I went in search of an answer on Google?

Well, it was on account of a perfect storm of being too clever for my own good coupled with my naiveté when it came to how WordPress functioned.

Long story short,2Who are we kidding, that ship sailed LONG ago. when I was trying to figure out how to make The Complete First Season binge-able from oldest to newest, I had installed a plugin that gives the blogger a bit more control over the order of posts, Simple Custom Post Order. What I didn’t realize is that most people using WordPress don’t have this god-like power to arbitrarily re-order their posts willy-nilly, i.e. the ability to click ‘n’ drag is not normal behavior.

Thinking that publishing them at the appropriate times would make the posts appear in the appropriate order, I was unaware that–under these new rules that I accidentally set up just for me–I needed to drag the newest post to the top of the list.

In summary, it was something of an unforced error due to having given way too much power someone way under-qualified to handle it responsibly.

Interestingly enough, my calendar-rearranging issues was obfuscated by another confounding screw-up. Later in that same conversation with Sonny B., she kept referring to the post which included her–which I had not published or otherwise shared with her.

I was simultaneously confused and impressed by her clairvoyant abilities to read a future post:

It turns out you can’t always blame the machine for bouts of unwanted technological tomfoolery.

Sometimes, there’s just a dipshit behind the wheel who can’t read a calendar…

Content created on: 4/6 January 2020 (Saturday/Monday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

But I Still Love Technology-The Evens

5 January 2020 / / 2 Comments
7 Min Read

Although we’re officially into the new year, and the time for countdowns is behind us, there was one last Top 5 list that I wanted to share.

In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.

And–spoiler alert–that is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.

Without further ado, I present to you:

The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.

J.K. Kidding! Before I present it to you, further ado is in order.

I promise that this is indeed a Top 5 list. However, since apparently I have zero ability to keep things short and simple, I decided to break it up into two posts out of respect for the Dear Reader’s time.

This week I present to you The Evens (#4 & #2)–be looking for The Odds (#5, #3, & #1) next week!

#4. That time I pretended I could time-travel.

No, I’m not talking about the time I took artistic liberties with a personal narrative in A Degenerate Family Christmas. This really happened–sadly much more boring, though.

You may have noticed at the end of many of my posts a time-stamp indicating when I actually created the content. For example:

Content created on: 23 October 2019 (Wednesday)

WordPress has many handy bits of code to make it much easier to efficiently build websites, one of them being “Reusable” blocks as seen here:

So of course I thought this would be perfect for always dropping the content’s creation date at the end of my blog, with the same formatting, etc. and only changing the date(s) as appropriate.

Every time I created a new post, I would add the “Content_creation_tag” block at the end and change the dates. Easy-peasy, done and done! Right?

It wasn’t until late October and after publishing 4 months worth of posts that I noticed something odd in an older post:

So…I guess a future me somehow wrote the post on the 23rd and sent it 3 days back in time to be published on the 20th? Wow. Sometimes I even impress myself.

But it turns out that’s only the beginning of my time-travel skillz:

BOOM! I can send information back at least 10 days in time. Ironclad proof, right here, ladies & gentlemen!

Upon closer inspection, it appears this is a skill I only developed exclusively for the month of October:

Poop. I really thought I had something special going there.

I’m J.K. Kidding of course–I don’t really believe I was able to manipulate the laws of physics so stupendously.

What it looks like is that my usage of the Reusable block–and ergo, these shenanigans–only started in the beginning of October. Though I could have sworn that I had been using them much longer than that…I’m starting to feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Obviously what was happening was that every time I updated that block with the creation date of a new post, it would retroactively update the older instances in the previous posts with that same date.

The bad news is the original dates were lost in the process (not that it matters that much), and I’ve been way to swamped with more important things to try to go back and correct this one stupid little detail.

The good news is that in putting together this post I discovered that Google’s all-seeing eye still remembers those posts as they were in their heydays:

But wait…

Arrrgggg. ----- this shit. I know for a fact that that is not accurate information for that post (which when visited, of course, says 23 October).

For the record, I’m basically live-blogging my research here, so you’re getting to see my sanity ----- with by technology in real time–again.

I give up.

This whole “content created” baloney is soooo asinine. I’m done wasting your time and mine on it.

Moving on, then…

#2: That time I tried to censor the contracted form of the F-bomb.

All y’all long-time readers of the Point know that swearing and the self-censoring thereof is a central theme around here.1See, for example: The Alpine Stranger and/or Hello, Mother F*ckers! For the sake of expediency, I have been using a WordPress “Censorship” plugin that will take a list of black-listed potty words, and then any time they show up in a post or comment, those words are replaced with dashes (i.e. something like “- – – -” will show up in place of the world-famous f-bomb).

In theory, this approach would allow me to change how the blog is censored in the future–or to turn it off all together–without having to edit every ----- post I’ve ever written. Also, it let’s me cuss to my heart’s content when writing, while minimizing the number of minor strokes my dearest mother experiences when reading my handiwork. Everybody wins, right?

Anyways, the Censorship plugin doesn’t quite always do its job. There is one particular off-the-rails example that I need to show you, because the absurdity only happens behind the scenes.

I believe it was when putting together A Pound Casual Asshat that I felt particularly compelled to write:

If all that seems like an atypically optimistic outlook coming from yours truly, then I applaud your keen sense of What the Fuck’s Up (emphasis added).

A Pound Casual Asshat (2019)

As of this writing, you should be able to see an uncensored version of the f-bomb.2There is an off chance that I’ve implemented my own censorship plugin by the time you’re reading this, in which case it may be properly censored.

And before that, included in my original batch of posts, was A Most Excellent Life Lesson, in which I employed the classic possessive form of the f-bomb:

Oh, for fuck’s sake people…CONTEXT! (again, emphasis added)

A Most Excellent Life Lesson (2019)

Well, interestingly enough, for the life of me, I could not get Censorship to detect and censor “fuck’s”.

