Mama’s Comin! And I Have Predictions!

My loyal readers (yes, both of you) will recall that I was complaining about my mother a few weeks back–mostly in relation to a planned visit for this coming Mother’s Day Weekend. A friend from back home has graciously agreed to be my saviour and drive mom down and return her home on Sunday. So mama’s coming after all!

I took today off to prepare myself. And as I tidied up the house, I came up with these predictions for what the weekend will bring. I’ll update you on Monday to see how many I got right.

1. She will hint at least twice that she wants to move in here.

2. She will have some issue with the fact that there is a picture of my late sister in a collage frame that also has a photo of my stepmother in it.

3. She will further recognize that there aren’t enough pictures of HER around.

4. She will complain that the house is too cold at night.

5.  She will recognize that the house is clean and proclaim that housekeeping is a trait I inherited from her (despite the fact that you literally can not walk through her house)

6. When we go shopping for the new sheets I promised her for mother’s day–she will hint heavily about at least four other things that she “needs”.

7. She will complain about the driving of whoever is behind the wheel.

8.  She will engage a complete stranger in a conversation about any or all of the following: A. whatever illness she is suffering from this week, B. my sister’s death, C. the rising price of various commodities.

9. She will provide amusement and embarassment with her complete lack of political correctness.

10. She will attempt to do the laundry.

11. She will inform me that I don’t use the right body soap, the right laundry soap, or the right cleaning products, and suggest the nearest dollar store where the correct items can be purchased.

12. She will, on no less than three occasions, suggest the she be allowed to smoke in A. my car, B. my garage, or C. in my house if she “cracks the window”.  Having been told no to all of these, any trip of more than 20 minutes will have to include a stop in a parking lot so she can light up.

 

Give me strength!

Creative Solutions

A reminder that sometimes the best answer requires us to think outside the box:

Tomato Garden

 An old Italian lived alone in New Jersey .  He wanted to plant his annual tomato garden, but it was very difficult work, as the ground was hard. His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament:  

       Dear  Vincent,

      I am feeling pretty sad, because it looks like I won’t be able to plant  my tomato garden     this year. I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here my troubles would be over. I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days.

      Love, Papa 

       A few days later he received a letter from his son. 

       Dear Pop,

      Don’t dig up that garden. That’s where the bodies are buried.

      Love, Vinnie 

 At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day the old man received another letter from his son.

       Dear Pop,

      Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That’s the best I could do under the circumstances.

      Love you,  Vinnie

 

Lindsay Lohan is a Coat-Napper!

From the New York Post:

“A Columbia co-ed wants to know how Lindsay Lohan ended up wearing her $11,000 blond mink coat - and is demanding the “Mean Girl” pay for the impromptu rental.

Masha Markova, 22, believed she had forever lost the prized jacket - a gift from her grandmother - while attending a private birthday party at 1Oak in the Meatpacking District in the early-morning hours of Jan. 26.

The club was closed for a friend of jet-setting playboy Stavros Niarchos, Markova said.

She added that at one point, she was seated next to Lohan, and recalled putting the mink in a common bin with other jackets.

It was gone when she prepared to leave 1Oak after an hour, Markova said.

Two weeks later, Markova flipped through the Feb. 11 edition of OK! Magazine and couldn’t believe her eyes - Lohan was photographed the night of Jan. 26 wearing the very same fur coat.

“I was actually talking on the phone to my grandmother about something else, and then I flipped through the magazine, saw the picture said, ‘I need to call you back,’ ” Markova told The Post yesterday.

“It was my coat. It was no doubt!”

The pretty co-ed said that in the ensuing days, she surfed the Internet and found several paparazzi photos of Lohan wearing the distinctive blond coat hours after the birthday party they had both attended.

Also, celebrity blogs posted pictures of the actress party-hopping that night - wearing a black coat before she arrived at 1Oak, Markova said.

Club owners vowed to get to the bottom of it, but several days passed with no call back, Markova said.

That’s when her immigration lawyer, Merrill Cohen, called Lohan’s high-powered Hollywood attorney, Blair Berke, threatening litigation.

Hours later, Markova said she heard from 1Oak.

“They were very discreet, never mentioned a name or even the word ‘coat,’ ” Markova said. “They just said, ‘We’re going to bring you something.’ ”

The coat arrived at Markova’s Morningside Heights apartment two days later.

Reeking of cigarettes and booze with a slight tear in the lining, the fur coat was no worse for wear after a dry cleaning and quick patch-up.

Still, she wants answers - and Lohan to own up to swiping her coat.

