Wait; THAT'S the toughest question??

Hey kids,

Dustin Randall here (call me Dusty Randy for short), back in the saddle again.  If you now have that awful Aerosmith song stuck in your head, good.  That was the point.

Anyhow, looks like it's time for the Segway creator to come clean.  Straight up front page on cnn.com (the source for EVERYTHING newsworthy):

Segway inventor reveals 'toughest question'

Did you know?  The Segway company is one of only three companies worldwide that has adopted what's known as the "business denim" dress code.

If you're like me, and you fully expected the "toughest question" to simply be "why are you the world's biggest douche?", well, you're apparently wrong: 

When to quit -- said Kamen, also the inventor of health care technologies and the Slingshot water purifier -- is "the toughest question there is" for any entrepreneur who survives on creativity and instinct.

Oh reeeeally.  How hard is it to figure out when to quit when you never should have started in the first place?  This guy's in the same class as the Shaper Image dweeb:

"Hi!  My name's Pecker!"

So we're just parking anywhere now...

Seeing as I go to school in Washington, DC, I'm reminded on a daily basis that despite tens of thousands of years of human evolution*, the human species is somehow completely unable to grasp the basic concept of the legal parking spot.  Now look, I fully understand that sometimes you have to run into a building to grab something, it's 3 in the afternoon, and shit, why in the hell is there a 14 ft no parking zone to begin with?  BUT...there's a difference between leaving your car unattended in a non-conspicous parking space for a few minutes, and just stopping your car wherever you damn well please and throwing the hazards on because "dude, if you put your hazards on, it's totally cool."  Ummm, no.  No, it's not.

"Fuck off man, I'll only be a few minutes!  I got my hazards on!"

Just another one of those things that as a society, we need to reach an agreement that this sort of stupidity will stop.

*Unless you're one of those who is still under the impression that creationism got the whole thing going, and that dinosaurs never existed (I bet the guy who made all those bone scupltures is soooo rich!), and the economy's fucking great.  

A few "sports guys"...Part One

So this is my chance to talk about a couple different "sports guys" that exist in my world, and more than likely in your world too.  It is not an attempt to be an all-inclusive, comprehensive list, as there are simply way too many of these species to even count.  It's like the insect kingdom; scientists are uncovering new breeds of sports guys nearly every week.  I'm pretty fortunate to live in DC, which is one of the largest collecting ponds for these guys in the world.  I realize that there are numerous other blogs out there that have attempted to compile lists on this exact same subject, but I didn't read any of them, because they all suck.  Anway, these are a few of my favorites...*

 - The "nonchalant guy who is friends with a bunch of guys who are way too passionate."

This is the guy who will spend 3 hours of a heated game texting and talking to girls with Iowa t-shirts or something, while his friends endure 3 hours of their own personal hell.  Immediately upon conclusion of the game, as his friends are trying to collect what's left of their sports dignity, and contemplating if they're going to leave the house at all in the next week, he'll usually say something like "you guys want to get some Chipotle?"

 - "Bad-humor rival" guy.  

"Green Bay??  More like Green BAD!!"

This guy is a fan of the team that you would consider to be one of your prime rivals.  There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself.  The problem is he tries to express his hatred for your team through really awful, uncreative humor.  His wheel-house jokes usually consist of some of these classics:  

"Charlie Weis is fat!"

"Peyton Manning is white trash!"

"At least we're not in Aunt Arbor!"   

And my personal favorite, "[insert any name here] is gay!"

Look, we get it.  You're a fan of the other team.  But do you really think anyone is in any way insulted or affected by your terrible jokes?  Newsflash dude:  that's not trash talk.  It's just stupid.  There is nothing more exhausting than bad comedy.  You're a retard, we know.  That's why you're a fan of the OTHER team.

 - "Red-Sox Hat" guy.

"Growing up in Omaha, I was the biggest Sox fan!  When they won the world series in '88, I was only 4 years old, but it was the greatest moment of my life!"

 This guy ran out to buy his Red Sox hat the minute they beat the Yankees in the playoffs several years ago.  He proudly wears his Red Sox hat nearly everywhere he goes, and proclaims he's a part of the "Red Sox nation."  You even catch him every now and then talking with a bit of a Boston accent when trying to pick up a girl - as if the Sox make the ladies swoooon.

But, dude, he grew up in a suburb outside of Chicago.  He went to school at Midwestern state school.  He lives in Orlando.  He's never even been to Boston.  He only knows two people who are from New England.  Take off the hat, douchebag.  There's enough Massholes in this world already; we don't need another one.

 - "Grown man wearing a hockey jersey" guy.

"Hi, I'm Chet!" 

Let me be clear about this:  There are only two situations on this earth where it is appropriate for a grown man to be wearing a ridiculous, oversized, brightly-colored garment with numbers and letters on it.  One, if you're playing the sport of hockey.  Two, if you're attending a hockey game - and even then, it's iffy.  You don't wear your hockey jersey around the house.  You don't wear it out at the bar.  You don't wear it to your friend's engagement party.  Dude, we know:  You're a hockey fan.  Sticks, pucks, Alex Ovechkin, and Canada make your world go fround.  But that's no excuse to purposefully look like a complete idiot.  Just because Cameron wore the shit out of that Red Wings jersey in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, it does not mean that this practice is socially acceptable.

 - "Soccer" guy.

You just know the Mac guy's a pretentious soccer snob.

This guy's actually closely related to "hockey jersey" guy.  Everybody knows this guy.  While he may or may not be a fan of other sports as well, he's quick to point out that soccer is sweetest of all science, and that the purity of the game of "real football" is unmatched in all the world of sport.  If soccer got in a fight with Ray Lewis, soccer would win handily.  Soccer vs. a hurricane?  Get that weak-ass hurriance shit out of here.  