Mom, I feel like you deserve to know how valiantly and bravely I wrestled the machine to try to protect you.

For those of you with a bit of coding/computer science background, you may know that the humble apostrophe–aka a single quote–is often a special character which is interpreted as signifying the beginning or end of some exactly quoted text, as opposed to be taken literally as an apostrophe that should appear in the text.

In most cases, special characters can be made literal–as I needed in this situation–by putting a so-called “escape character” before it. This is typically a backslash (“\”).

So when Censorship didn’t bleep out “fuck’s” after I had add it to the blacklist, I tried escaping the apostrophe, and thus typed into the software as “fuck\’s” (without the double quotes).

When that didn’t work, I added several variations, hoping to empirically find something that would work and spare my poor mother’s eyes of beholding the horror of “fuck’s.”

Well, something in the Censorship code tells it re-process all the potty words every time one is added. Each time it does this, it tries to be smart and add an escape character in front of any special characters it finds.

Guess what? The backslash is also a special character–it is the escape character, after all. Pretty ----- special, I would say.

The best part is that it has no way to know which backslashes it had automatically inserted the last time a word was added to the list. Therefore, each time it doubles (at least) the number of ----- backslashes it thinks it needs to look for.

Let me just show you how ----- out-of-hand it has gotten–just consider the fact that I had to take two screenshots and then turn them on their sides just to present the following to you in any comprehensible manner:

That’s 256 backslashes in the longest instance, for those of you keeping score at home.

I’m pretty sure if I add just a few more words to this list, that that initial instance of “fuck’s” will break my entire website…

Actually, according to my math, if I add 12 words, that “fuck’s” alone will be 1 MB, and 10 more words after that it will be 1 GB.3Uncompressed–this particular type of information can be compressed with almost infinite efficiency. Another 10 words and the Censorship code running on the server hosting this website will attempt to compare a 1 TB (1000 GB) string against every word of every post it loads. OOF, Le OOF.

In America, you censor “fuck’s,” but in Soviet Russia4I wrote whole post on this topic: In Soviet Russia. Read it today! the Censor ----- you.

Wait, wait, that’s not how the joke is supposed to go…

…but in Soviet Russia “fuck’s” censors you.

Screw it–they’re both accurate descriptions.

My inner Yakov Smirnoff going off on a tangent

Don’t forgot to tune in next week as we hit #5, #3, and, of course, #1!

Content created on: 3/4 January 2020 (Friday/Saturday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Just Under the Wire

31 December 2019 / / 0 Comments
5 Min Read

As I write this, the western half humanity is only moments away from saying goodbye to the decade that was the 2010s and welcoming in 2020 and beyond.

I find myself going back and forth between whether or not I’m supposed to be doing something sacred and meaningful to bring closure and completeness to the last 10 years.

History is typically a good first draft of a guide, so I that got me to thinking, “Well, how the heck did I close out the first decade of the 2000s?”

It took awhile and little bit of detective work, but I was finally able to reconstruct my final moments of 2009.

Turns out, tonight will mark an important milestone for me as a physicist: it will be my “tin, aluminum” anniversary1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedding_anniversary#Celebration_and_gifts of submitting my first scientific paper!

Well, sort of.

You see, back in 2009, I was in the middle of my 6-year stint as a graduate student. I had spent a good half of that year trying to write my first paper, and it just seemed to be this endless churning month after month.

As the year wound down, my professors and I had worked our way through the 7th, 8th, and 9th revisions of the paper. Though it was never obvious to us, slowly but surely, the story it had been lacking was slowly congealing into something presentable.

I had received that 9th revision back when I went into work on December 30th. As I looked over it, I realized “Holy shit. I think it’s finally ready to be submitted!”

Honestly, this came as a complete surprise to me, as it had just seemed to be the Paper That Wouldn’t Die. I think a part of me expected to still be ----- with it 10 years on, so all in all this was a wonderful revelation.

I spent the rest of that day putting the finishing touches on it, and decided I would work a short day on New Year’s Eve, just long enough to get it officially submitted.

This was a pretty exciting thought, that I would be able to officially have it timestamped with “2009.” Some journals even go by the submission date when determining the year of publication for the official record,2Okay, okay. To the few published scientists out there reading this: ya got me. I don’t think any journals go by submission date. However, since this was my first rodeo, it is entirely possible I believed this to be the case. so it would be a badge of honor I could wear with pride, an immovable token signifying that I had actually accomplished something tangible that year.

New Year’s Day I rolled up into the lab all hopped up on adrenaline. Today was going to be the day. I could feel it.

So here’s a fun fact about the academic world that I learned that day: even with a complete manuscript in hand and ready to go, there is always a surprising amount of bullshit and/or red tape between you and finally pressing the Submit button.

It also didn’t help that I was going rogue just a wee bit. I knew that if I brought the professors back in for any of the process it would just add an extra 3-4 days to the whole thing, so I had made the executive decision to pull the trigger. My paper, my choice, right?

Anyways, the day continued to tick away as I made my way through the labyrinth of online submission forms, and so around 3 pm I decided that I was close enough to being done that it made more sense to go home and wrap it up from there.

Oh, what an ignorant chap3”Ignorant slut.” That’s the term I really want to use. It’s okay, right? I’ve seen it used freely on broadcast TV so it has to be somewhat acceptable now, ya? I was.

Once home, I got back to work, always seemingly 5 minutes away from washing my hands of the matter and being able to relax and enjoy ringing in the new decade with The Boss Lady.

Almost done…almost done…always, “almost done.”

While I sat on the couch, furiously pounding away at the laptop, my companion literally tired of waiting for me and fell into a deep slumber beside me.

But the finish line was RIGHT THERE. It wasn’t a mirage, I was certain of it. All I had to do was persevere, put my head down, and power through the pain. I was too close to admit defeat.