“I don’t see how it could have been an accident,” Markova said.

Markova and her lawyer stopped short of accusing Lohan of wrongdoing. But they still want her to pay at least $10,000 for the unauthorized, three-week rental.

Lohan’s spokeswoman did not return calls.

A 1Oak rep confirmed that the club delivered Markova’s fur coat back to her in February.

“I am not the coat keeper. I’m not sure where the coat was,” said club spokeswoman Lisette Sand-Freedman.

david.li@nypost.com“

 

Here’s the coat and the skank who really owns it:

 She needs to hock the coat and get some new shoes…I bet there’s a homeless woman in New York wondering where her dirty ballerina slippers went…

Happy Birthday Sissy!

Tomorrow is/was/would have been my sister’s 26th birthday. (I’m still not sure what tense to use, so forgive me if this post makes you feel like you’re inside the mind of a schizo). She passed away on Valentine’s Day of this year, after several days in a coma following a car accident. My last moment with her was in her hospital room, holding her hand and whispering “You’ve gotta wake up and get better before Mom drives us all crazy!” She squeezed my hand–I knew she could relate. I left the hospital that afternoon and came back home, a 9 hour drive from where she was, thinking that she was at least stable and would pull through, even if her recovery would be long. The next morning I awoke to find a message from an uncle that the pressure on her brain had grown through the night, and there was little hope left. Before I could get back, she was gone. But I swear this won’t be a weepy post. I’d rather remember the laughs and fun we shared.

Last week, my mom said “There’s a bird that’s been waking me up every morning at 7 AM singing outside my bedroom window, do you think that’s your sister?”

“Hell no, she wouldn’t be up that early.” And it’s true. She was not at all a morning person. I remember the morning routine of getting ready for school. It would start out with a gentle “Its time to get up” and escalate quickly into a shouting match that would end in her stomping through the house with a scowl on her face. The only time I recall her eagerly hopping out of bed is when I once went in and told her that Santa Claus had come. She rushed to the living room, and realizing my lie, called me a few choice words. (That it was October might have been her first clue, but who thinks clearly when they are half asleep?)

Of course, she was always a bit dingy, but that was part of her charm I suppose. A few years ago, she called, frantic because she had lost her purse and she and her scuzband-to-be needed to get home from Alabama where he had been working. I agreed to Western Union her some money for bus tickets, but found that Western Union required a password if the recipient doesn’t have photo ID with them, and of course she wouldn’t because of the aforementioned lost purse. So I have her on the phone and tell her “I’ll just make the password the street we grew up on.” to which she replied “Ugh! Just make it something simple like my dogs name!” I guess recalling the street she had spent more than a decade on was too taxing for her. But she’d always had a soft spot for pets, so I guess the name of her boxer was easier.

When we were kids, her pet cat, “Sammy”, a cross-eyed Siamese who always looked drunk, was her constant companion and a constant pain in my ass. I’ve never been one for animals in the house, and took every opportunity to toss his cross eyed carcus out into the yard. She had the habit of closing him up in her room every night, and was too sound a sleeper to hear his scratches at her door when he needed out, so her door frame and wall were scratched to bits by this poor animal who probably desperately needed water or a place to relieve himself. I’ve always been a bit of a perfectionist who likes to keep everything in “as new” condition, so the scratched up trim and walls were reason enough to have the animal put to sleep in my mind. 

One night in  high school one of my oldest friends was sleeping over. (The same friend, it should be said, who was present for the football hotdog incident) As usual, I tossed the cross eyed cat out in the yard before heading to bed. That night, a blizzard blanketed our area with over a foot of snow. My sister awoke the next morning frantic that her cat was missing. She called and called, and he never showed up. We tortured her by striking the pose of the poor feline frozen in place as he pawed at the door to be let in, and assured her that he had no doubt gone to kitty heaven. As the hours passed, and boredom set in, we even fashioned a crude cross in his memory and mounted it to the cat scratched door frame to her bedroom. It should be noted that the cat was merely seeking shelter elsewhere and returned a day or so later, but the whole episode was typical of the pranks we played on her.

Years earlier, we had tossed one of her Barbie dolls into the street, waited for a passing car to run over it, and then, after a few grueling minutes of duct tape “surgery” declared the blonde doll dead and laid her to rest in a Little Debbie cake box buried in the garden.

