No I will not. I would be the worst Amazing Race partner for about a million reasons. I will be your partner for bar trivia, though, and we will win, because I always win at bar trivia. Always. I have a drawer full of t-shirts with beer and liquor logos on them to prove it.
This is terrific. You are doing excellent work.
First of all, read this blockquote, then go read Spencer Hall’s entire post about Blockbuster. Do these things immediately.
Blockbuster’s selection made sense only in the sense that there was an alphabetical order, and sections, and then the words on those tapes were arranged in something like alphabetical order. Blockbuster would have one copy of Lawrence of Arabia. They would have 500 fucking copies of The Pelican Brief because Blockbuster either had a sweet deal with the studio on the video release, or because someone seriously overestimated your interest in a middling Grisham thriller.
This bothered me so much I once rented three copies of The Fugitive—three out of roughly seven hundred copies available at once at the Blockbuster on US 19 in Palm Harbor, Florida—just to see if the clerk would even flinch. They did not, and merely noted the $5,000 balance in late fees the family account had on it from the last time we rented Cool Hand Luke. I shot the clerk, and took all three copies home and watched them without remorse. When I finished one, I would go to the next, because the best thing to watch after watching Andrew Davis’s classic take on Dr. Richard Kimble’s story of redemption and survival IS TO WATCH THE FUGITIVE AGAIN.
Here is a true story: One time I rang up something like $50 worth of late fees at Blockbuster on a VHS copy of The Patriot. I talked my way out of this fine by explaining to the clerk that I rented the movie for a party and my idiot friend Sam was supposed to return it, but he totally forgot — Ugh, SAM, am I right? — and I couldn’t do anything about it because I left for a Caribbean cruise the day after the party.
Here are three fun facts about that story:
Eat shit, Blockbuster.
I spent a huge chunk of yesterday afternoon in a local Barnes & Noble. Here is my report:
- There was a girl sitting a few tables away from me in the coffee shop who was meeting with her tutor. Today’s lesson: trigonometry. Catching bits and pieces of their conversation — “blah blah sine, something something cosine” — kicked off a three-step process in my brain. First step: PANIC, as I had vivid, crystal-clear flashbacks to my own four-year Shitshow Parade of a high school math career. If it hadn’t been for time honored American traditions like blatant cheating and teachers willing to give C’s instead of D’s if it means avoiding numerous phone calls from furious moms with overinflated senses of their children’s intellect, I never would have made it out alive.
The second step was pure, uncut relief, when I remembered that I am a grownup and I don’t have to give a single Pythagorean shit about math anymore. We don’t make a big enough deal about this. Like, it should be the first step modern mental health professionals use to treat depression. (“Right … but do you still have to do calculus?” “Well, no.” “So is it really that bad?”)
The final step was empathy. This poor girl was meeting with a math tutor on a gorgeous spring Sunday. This is unacceptable. Math is awful and it should not be inflicted on the young and unwilling. If you want to do math, fine. Godspeed. But forcing it on a nation of minors under the guise of self-betterment is essentially systematic child abuse, and I don’t see why we have to stand for it.
- While I was cruising around looking for something to read, I saw a little girl, somewhere between 2 and 6 (I am bad at estimating children’s ages), throwing foreign language books on the floor two at a time as her mother stood 10 feet away in the Study Aids section looking at some sort of standardized test guidebook. I have chosen to believe that the little girl is a tiny hateful xenophobe, and her actions were a form of anti-immigration protest.
- There was an old man in a faded camouflage hoodie who was reading the latest issue of GQ while eating a bowl of soup. Target demo = ACHIEVED.
- One girl was sitting by herself at a table in the coffee shop eating an apple. That’s all she was doing. Not playing with her phone, not reading a book, not flipping through a magazine. Just sitting there, eating an apple, and looking at people. It was terrifying.