The evening hours evaporated away and when I finally glanced up at the clock, I found myself in the 11th hour.

Actually, it was 11:51 to be exact. And this time, I was pretty sure that there really was only 5 minutes left.

Focused like never before, I clicked that trackpad with certainty and an imperial sense of destiny.

Two-thousand nine in the year of our Lord was going to be the year that I submitted my first paper. Nothing was going to stop me.

Crap–11:57 and I still had a few more fields to go. But there was no time to stop and think–only do and click.

The clock hit 11:59 and I was…almost…there.

SUBMIT!

I had done it!!! I immediately turned on the TV just in time to see D1ck4Stupid ----- censorship plugin wants you to only read ----- Clark instead, hence the numbers-for-letters baloney. Clark and the rest of Time’s Square chanting “…9…8…7…”5OMFG, I had no idea what I just missed until putting this post together. Apparently all the real fun happened right before 9: https://www.thedailybeast.com/dick-clark-flubs-new-years-countdown. I. Can’t. Even.

I turned to the Boss Lady and shook her awake, fully expecting her to share in my jubilation while the last seconds of the decade ticked away.

“I did it! I really did it! I got my paper submitted in 2009! Now, how about a big ol’ sloppy victory kiss?”

I went in to redeem that kiss I had just promised myself, only to be met with a healthy dose of Side-Cheek of Rejection.

ACCESS DE-NIED.

Um, yeah…so it turns out that putting off a beautiful woman who only wanted to spend a romantic evening with you and instead ignoring all reason to focus on a completely arbitrary deadline…listen well, Young Grasshoppers: that is not the way to turn a woman on. Or even endear yourself to them. In any way. At all.

She more or less told me that if I loved my ----- paper so much than I could kiss that instead. Ouch.

The victory I had worked so hard for wasn’t tasting so sweet any more, now was it?

Oh, and the best part? I got an email from the journal a few days later, kindly informing me that they only accept submissions from current Ph.D holders.

“But what does that even mean?” you may be wondering.

It means that, as a grad student working on–but still a few years away from–a Ph.D., my submission was totally invalid, and that I would have to have one of my professors start up the submission process afresh…in 2010, obviously.

In the end, the paper didn’t even get its 2009 submission timestamp–the one prize I was really after.

The Universe has one ----- up sense of humor, that’s all I gotta say.

Anyways, the point of the story is this:

As you near the countdown,
Please, put the computer down.
Young man, don't be daft--
Put away that final draft!
And never leave your dear wife waiting,
Unless, of course, you prefer...

Remember what’s important is the people in your life and the moments you share with them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to play bubbles with my 2-year-old and enjoy a round of Uno with the Elder.

Happy 2020, my ninjas!

Content created on: 31 December 2019 (Tues)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Best of the Best of 2019-The Doctor Edition

29 December 2019 / / 0 Comments
2 Min Read

Unlike the wholly unauthorized Boss Lady’s Edition of the Best of 2019, this time around I have actually commissioned a Top 3 list from a dedicated reader. These picks come to us courtesy of my pensive friend and former colleague, The Doctor.1As a bonus for the dedicated few who actually read these footnotes: “also the guy who couldn’t find Connecticut on a map”. You may have seen his comments floating around here on occasion. So many thanks to him for taking the time and effort to put this together.

The Doctor says:

…I think your best stories are those that make us think about how our presuppositions about the world are plain wrong. As humans, we tend to want to make things as simple as possible, because complicated is hard. You’ve had more than a few stories that illustrate the nuance and complexity of all the other people we share the planet with.

Here are [a few of] my picks along with some of my accompanying thoughts.

– The Doctor

3. Lawnmower Man

Click here to read Lawnmower Man

The Doctor says:

More and more, context matters. Not just when you do something a bit goofy in the shower, but when you’re making judgments about other people choices, culture, religion, etc.

Like John Stewart said, “Actually, that joke was brought to you by… Context. Look at how silly the world would be without context.“2Watch the video here: http://www.cc.com/video-clips/o90eth/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-win-city

2. F*ck Bob Ross

Click here to read ----- Bob Ross

The Doctor says:

Just like context is important, so is the realization that we experience the world differently. Two people can have completely different reactions to something or someone because of different backgrounds and experiences.

Even more than that, how we experience and react to the world is based in our biology.We can all look at the same picture of a dress and come way of radically different ideas about what color it is3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress...

1. The Olde Timey Wheelchair

Click here to read The Olde Timey Wheelchair

The Doctor says:

So, we like to think that we are master’s of our own destiny, and that if we do everything “just right”, stuff will work out. The world is not so simple. Small events, circumstances, and comments can have far reaching effects. We just can’t anticipate everything. (Although, I guess it’s important to realize that general principals still can tell you something…)

Editor’s note: If you really want to nerd out a la The Doctor, watch this video about The Butterfly Effect:

Footnotes & References:[+]

Best of 2019-The Boss Lady Edition

26 December 2019 / / 0 Comments
< 1 Min Read

As the year–and the decade–draws to a close, it’s only appropriate to partake in the time-honored tradition of substituting new and original content with Top 3/10/100/etc lists and other asinine countdowns.

This first Top 3 list comes to you courtesy of The Boss Lady, aka my wife (if you haven’t picked up on this by now). This is an unauthorized list, put together without directly consulting her; nonetheless, I’m pretty sure that she rather enjoyed the following ramblings of her husband.

If you are reading this and are NOT The Boss Lady, feel free to share which posts you have particularly enjoyed thus far in the comments below. Perhaps I will compile a new list of fan-favorites–sort of a guide for newcomers to the community.

Without further ado, I present to you Posts Which Have Caused The Boss Lady to Expel Liquid from Her Body:1Usually we’re talking tears here, due to laughing so hard she cried, but I like to hold out hope that on at least one occasion she has peed herself a little bit.