But our childhood was not all me being the mean big brother. Our neighborhood was a small one of about ten homes, all set on several acres, and the few kids that lived there were mostly roughnecks that we wouldn’t play with. So she and I, in the days before Wii and Playstation, dreamt of wonderful scenarios to occupy ourselves. A few appliance boxes with windows cut into them were added to her small playhouse to form a country villa that entertained us until the next rainstorm turned it into a soggy mess of disintegrating cardboard.  Days inside could be passed by pretending that my bunk beds were a big van and we were on a road trip, or our bedrooms could easily be turned into big city apartments with the addition of a note card taped to the door that bore a distinguished address.

 As she grew into a young woman, it was clear that she had not only inherited our mother’s brilliant  blue eyes, but her taste in men as well. She began  seeing a boy in junior high that we all instantly disapproved of.  I once had to pick her up from his home, which was in a less than desirable part of town. As I made my way up his rutted, gravel driveway I found the way was blocked by a cow. I honked. It mooed. I edged forward. It didn’t budge. I grabbed my cell and called my sister.

“Um…there’s a cow in the driveway.”

“Well just bump it and it will move.” Picturing this beast falling onto the hood of my car as I nudged it with my bumper convinced me that was a bad idea. Suddenly, an extra from Deliverance appeared and shooed the bovine off the driveway, allowing me to pass. I arrived at her boyfriend’s home–which, from the outside, appeared to be a fairly new single-wide trailer. I walked up the steps and swung open the frame of the screen door (the screen was torn away) and walked into the nastiest residence I have ever seen. No less than three dogs had the run of the house. A fourth barged through the door frame and promptly leapt onto an unmade bed and proceded to wallow around on the sheets. Flies buzzed through the house–no doubt attracted to the five foot tower of trash and the piles of dirty dishes and rotting food that filled most of the kitchen. Every step I took on the threadbare carpet sent fleas jumping up my legs.

“Hey!” my sister shouted, “come on in!”

“Um..no, we need to get going. I’ll wait out in the car.” I got the hell out of there.

Mom did her best to keep sis away from the boy,  but my sister was crafty. In order to get as much time with him as possible, she set her father and  his mother up on a date. Sparks flew between them, and in short time, they married–meaning my sister was then dating her stepbrother. (Remember, this is West Virginia)

When she was nineteen, having long since moved out of our mother’s house, she and the boy were having dinner at mom’s. Throughout the evening, he kept calling our mom “mom”, which annoyed her to no end. Finally, she said, “I’m not your mother, so stop calling me that.”

“Actually, you are.” he said, and the news was broken. Months earlier, he and my sister had married in a secret justice-of-the-peace ceremony.  Apparently, it was spur of the moment, as my sister revealed she had said her “I do’s” in a pair of sweat pants. As anyone could have predicted, the marriage didn’t last long. The ink wasn’t even dry on the divorce papers when sis had hooked up with another man of equal caliber–and it was with him that she spent the last years of her life.

Despite a handful of chaotic years, I always felt that she would find her way in the world and turn out OK. As it turns out, this world isn’t the one she was meant for.  So…happy birthday Sis, wherever you are.

 

 

Random Bit of (nearly) Useless Knowledge for May 5, 2008

Did you know that if the exit number on an interstate sign is on the top right of the sign, you will exit to the right and vice versa?

Be sure and impress your friends with this one kids.

2008 Campaign Buttons

With the election coming up, it’s time to show your pride in your chosen candidate. Do it with one of these clever election year buttons:

Isle of Lesbos Residents Suing Lesbians

What a perfect way to highlight one of my favorite Golden Girls clips!

ATHENS, Greece - A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world’s gay women.

Three islanders from Lesbos — home of the ancient poet Sappho, who praised love between women — have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word lesbian in its name.

One of the plaintiffs said Wednesday that the name of the association, Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, “insults the identity” of the people of Lesbos, who are also known as Lesbians.

“My sister can’t say she is a Lesbian,” said Dimitris Lambrou. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos,” he said.

The three plaintiffs are seeking to have the group barred from using “lesbian” in its name and filed a lawsuit on April 10. The other two plaintiffs are women.

Also called Mytilene, after its capital, Lesbos is famed as the birthplace of Sappho. The island is a favored holiday destination for gay women, particularly the lyric poet’s reputed home town of Eressos.

“This is not an aggressive act against gay women,” Lambrou said. “Let them visit Lesbos and get married and whatever they like. We just want (the group) to remove the word lesbian from their title.”

He said the plaintiffs targeted the group because it is the only officially registered gay group in Greece to use the word lesbian in its name. The case will be heard in an Athens court on June 10.