Soccer guy's favorite activity consists of going to seedy soccer bars (or "pubs," as they call them - I guess they didn't notice that they're in Newark, not Newcastle) at 4 am in the morning to watch some idiotic match-up between two obscure German-league teams that's going to end up in a tie.  All the while, he'll be heavily consuming pints of some fake-import beer like "Harp" or "Wasteiner," because that's how they do it in Europe, man!  UEFA, FIFA, AC "insert town name here", Vodaphone, riots - fine, whatever.  Just move to Europe already and get it over with.  Spare us your "passion" for this inane sport.

Part II to follow...

*Some of these guys are indeed personally connected to me.  I'm not going to say who they are, but if you're that guy, you knew it the minute you read it.  And you should be ashamed.  Will you still be my friend though?

Shit yeah brah!

+

=

"Resale Value?  What the fuck is that, brah?  Check out my spoila!!!"

As a society, at some point we have to just all agree that this isn't going to happen anymore.

The Wiley Man

A friend of mine recently sent this to me, and I thought it was just a sketch that was filmed a couple of years ago for some comedy pilot.  But...it's not.  There was actually a time in the not-too-distant future where Seth Green was loved in the city of New Orleans for playing a fast-food cashier in a commerical with a "Cha-Ching!" punch-line.

See if you can count the # of times he says "Cha-Ching" in this news spot.  Just when you think he couldn't possibly say it anymore, he not only says it again, but with more enthusiasm, and with an even more exaggerated fist-pump.  By the way, could he have looked any ghastlier?  Were they paying him in Vitamin D deficiency?

It's a far cry from what is by far his best role in anything, ever:  as the Wiley Man in the classic film "AirBorne."

Is that really necessary?

A little note to all the people who need to eat in the middle of class:  Fucking don't.  Seriously, you can't wait 10 minutes until the break to meal on your shitty granola bar?  Has your mid-20s body not been able to adapt to the customary 3 meals a day routine?  It's not necessarily you feeding your face that annoys me; it's the slow and painful unwrapping of whatever it is you MUST immediately gorge upon in order to stay alive.  Do you need a can opener for that thing?  Let me give you a valuable life lesson:  There's no quiet way to open a bag of potato chips.  Enough with the never-ending eating train.  Wait until either the break or lunch like the rest of us considerate people.

Save it for the break, hippie.

Homo Shorticus

I thought for sure I had seen the last of the Shorts Guys in undergrad.  They were a rare breed even then, and you always had the feeling that as soon as they were no longer in an environment where everyone noticed them, they’d quietly slip back into a pair of jeans and a sweater, much like the rest of us normal people.  We had a couple classic Shorts Guys in undergrad; one in particular embodied every badass stereotype there is about these guys.  He was some white trash buddy of a friend of ours who would park at our place and get tanked before hockey games (we lived across from the ice rink).  Throughout the winter in Michigan, you can probably expect that there’s a snow cover of at least a few inches.  And the temperature in the evening rarely gets above freezing.  It’s fucking miserable. 

So anyway, prior to hockey games we’d generally sit outside on our porch, chugging beers and puffing cigs to stay warm and get ready for the game.  You wore a thick coat, and usually gloves.  But not shorts guy.  Shorts guy stood outside for hours at a time in nothing but of course, shorts and a t-shirt.  It didn’t matter how cold it got, how windy it was, or how hard it was snowing – wearing adequate clothing was for pussies.  I’m pretty sure the whole point of his existence was waiting for that inevitable moment when someone would ask “aren’t you cold?” just so he could stare them dead in the face and say “shit no.  It feels great out here.” 

“You think it’s cold out here?  Fag.”

There was another shorts guy who was kind of a mini-celeb on campus.  He was an extremely fat guy who seemed to only come out when the temperature dropped below 20.  Maybe that’s why he only wore shorts; he didn’t get outside enough in his life to realize temperature and weather differences?  If you only come outside on 20 degree days, do you have any relative idea as to what cold actually is?  Maybe that just seemed normal to him?  Anyhow, one particularly shitty winter day I was walking through the Diag when I came across this fine specimen, walking to class in nothing but, what else,  shorts and a t-shirt.  He even took it to the next level by sporting flip-flops.  His skin was covered in red splotches from the cold, and his faced looked half-albino, half third-degree burn.  He looked like a fat AIDS patient.  But he didn’t give a shit; he just wanted you to know that he was totally fucking comfortable in this kind of weather (he was also the type of guy who would probably tell you some bullshit like “I’m from Manitoba – this feels like summer!”)

Like I mentioned earlier, I thought for sure though that this species pretty much withered away after undergrad, when people stopped looking at Shorts Guy and asking “what the fuck is wrong with that guy?” and started saying “alright, clearly this guy isn’t fit to be a productive member of society.”  But lo and behold, when I got to class today, there he was in all his glory; Shorts Guy!  It was probably about 30 degrees here in DC this morning; not exceedingly cold by any means, but cold enough for most people (those with a pulse) to wear pants and a jacket of some sort.  Maybe he didn’t check the weather this morning, or just hasn’t seen a calendar in a few months, or maybe he’s just too fucking badass to have his wardrobe constricted by weather conditions?  After seeing that shorts guy can indeed survive far beyond undergrad, I’m convinced that next to the cockroach, the shorts guy species is probably the second most likely to survive either a nuclear holocaust or an ice age.  I have a feeling they’re going to get the last laugh – or at least that’s what they keep telling themselves as they catch hypothermia every winter in the name of stupidity.  For right now anyway I’m just glad to have spotted this rare specimen; global warming’s got nothing on these guys.