Physics Is My Middle Name
Physics Is My Middle Name
Read More
Kandy Karma Part 1
Kandy Karma Part 1
Read More
A Most Excellent Life Lesson
A Most Excellent Life Lesson
Read More

Have a Happy 2020, Everybodies!

Footnotes & References:[+]

A Degenerate Family Christmas

22 December 2019 / / 0 Comments
6 Min Read

No, not that kind of degeneracy.

I’m talking about a much more refined and pretension degeneracy.

Now, in quantum physics–and just bear with me for a few seconds–there’s this whole thing about being able to say what quantum state a group of particles1Or, more formally: a system. are in based on the result of some measurement, say, energy, for example.

But what if two different arrangements produced the same measurable energy?

Well, then, if you did your experiment and recorded this particular energy, you would be stuck not knowing which of those two states you were actually looking at.

This is called a degenerate energy level.

If you wanted to distinguish between the two possible states, you would break the degeneracy by doing something that can be thought of as measuring a different property of the system, like the total weight of all the particles.

Apart from breaking the degeneracy, you’re stuck never knowing exactly what arrangement your system is in.

At this point, it’s forgivable if all you’re hearing is “Laht, laht, lah! Physics, physics, physics! #HumbleBrag.”

Fortunately for you, the story of why in the name of ----- I ended up going through life using a synonym for fellatio as my name just so happens to be a pretty darn good analogy for degeneracy.

Now, if you will, take a step back in time with me, and all shall be made clear…

Christmas Day 1980, some undisclosed location in Kansas: during an otherwise routine family holiday gathering, an emergency meeting is called.

Unto them a child was born, and unto them they knew not what the hell to call him.

You see, this days-old youngster certainly had a name. It was just that this particular name was sorta…already taken.

And of course I was the hapless lad in this story, so I might as well stop referring to myself in the third person before we go any farther.

Figure 1. I await the decision of the Almighty Council of Nicknames…

So, there I was, just chillin’ like a villain, as depicted in Figure 1, oblivious to the fact that a major determinant of the arc of my life yet to come was hanging in the balance.

When I was born, “somebody”2Most definitely, unequivocally my dad. got the big idea to name me after his grandfathers, so the story about how I ended up with “Robert James” on my birth certificate is actually pretty run-of-the-mill. Big whoop.

But as I had alluded to, “Robert” was already spoken for–by my great grandfather, obviously–and so if from a physicist’s perspective in which one’s name is perhaps one of the most basic “measurements” of a human, I was clearly born into degeneracy.

If someone in the family starts talking about Robert, well, to whom exactly would they be referring?

One could break the degeneracy by a “secondary measurement,” such as age or size. Clarifying that they were talking about “Grandpa” would make it immediately clear that they were referring to the elder of us. Another option would be to call me “L’il Robert” and their point would be just as easily made.

Alternatively, the use of nicknames can be a reliable degeneracy-breaker, and the good news here is that “Robert” has many variants.

The bad news? My family tree (Fig. 2) is littered with one ----- Robert after another.

Figure 2. My abbreviated family tree.

First, there’s my namesake, my great grandfather Robert on my dad’s side, who everyone just called “Bob.”

Then there’s my maternal grandfather, Albert Robert, who–by the way–for some reason went by “Pat.” Go figure.

Moving down to the next generation: there’s my dad whose legal name actually is Bobby Jim, I shit thee not. Turns out that he got stuck/blessed with the nicknames of his two grandfathers.

Switching back to my mom’s side is her brother, the One True Robert. That’s just a fancy way of saying that of all the Roberts in the family, Uncle Robert was the only one who didn’t use a nickname as an adult.

And, for good measure, my mom & Uncle Robert had a cousin who was beaugarding the title of “Robby” all to himself.

Now, my dad was aware of all this when he haphazardly slapped a name on my back, and so honestly I don’t know what the hell he was thinking bringing yet another Robert into the mess.

Reviewing the situation: we now have six-fold degeneracy at the Robert name level, and the members of my family in the emergency Christmas meeting were hoping to break that degeneracy with a nickname.

Perhaps it went down something a little like this…

Individual 1: “So, what about Bob?”

Individual 2: “Nope, Grandpa Bob took that one.”

Individual 1: “Dammit. Of course he did.”

Individual 3: “Well, we can’t call him Pat…”

Everyone else: “Why the hell would we call him that?”

Individual 3: “Good question…why do we call Pop-Pop ‘Pat’? That makes no ----- sense.”

Albert Robert “Pat” “Pop-Pop”: “Yeah, why do you call me Pat?”

Everyone else: “NOT NOW, POP-POP!”

Individual 1: “Okay, okay…and I guess it’s obvious that Bobby is off the table as well. Yes, I’m looking at you, Bobby. YOU did this, we’re in this ----- mess because of you. We’re wasting our Christmas because of your utter lack of creativity and imagination. Good lord, we can only hope he doesn’t take after you in that department.”

Individual 4: “Remind me again what was wrong with plain ol’ Robert?”

Individual 3: “Uh, because you kinda took that one, Uncle Robert. Anyways, we can’t do Bobby, but how about this…[with a dramatic flourish] Robby?”

Individual 5: “Sorry, but there’s Cousin Robby…”

Individual 3: “Well, shit…”

Individual 1: “Okay, we got to start thinking outside the box here, folks. How about Bert?”

Bobby Jim “Bobby Jim”: “Sure, let’s name him after my ex-wife’s dad. That won’t be awkward at all.”3I had a rough idea of all the details up until this one. This one I discovered for the first time while researching this story.

Individual 1: “For you and me both. Though I still think he looks like he would make a fine Bert.”

Individual 5: “I’ve got it! So, I think we’ve been going about this all wrong. We’ve been trying to come up with nickname that is supported by some basic logic and would be patently obvious to any new acquaintance why he was called thus.”

Individual 4: “Go on…”

Individual 5: “Instead, we should eschew all logic and give him a name that will wear out anybody who is unfortunate enough to ask him about its backstory. How about Bobby’s initials?”