Sappho lived from the late 7th to the early 6th century B.C. and is considered one of the greatest poets of antiquity. Many of her poems, written in the first person and intended to be accompanied by music, contain passionate references to love for other women.

Lambrou said the word lesbian has only been linked with gay women in the past few decades. “But we have been Lesbians for thousands of years,” said Lambrou, who publishes a small magazine on ancient Greek religion and technology that frequently criticizes the Christian Church.

Very little is known of Sappho’s life. According to some ancient accounts, she was an aristocrat who married a rich merchant and had a daughter with him. One tradition says that she killed herself by jumping off a cliff over an unhappy love affair.

Lambrou says Sappho was not gay. “But even if we assume she was, how can 250,000 people of Lesbian descent — including women — be considered homosexual?”

The Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece could not be reached for comment.

People will sue over anything, won’t they?? I hear the residents of Karpetmunchia, a small Russian town, are poised to sue as well…

 

Strange Things I’ve Done to my Penis

Let me start out saying that if you know me in real life, stop now. You probably don’t want to read further. But if you already stomached my narrative on the horrors of being a man at the doctors office, you’ll be fine.

If you made it this far, I’ll continue by saying that I could just as easily write about “Strange things Ive done to my finger” or “weird happenings with my feet” but that would be boring, which is something I try not to be.

From time to time, I have visited tanning beds. I did it in high school to have a nice color for prom. Throughout college and my early career years, I would get a few sessions in before taking a beach trip to get a nice base tan in an attempt to save myself from a sunburn while on vacation. And this month, I’m taking advantage of a month of tanning that was offered by my new gym. Typically speaking, though, I gave up tanning a long time ago. Having the Vinyl Village pool means that I usually get a little sun before any trips, and having the roof open on the car keeps me slightly tanned year round.

I never was, and never will be, one of those people who tans so much that they turn orange. I saw such a creature this past weekend at a fundraiser. The poor thing must have slept in a sunbed every night…she was literally the color of a basketball, and had almost the same texture. I have also never been one for naked tanning, or clever little “press on tattoos” that leave a pasty white image of a Playboy bunny or something equally tacky on the netherregions. I simply hop into the tanning bed with whatever underwear I have on and leave it at that.

Now, before I learned the supportive benefits of boxer briefs, a nice trunk, or a classic tighty whitie, I pretty much stuck to boxers. And that’s what I had on one day when I got into the tanning bed. I’d already had several sessions, so had a good base, and was up to the point where I tanned for about 10 or 12 minutes a session.  So I got down to my boxers, slapped on those goofy looking glasses, and got in.

All seemed well until later that night. My penis was very tender…the slightest bit of friction from walking or moving about was terribly uncomfortable. And it itched slightly. When I got into the shower I noticed the cause–I’d sunburned my dick! The baggy boxers I had been wearing had apparently gaped open at the fly just enough to expose a lemon-shaped wedge of pasty white shaft skin. Well, at least it had been pasty white. Now it was bright red. The shower water hitting me burned. Rubbing against clothes caused almost nauseating pain for at least two days. And then it itched like crazy. A week later, it peeled! And for weeks I had what appeared to be a lemon-shaped liver spot midway up my wang.

But that isn’t all my poor weiner has had to endure. Skip ahead a few years. My roommate in college got a new computer and for the first time, we had the internet in our home. She and I were surfing ebay one night, trying to find something that we actually needed, though I can’t recall what it was.

We came across an auction for one of those penis enlarging “pumps”. The current price was around $2. Jokingly, J, the roomie, put a bid in on it. Now, since she and I were both new to eBay, we had no idea that what we had just bid on was a dutch auction. (Meaning that there are several of the item up for bids, and there’s a good chance all who bid will end up with one.) But that’s what we had done. Bid two dollars on an instrument guaranteed to add inches to your manhood. A few days later, we got the dreaded email :”Congratulations! The auction has ended and you are the winner of the Long Dong Vacuum Schlong” (or whatever it was called). Not wanting to harm our fresh eBay reputation, we ponied up the two dollars and just paid for the damned thing. Within a week, the pump arrived at our door step. It looked like a combination between a test tube on steroids and a blood pressure cuff. We had a laugh, and it got tossed into my closet.

A few weeks later, I went to bed, and for whatever reason, my mind turned to the device in the closet.

“What the heck?” I figured, “Let’s see if this thing works.” So I squeezed through the rubber gasket at the end, and pumped up the little valve. A few moments later, I was the proud owner of a penis that, while not appreciably larger, was a bit more girthy. But it looked like someone was choking it. It was reddish purple, and the pump was not at all comfortable. Fun over, I released the valve and pulled at the pump.