- There were two middle-aged women in the children’s section talking about whether the Boston bomber should get the death penalty. This seemed like an odd thing to talk about in an area of the store specifically dedicated to children, but I admittedly did not stick around long enough to hear much of their conversation as I have not shaved in a few days and the resulting pathetic facial hair situation may have led others in the store to become concerned about the creepy, single, sweatpants-wearing adult male lingering around Dr. Seuss books. Nope. Off we go.
All in all it was a pretty fun afternoon, and it made me sad that so many bookstores are closing as Amazon and eBooks corner the market. But I also read Sports Illustrated and like 75% of a book in the coffee shop while drinking a $3.00 ice tea, and then put them both back on the shelf on my way out, so I suppose the main takeaway of my trip is that I’m a math-hating hypocrite who shouldn’t be around children.
THE END.
Hello. I set this GIF to the song “Return of the Mack.” Have a great day.
Lamborghini mercy
Your chick she so thirsty
@eightlotsroad
Uncle Joe doin’ things.
I would like Facebook to change the event invites to the following:
ARE YOU GOING?
Yes / Bitch I might Be / No
Good morning.
(Source: fukkkres)
Sometimes you put on a brand new shirt and immediately spill coffee on it. Sometimes you schedule a big outdoor party and it rains cats and dogs all day long. Sometimes a driver gets distracted and rear-ends you on your way to work. Sometimes a loved one gets very sick suddenly and seemingly without explanation. Sometimes a baby is born with significant mental or physical problems. And, sometimes, a psychopath leaves bombs all over a major metropolitan area and sets them to go off in a way that will harm the greatest possible number of people. It’s terrifying to think about, and it’s hard to come to terms with when it happens, but the truth is that sometimes bad things happen, and there’s not much you can do about it.
But then, after those bad things happen, in the next moments and days and years, you have to make a choice. You can let them consume you and turn you into someone who is perpetually upset about things that you will never be able to change or control, or you can try to be a better, stronger person.
I was glued to the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing for most of the day yesterday, and I ran through a range of feelings over the course of that five or six hour period. There was shock as I first flipped on the television, watching the aerial shots of the carnage like they were a scene out of a Roland Emmerich movie. Then there was rage, as I thought of the subhuman monsters who set up explosives in a public area knowing full well what kind of destruction and suffering that decision would lead to. Then there was sadness, as I saw the news that one of the casualties was an 8-year-old child. Then I got a little emotional.
But then I stopped to think about the people who risked their lives to get victims out of the wreckage, and the runners who continued past the finish line and went straight to the hospital to donate blood, and all the very amazing people I follow on Twitter who put aside the snarky jokes for a while and tweeted out updates and hotline numbers and information to help people find shelter, and then I got a little emotional again, this time for a completely different reason. Patton Oswalt touched on this in his Facebook post yesterday, but there are so many good people out there, and we should never forget that. We’ll never be able to completely stop bad things from happening, but we — as individuals and as a group — can go a long way to minimizing their effect.
And do you want to know the best part? You don’t even have to become a first responder or risk bodily harm to do it. I mean, you can, and I hope some of you do, because there are a lot of people like me who are straight-up not equipped to deal with situations like that, but you certainly don’t have to. You can donate time, energy, and resources in other ways, whether by giving blood or volunteering during relief efforts, or whatever. Or, in the case of some of the less serious examples I listed in the first paragraph, you can just, like, not be an asshole. That doesn’t do anything to solve the problem, and if anything it makes it worse because now everyone else has to deal with the grumpy putz standing in the rain and cursing it for being wet. (See also, complaining about crappy news coverage or shock comics telling crappy jokes, which is kind of like picking up a piece of trash that washed up on shore, sticking your stale chewing gum to it, and hucking it back into the ocean.)
Point being: Next time something bad happens, whether it’s something inconsequential like a barista messing up your order, or a horrifying tragedy that results in mass injury and loss of life, ask yourself a question, and do it quickly: Do I want to put more shit into the world, or do I want to focus on making a bad situation better? You always have that choice, and you don’t have to wait for a tragedy to remember it.
Sometimes bad things happen. It’s how we deal with them that’s important.
Read this and watch the show a lot.
(Source: popculturebrain)