Individual 3: “Ummm, you mean B.J.?”

Individual 5: “Exactly.”

Individual 1: “No, I really don’t–“

Bobby Jim “Bobby Jim”: “It’s perfect!”

Individual 1: “Hey, I don’t think I like tha–“

Individual 5: “We don’t really care about your opinion, even if it was your womb. Let’s vote on it.”

[The Council–save a vigorously protesting Individual 1–all murmur in agreement or nod in approval.]

Individual 6 [whispering to Individual 3]: “You think maybe we should tell Grandma what a Blow Job is exactly before the poor kid gets screwed over?”

Individual 3: “Nah, I wanna see where this goes…”

[Seemingly out of nowhere, the meeting is interrupted by a frantically screaming Time Bandit…]

Future Bandit: ” ----- -sucker! ----- -SUCKER! Don’t you all know that’s what a ----- -sucker does?!?”

Individual 2: “The hell you say?”

Future Bandit: “Please, don’t doom me to a lifetime supply of ----- -sucking references! Especially with these lips! Nooooooo! It’s too late! I’m fading already…don’t…let…me…be…a…B.J………..”

[And just like that the Time Bandit is ironically sucked back into the vortex from which he came…]

Individual 4: “Was it just me, or did anybody else get the feeling that they were looking at a weird clone of Bobby’s when gazing upon that strange fellow?”

Bobby Jim “Bobby Jim”: “Yeah, it was like looking in a mirror…it must be a sign!”

All except Individual 1: “Hear, hear! Then B.J. he shall be! Merry First Christmas, Kid!”

Individual 5 [underneath her breath as she passes Individuals 3 & 6]: “…and a little ----- -sucker he shall be…”

[Individuals 3 & 6 stare at each other in stunned silence…]

The point of the story is I guess we now all know what I would do if I ever built myself a time machine… ----- stopping Hitler–that’s too bougie anyways.

Given the chance, I would go back and stop the degenerates in my family from screwing me over for degenerations to come…so suck on that, Grandma Individual 5.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Y’all!

Footnotes & References:[+]

Back in the USSR

19 December 2019 / / 0 Comments
3 Min Read

Editor’s Note: This is a continuation of the loose theme introduced in In Soviet Russia (spoonerisms/transpositional humor…and basically just more abuse of the English language). While not essential, go ahead and read it anyways. Also, for your sanity, the title simply refers to the fact that we’re getting back to that original post that started this trainwreck of thought.

One time in high school, I entrusted my best friend, Phillip K. Ballz, to give me a very simple haircut that only required a single snip of the scissors. He proceeded to “accidentally” cut it at a sharp angle, resulting in the very front of my hair being notably shorter than the rest of my mini-puff.

Although I had enough historical data to know that I don’t look good at all as a human cue ball, he left me with no choice but to completely shave my head1Actually, we didn’t go straight to a complete buzzcut, but that story merits its own post. Patience, Young Grasshopper……which he proceeded to do with a little too much gusto.

Later on in front of some other friends, he made a frankly unimaginative attempt at mocking me for the follicular predicament that he had put me in:

PKB: “Hah hah! You’re like a Head and Shoulders commercial: Great hair can’t have flakes!“

Me: “Bitch, please. I think it’s much more accurate to say Great flakes can’t have hair…”

Duly Quoted

Legend has it that, when asked by an editor why she had missed a deadline, writer and mistress of wit Dorothy Parker replied:

Tell him I was too f*cking busy–or vice versa.

Notable Badass Dorothy Parker

I mean, we’ve all been there, right? But now, now you finally have the words to properly express yourself…

As I previously stated in In Soviet Russia, spoonerisms can be a real fount of wit and humor, even if it’s not premeditated. Out of habit I will often find myself taking whatever phrase is in the moment and uttering a spoonerized version of it, just to see what pops out.

It blesses my heart that I have been able to lead by example and have successfully imparted this habit to the Elder.2My eldest daughter, to those unfamiliar with this nomenclature. On a regular basis I will overhear her applying the spooneristic algorithm to whatever phrase is currently on her mind.

However, if you are thinking about trying this out for yourself, I should caution against mindlessly spoonerizing aloud.

Please, it behooves you to workshop them in your head first.

I just know one day, when we’re at the theatre to watch the latest Disney/Pixar money-suck, the Elder is going to call loudly across the lobby to me:

“Dad, don’t forget the c0ck porn!”3If you’r curious, I had to spell ‘c0ck’ with a zero instead of the letter O on account of the fact that my Censorship plugin will censor it. It’s not as funny reading —– porn, especially if it’s not immediately clear that we’re spoonerizing “popcorn”. Here let me show you: ----- ----- cock-a-doodle-doo!

Or, maybe if I’m lucky, she’ll merely ask for “cop porn” instead…

That is the better option of the two…right?

Speaking of the Elder, I am usually responsible for getting her to bed.

I will routinely lay down with her and chat a bit before chilling next to her while she says her nighttime prayers.

She will sit there silently, [presumably] praying, and then when she’s done she will loudly proclaim “Amen!”

At one point I got the notion to introduce her to another favorite mental pastime of mine, taking ideas waaaaay past their logical conclusions.

Since she was at that age where she was all about ABCs and patterns, I asked her what she thought should come after “Amen”, et cetera.

Several nights later, it was the Boss Lady’s turn to lay down with her.

They chatted for a bit and the Elder said her silent prayers as per usual.

I about choked on my laughter when from the living room I could hear her excitedly bark in the Boss Lady’s ear:

“A-men! B-men! C-men! D-men!”

A 4-year-old

Needless to say, I got in trouble with the Boss Lady for corrupting our daughter’s soul.