Only, it wouldn’t move. A few painful yanks, and it hadn’t budged. I walked around my room, giant plastic object hanging from my johnson, and found some lotion–hoping that would provide just enough lubricant to extract myself from the pump.

Half a bottle later, I was still stuck and starting to panic. My mind raced. I thought of ugly lesbians, naked old women, and read a passage or two from the Bible, all in an attempt to wither my weinie. None of it worked.

“I could find a hammer to break the plastic!” I thought. It didn’t occur to me that I would also break my wang. The only thing that swayed me from that solution was the realization that the hammer was in the kitchen, two floors beneath me, and I would have to walk past J to get to it. There was no way in hell I was going to explain the predicament to her.

I wrapped myself, and the giant mass  of plastic and rubber at my groin, in a robe and waddled down the hall to my study. Finding a pair of scissors, I reasoned that I could cut the rubber gasket away to free myself. Then I realized there was nothing but skin on the other side and one false move and I’d have to join a support group founded by John Wayne Bobbitt.

By this point, some amount of time had passed and I was having a major panic attack. I was beginning to think the only way I was getting out of that pump was to go to the hospital and have it removed.

“How will I explain that bill to my parents when they get it?”

“What if I get pulled over by the police on the way to the hospital?”

“How can I even face them at the hospital? This is some urban legend shit right here!”

Too mortified to even think of having to share what I was going through with anyone, I decided to try once more to get it off. The throbbing had subsided some, and I figured that either my dick had fallen asleep or it had shrank a bit and the pressure had relieved itself somewhat. I put on a slathering of lotion and pulled hard at the base of the pump. Miraculously, it flew off and landed on the carpet a few feet away.

My unit was dark red, veins bulging as if they might burst any moment. I was so relieved that a visit to the hospital had been averted that I didn’t even care. Over the next few days, a nasty bruise developed at the base of my penis. Dark purple, then fading away over the next few weeks to varying shades of green and yellow. I guess that’s what I got for wondering if the pump worked…

 

I’ve Been Tagged!

Well I have been tagged by TrailerParkBarbie

Here are the rules: 1) Link back to the person who tagged you (that= me!). 2) Post the rules on your blog. 3) Write six things about yourself. 4) Tag six people at the end of your post by posting links to their blog sites. 5) Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their site. 6) And let your tagger know when your entry is up.

Six things about me:

1. I’m not afraid of much, but I can’t even stand the site of a cockroach. Down in the South, they call ‘em “Palmetto Bugs”  You can call them Strawberry Shortcake for all I care, it’s a damned roach and if I even see one across the street I’m likely to scream like a six year old little girl.

2. I once, many years ago,  had an unfortunate incident with  a sex toy from eBay. I’ll make a blog entry on that soon.

3.  I would really like to be a dad. I don’t know if I would be any good at it, since I think pets are too much trouble, but I’d like a kid or two.

4. I used to think if I won the lottery, I would keep working. That was stupid. If I won the lottery, I think I could find enough things to keep me busy without having to show up at an office everyday. me winning=me retiring.

5. Speaking of the lottery, when I was in junior high or high school I had a very realistic dream that I bought 50 lottery tickets and won the very specific amount of $152 million. Once in college, the Powerball hit exactly that number (a record at the time I think) and I was so sure it was my destiny to win it that I wrote a check for 50 lottery tickets that I couldn’t even cover. I beat the odds, all right, I didn’t even win one dollar off any of my 50 tickets.

6. And speaking of bad checks, about four years ago I was writing out bills and balancing my check book as I went along. What I intended to do was write a check for $50 and record my balance as $879. Instead, I wrote the check for $879 and mailed it off. I bounced like 12 things because of that snafu. And I never balanced my checkbook again.

So, I tag the following random assortment of visitors to the Vinyl Village:

Finn

The Reverend

Dr. Murray Trillionaire

Little Miss Sew and Sew

Jodi

and Jennifer

 

Internet Idiot for April 24, 2008

From a discussion regarding the recent study that a woman’s diet may influence the sex of her child:

“Sex of an child is not deturmend by diet it’s the feetises chooses the sex off of it’s invirment around the mother an father it’s not controlable or chooseable but the featise’s chooses it’s sex it’s self or the doctor’s could cause birth defect’s or sex drive defect’s altering the grouth of the fetises causes defect’s from fake or outside sorces of hormons!!!”

I wonder if this poster CHOSE to be this damned stupid as a fetus, or if he decided it later in life…