But damn, was that spanking every bit worth it, though…

Content created on: 12/17/18 December 2019 (Thurs/Tues/Wed)

Footnotes & References:[+]

A Very Merry Bar Shitzvah

15 December 2019 / / 2 Comments
9 Min Read

In some cultures, a boy’s twelfth birthday is a very important rite of passage in his life. In Judaism this is marked with a Bar Mitzvah, in which, in the eyes of his society, he has officially become a man.

Although I wasn’t brought up in the Hebrew tradition, I was still pretty excited for my big one-two.

For reasons well beyond the scope of this story, Autumn 1992 was the very first time in my life that I didn’t have my slightly older brother J around. Up until that point in time I had been overly-dependent on him to guide me through pretty much all social settings. Thus, being rather shy by nature, transitioning to not living with him was scary AF for me.

Amazingly, only months in, and I was finding that I was actually capable of holding my own when flying solo. Yup, I was ----- proud of myself for adjusting–I wasn’t the helpless little kid I feared I would become. And turning 12 was going to help me mark this important milestone in my life.

Now all of this was in the midst of the 5 years that my mom and us boys spent living in Springfield MO while she attended Baptist Bible College.

About a month before my birthday, she had gone on a blind date with an older guy about her age who was also a student at BBC, whom we’ll simply refer to as Chaz.1Kind of his real name. I don’t know why I should even bother with protecting this fucker’s identity in the least, though. Little did we know he had his sights set on marrying her ASAP.

Even littler did we know what a complete ----- psychopath he would turn out to be…but that’s a story for another time. The key point here is that when I use the term psychopath, I’m not bandying it about lightly. This asshole was cunning and deceptive.

A critical component of his matrimonial plan was wooing the kiddo–which he was already doing a surprisingly good job of2She had dated another gentlemen a few years earlier. In summary, I did not take it well.–and he decided to swing for the fences by really treating me for my birthday.

He actually had put together a nice little itinerary for the three of us, and I was pretty pumped about it.

We would kick off the night with a professional magic show. I had never been to one, so for this wannabe David Copperfield, this was going to be a real treat. Spoiler alert–apart from the requisite anxiousness that the magician was going to ----- up–it was a real treat.

After that we would do some fine dining at my favorite restaurant, Ryan’s Buffet, and then cap the night off with a Living Christmas Tree Cantata at a rival church, High Street Baptist.

For those of you not familiar with Ryan’s let me expound a bit.

We never had much petty cash during those times, so one of the few times we would get to eat out was when our grandma would visit from Kansas. Almost every time she came out we would indulge in a trip to Ryan’s.

Ryan’s truly was a chubby kid’s paradise.

First, it was “all-you-can-eat.” However, one thing the execs running Ryan’s didn’t account for in their business model was under-privileged gluttonous underage geniuses3I.e. yours truly. hacking the system. You see, I never let the “can” part of all-you-can-eat stop me. I had a pretty solid strategy in which, once having eaten to my nominal capacity, I would take a “half-time break” trip to the restroom and make room for Round Two. I only had one shot at this a year, so I was going to get the money’s worth of whoever was paying, dammit.

Second, back then, it was one of the rare massive buffets that have become more ubiquitous in this day and age. It had all the bars a ravenous kid could want: Salad bar. Soup bar. Meats & Pastas bar. Bread bar.

And most importantly, a stacked-to-the-rafters Dessert bar.

GOD, I was obsessed with the Dessert bar. NOM NOM NOM! I salivate just thinking about my old friend.

So there I was, it’s my twelfth birthday, and I was there to party. I had my plate loaded up with all sorts of sweets and goodies. The only thing lacking was the pièce de résistance disguised as an accoutrement: the whipped cream.

Now the whipped cream posed an interesting dilemma for me. My gut instinct was to pass on it that day. And I literally mean my “gut” here: while I had a limited number of data points, I had noticed a clear trend in which consumption of Ryan’s whipped cream would almost inevitably lead to gastric discomfort later on, and on occasion, a moderate4…to severe case of the squirts.

On the other hand…it was my ----- birthday.

Unfortunately, the latter of the two won out.

I clearly and distinctly remember thinking, “Fuck it5Sorry, Mom, I don’t know why my censorship plug-in doesn’t catch this.–it’s my birthday!” and scooping approximately a snow-shovel’s worth onto my plate.

The point of this story is live life without regrets; indulge in the little things in life that bring you joy and happiness, especially if it’s a special occasion, such as your Bar Mitzvah, or the Gentile equivalent thereof…

J.K. Kidding. Oh, how I wish that were the point of the story.

But where would the fun be in that, right? No, the birthday celebration must go on…

So, after indulging in a healthy dollop of whipped cream with the rest of my desserts, we wrapped it up at Ryan’s and headed off to ol’ High Street for some light holiday revelry.

When we got there, we found comfy seats in the middle of the left third section, about halfway back. In front of us sat a mixed race couple and their three kids–a darker Asian6Perhaps Indian or Filipino? I’m not really much of racist that sees people in terms of color, so I’m not/was not very good at making such distinctions. man and a gorgeous blonde trophy wife.

Now admittedly, this last detail has exactly jack-shit to do with today’s story, but 1) it’s just another example of how, uh, “memorable” that evening was, and 2) I recall observing that family and formulating the following theorem: classy interracial relationship = exotic dark-skinned male + beautiful blonde female. The importance/irony of this is that 15 years and 2 weeks later I would prove the inverse of this theorem to be true when I became the gorgeous blonde trophy husband in an interracial marriage…

ANYWAYS,7I feel unnecessarily compelled to tell you at this point that I’m trying a new strategy at writing my blog posts more efficiently by concurrently imbibing fine licorice-flavored French liquor. In theory alcohol would make me more focused, but in this case it seems that it just helps me access deeper parts of an already overly-vivid memory. about what seemed like halfway through the performance, my tummy started to feel a little rumbly. I didn’t think much of it, other than, yeah, of course, because I had eaten Ryan’s whipped cream.

After about ten minutes of my stomach gurgling, I realized that a quick trip to the restroom was in order.

The reason I described in way-too-much-detail the location of our seats was because it determined my path to the nearest restroom. I needed to move to the left-central aisle and head to the back doors. After that I had to circle back around to where the restrooms that were, relatively speaking, nearest the front-left of the…nave?8This is what happens when drinking while blogging: (see Figure XXX).

As I scurried along that path, I gradually started to realize the seriousness of the situation. In response, I clenched my anal sphincter muscle as tightly as possible and power-walked even faster.

I was halfway down the corridor that had an almost direct path to the nearest men’s restroom, when I passed a fella I knew from High Street via Awanas.9Awanas has been previously referenced in: Kandy Karma, Part 1. I highly recommend reading that one if you haven’t already. As I passed him, he nodded a greeting, and I feigned my best “How do you do, good Sir that I know to the most modest of degrees? But please FOR THE LOVE OF ----- do not stop and chat me up. I beg of thee.”

I didn’t mean to be impertinent, but I had much more pressing matters.

And those matters? Approximately 3 seconds later they pressed a little too hard on my 144-month-old sphincter muscle.

Whoosh!

My previously trustworthy sphincter gave up the ghost and a fount of fecal matter flowed down my right pant leg.

It was official: my Bar Shitzvah was in full swing.

Mind you, I wasn’t even to the restroom at this point. I still had a good 15-30 seconds to get to the relative safety of a stall, all the while thinking, “Mother ----- It’s my 12th birthday and I’m straight-up shitting my pants? ----- my life. ----- it in the ass. You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Once I made it to the restroom, I holed myself up in the singular stall in the men’s bathroom, hoping to mitigate the situation.

I sat there for a good 10 minutes in shock from what had just transpired, unsure of how the hell I was going to get out of this one.

At this point you may be saying “Give it to me straight Doc. How bad was it?”

Well, I will give it to you straight, Bub. It was bad…real bad.

The good news first, though: my left pant leg was largely unscathed and still quite dry.

Now the bad news: my right pant leg was completely soaked through all the way down to the ankle.

Ever the optimist, I thought maybe, with enough toilet paper, I could dab the juices until it was dry enough to go back out in public without it being completely obvious that I had just shat my britches.

I went through about 2/3 of the toilet paper supply before giving up on that strategy and moving to Plan B: let it air dry.

Not that it was a great idea in the first place, but at that point what else was I going to do? But then, a fly appeared in the ointment.

After about 5 minutes of sitting in the stall, alone with some very emasculating thoughts and still dripping wet pants, somebody wandered into the bathroom.

It appeared that they needed to use the stall, as they just started loitering and not doing much else.

In my head I was like “Welp, buddy, sorry but I ain’t going anywhere for awhile. I highly recommend not trying to out-wait me, because that’s a losing proposition for ya.”

It’s not like there was anyway in hell I could actually explain the situation to him, so I just sat there quietly, hoping he would get tired of waiting and go find another, more available–and non-desecrated–restroom.

But, oh my god, this guy. Five minutes of awkward silence–still there. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes–that fuck-face was still there. I mean, couldn’t he smell that things weren’t quite right with me?

Admittedly, time was kinda at a standstill for me, so I don’t know how long the World’s Most Awkward Standoff lasted, but it was at least 30 minutes before he left.

You know, it’s bad enough being on the verge of your teenage years and defecating yourself in public, but can you imagine being trapped in a stall, with someone standing for over half an hour on the other side of the door, the whole time knowing that they have to know that you’ve done crapped your pants?

If there ever was a moment in my life in which I wished I could die, this would have definitely been it.

And where was this guy’s sense of humanity? His actions definitely went against the very spirit of Christmas.

Anyways, even with that poop-sniffing fool finally gone, I still didn’t have an exit strategy.

Eventually, the best I could come up with was mummifying my right leg with as much toilet paper as I could in hopes of at least not having my skin in constant contact with my liquified excrement between then and whenever I finally got home.

So I wrapped up my leg as best as I could with what remained of the t.p., pulled up my pants, tried not to throw up, and strolled out of the stall. I tossed my D.O.A. underwear in the trash and proceeded to wash my hands 5-10 times.

Now, I would have hung out in the warmth of the bathroom longer, but by my best estimate, the Cantata would be ending any minute, and I wanted to be ready to skedaddle the ----- out of there as soon as possible.

However, this was complicated by the fact that I absolutely did not want to interact with any other humans in my current state, so staying inside the church seemed too risky.

…so that left me with no real alternative but to wander out into the freezing cold parking lot without my coat10Like Kirk Cameron, obviously it had been Left Behind in the nave, since this Nostradamus didn’t exactly foresee where the night was going to head. and park my moist butt next to Chaz’s Blazer. And wait.

Again, alone with my thoughts.

God, I was miserable. Cold. Wet. Stinking to high heaven. Depressed.

And on top of that, it turned out my estimation of how much time remained was slightly inaccurate.

Although my mind and soul seemed to freeze while I waited, I was cognizant enough to note the passage of time. It was at least another 45 minutes to an hour of my personal hell before people started to trickle out of the church and into the parking lot.

Of course the nightmare wasn’t quite over, as I feared I would have to explain my little adventure to Mom and Chaz. I knew Mom would be gracious and understanding, so no problem there.

On the other hand, this was like the 2nd or 3rd impression that Chaz would have of me, and even if he was kind about it, BJ the Pants-Pooper would be ingrained in his mind FOREVER.

Fortunately, Mom covered for me, and just told him I had an upset stomach, so we loaded up and headed straight back to our apartment.

I almost cared whether or not I might be leaving watery shit-stains on his seats, but, nah, I was so done with life at that point. It ’twas what it ’twas.

Finally home and after a nice long hot shower, I had more than enough of my fill of the day, so I just went straight to bed and hoped I didn’t further degrade myself by crying myself to sleep.

I had woke up that morning a young man, and now here I was, going to bed a little boy. At last, my Bar Shitzvah was complete.

Happy birthday, me?

The point of the story is, you can say “fuck it–it’s my birthday!” all you want. But make no mistake, boy, you still gonna have to live with the shitty consequences of your poor life decisions.

Appendix A

Figure Triple-X: When you drink and blog, you can’t remember a key component of your childhood, the main area of a church, so you have to Google it.

Content created on: 11/13/14 December 2019 (Wed/Fri/Sat)

Footnotes & References:[+]

In Soviet Russia

12 December 2019 / / 0 Comments
4 Min Read
…according to Webster’s Dictionary, at least.

As one whose thoughts often outpace his mouth, I have experienced my fair share of unintentional spoonerisms.

At some point, though, I realized that spoonerisms weren’t something to be ashamed of, but rather embraced. There is much bemusement to be found therein, and sometimes by intentionally spoonerin’ it up one can result in getting easy credit as a humorous person.

Hell, Yakov Smirnoff made a whole career out of it. If you’re old enough, you may remember his whole line of In Soviet Russia… jokes, featuring such classics as:

In Soviet Russia…cars drive you!

Maybe Yakov smirnoff

or:

In Soviet Russia…TV watches you!

Also Maybe yakov smirnoff

A few interesting side notes here. First, this specific type of literary construct is officially known as a Russian Reversal.1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_reversal Yes, a bit racist. I know.

Second, technically a spoonerism refers to transposition of the initial sounds of a multi-word phrase, whereas this falls under the broader informal category of transpositional humor–NOT to be confused with the more narrow trope of transpositional puns.2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpositional_pun Got it? Super.

And lastly, according to an uncited source on Wikipedia, while Comrade Smirnoff is most commonly associated with Russian Reversals, they long pre-dated him, and in fact, he rarely employed them.3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_reversal

The point of the story is that if you’re going to blog about a poorly or misconceived notion of yours, maybe you should at least do a Wikipedia/Google-level of research before you manage to live-blog proving yourself to be an ignoramus,4I’ve noticed the phrase ignorant slut used on several occasions recently. Like, is that a thing? And is that a phrase that is certified cancel-culture proof? Asking for a friend… yeah?

Also…the joys of going down the rabbit hole of a Wiki-venture, amiright?

Well, my half-ass mental associations notwithstanding, I’m determined to forge ahead with my praise of transpositional humor in general. I present to you, in no particular order, a handful of spooneristic/In Soviet Russia musings.

One of the best ways we can contribute to society is by passing on our values to our children.5This point is actually quite debatable, given the subjective nature and wide spectrum of “values”, which pretty much statistically ensures that for an given value held, there is a non-zero portion of society who is diametrically opposed to it. My misguided adulation of Yakov is one of the many values that I’ve attempted to pass on to my offspring.

This transference of ideology began at my Elder daughter’s bedtime, for which I am typically responsible. At first it was a bit confusing to a 4-year-old why, whenever she told her Daddy she needed to “say her prayers,” she would be met with the retort:

In Soviet Russia…prayers say you!

A Very responsible and thoughtful father

In fairness to me, this was a step up from “Your mom says her prayers!” Side story: after enduring more than enough of my overplaying the your mom trope, she finally had enough: “You keep saying that. What does that even mean?” Oh, the wisdom of a child…

Anyways, she eventually grasped the general concept…except she didn’t quite nail the execution. For example, she graced me with this little nugget:

In North Carolina…you sleep in your bed!

The elder

I quickly figured out that she was actually doing a double-spoonerism in her head, somehow skipping to the spoonerified version of the phrase as her starting point, and ending up with a phrase in which the two spoonerisms just cancelled each other out.

She was thinking herself funny when, for all practical purposes, she was just stating very obvious things. Bonus points for switching “Soviet Russia” with “North Carolina”, though…

While not an exact analogy, and not quite transpositional in nature, I can relate to the Elder’s error, having done something similar with a familiar pun. An actual transcript from a conversation I had with myself this past year:

Some random external source: “Blah blah blah…Ships, Ahoy! Blah blah blah…”

Me: ” ‘Ships, Ahoy!’ Ha ha. That’s very punny, saying ‘Ships, Ahoy!’ You know, like ‘Chips, Ahoy!’ the well-known name-brand cookie…”

Also me: “It does seem odd though that the maritime/pirating industries would go out of their way to make a baked-good based pun…”

Me, again: “Oh…right. ‘Chips, Ahoy!’ is the pun. Yeah. That makes waaaay more sense.”

Overly objective me: “Good lord, I’m a ----- idiot…”

Normally, I’m a law-abiding citizen, always using crosswalks at the appropriate time and never jay-walking.

However, a few years ago, I really needed to catch my bus that was sitting at a red light, with the bus stop only a 50 yards or so past the intersection. Both of which were on the opposite side of the street from me.

With the bus’s light about to turn green, I knew that it would be impossible for me to catch it if I waited to properly cross in the crosswalk.

So, carefully dodging oncoming traffic in the lanes closest to me, I angled across the street from the corner of the intersection directly towards the bus stop, hoping to cross right behind the bus as it came to a stop, and then hopping on just in time.

As I made my way across the last two lanes of traffic and with the bus almost directly in front of me by now, I took one last look to the right to ensure that no more traffic was coming from that direction.

Seeing that it was all clear I continued along my path-of-least-distance, but as I turned my head back straight ahead–HOLY SHIT, THE BUS IS STILL IN MY PATH AND MOVING FASTER THAN EXPECTED!

Apparently, I had anticipated it to have been out of my path and stopped by time I needed to cross the far lane. Instead, I came within about 4 inches of losing part of my face to the back corner of a moving bus.

In other words:

In North Carolina…bus gets hit by you.

my inner yakov smirnoff

Footnotes & References:[+]

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