Will Somebody Please Pronounce Ghislane?

Your love is like  gray meatballs, from the convenience store. 

Yes, I'm easily impressed. It absolutely knocks me out to watch people typing on their phones with 1 hand. As a guitar player, I have some manual dexterity, but typing with 1 hand is like petting a giraffe's head from Dick Cheney's underground lair. Watching people type quickly is also mind-numbing. I have non-professionally graded my typing as 1 error for every key typed, and this is typing slowly. 

So if you want to impress me, show me you have no gag reflex bang away at the drums phone. Or pop by with some pizza, from the place we tithe to. Like I said, I'm easily impressed.

These made-up days are just giving me headaches.... Black Friday, Black Sunday, Cyber Monday, and now, Giving Tuesday. I noticed there's never a Give to lefty Wednesday, or Show Sympathy to Mrs lefty Sunday. Mind you, sympathy to Mrs lefty is a universal concept. No matter who I introduce to Mrs lefty, their first words are always "I'm so sorry." It doesn't matter if they're from work, bands, plumbing organizations - they always say that. Don't ask me - I have no idea. I'm a heavenly experience every day.

Today I identify as   that alien thing from the movie, that covered their faces

As the Flying AIDS vaccine approaches, we need to decide who gets its first. And who decided who gets it first. At this point, a committee of 'expert' advisers for the CDC makes recommendations. We need someone with more mojo, like the people who decide which shoes are going on sale at Target, or what coffee will be the special at Starbucks - people with import, style, and the aforementioned mojo. 

After we (they) decide on who decides, it's time to decide who gets the Magic Flying AIDS Cure<tm> first..

• some of the most important people in the world are the staff of convenience stores. Where will you get your coffee and donuts in the morning before going off to do your important work? Think about it.
• operators of adult websites - they're the highest rated for some reason or other, plus we need something to do while imprisoned in our own houses
• pizza delivery - do I really need to explain?

Of course we'll need a list of the last people to get vaccines too...

• anybody in media - do you really need to read about this shit anymore?
• Congress
• people who send emails with emojis in the subject
• the Top 20 album sales - truly disposable
• CDC and WHO executives
• anybody who doesn't want it and/or doesn't trust it

My very complicated relationship with Guitar Center continues, with the latest email telling me to have no regrets about taking advantage of the deals. Just the other day it was threatening to tell my wife about some visit I made with a woman who wasn't her, and now it wants me to take advantage of it. This is what you call a dangerous retail establishment: you know no matter what you do, it's not going to work out well, possibly involving the police and a no-contact order.  So I'm warning you, good readers, not to fall for any of this stuff. It will not work out well, and you cannot access ThermionicEmissions in jail.

Perhaps because of the holidays, the aliens are still at it. The disappeared Utah monolith which turned up in Romania has itself disappeared. These guys are really active this season, maybe because the Betelgeuse situation has been solved. I don't know these aliens any better than you, but I'd watch my anus, if I were you.

• UPDATE: the monolith re-reappeared, atop a California mountain. Although the aliens have an interesting sense of humor, it is somewhat less than fully developed.

Dear lefty  

• Should I remove my hat when indoors?
• although it is societal convention, you should definitely keep yours on - you do not want the top of your head visible, generally from the neck up.

It Went BOOM 

The Arecibo telescope, starting to have 'destructive events' lately, has gone all the way and collapsed. 

Invasive wasps are creating incidents with passenger planes.

An absolutely ingenious way to get rid of surveillance tech has reared its absolutely ingenious head: discover the tech is actually racist, misidentifying black faces and confusing broom handles with guns. As we know, anything even accused of racism is a non-starter. So we just identify all surveillance tech as racist - no problem.

One of the biggest booms in my life was Led Zeppelin. I never got to see them live. This article puts kind of a nasty period on one of my favorite bands. For years, I've wondered why we hear no more... I think we have an answer.

• the Amazon Quantum Uncertainty Delivery Principle is in high gear, having proved thus far that November 31 is November 31, but packages to be delivered November 31 will be delivered December 1-2. 
• The aforementioned Principle has been further modified to show that any day a package is promised for delivery has a higher chance of a Kennedy being elected (and remaining) in high office.

A new view of international financial health has been introduced by a Chicago aquarium, which takes its penguins for field trips to movie theaters, art museums, and football stadiums. Apparently the birds like to get out and be stimulated, when they're not following their keepers around.

I have inadvertently wound up with a Wife Detector. It only works at home:

It's Penny, the Wonder English Cocker.

When Mommy leaves, Penny's by the window, pining away. While this doesn't tell me where Mommy went, shoe shopping is always a good guess.

When Mommy's in her office, I know because Penny's in my office, staring intently at me, hoping I'll open Mommy's office door so Penny can sit next to her. She will continue to sit there, with her huge brown eyes, begging me to get her mother.

Cockers with abandonment issues (redundant, I know) can be put to good use.

• Teen makes dress out of 1400 mangoes to highlight food waste
• might also be highlighting mental instability, which should be looked into

An International Council on These Sorts of Things<tm> has expressed alarm over the LGBT communities' inclusion, thus far expanding their abbreviation to LGBTQIA+. The Council warns that their moniker hurts tolerance by requiring more letters every few months, ruining old letterhead and requiring new, plus putting people who don't know the latest few letters at risk from the tolerant group.

An Oscar-nominated actor came out as trans; formerly coming out as queer. Pretty soon there will be a checklist, I fear. 

I look at this the same way as I look at hiring people: the best person for the job - not their color, gender, race, or feelings about vanilla over chocolate. Naturally this fellow is being praised as a superhero, not for his acting ability, but for coming out.

Warning: guys, if you look at his picture and say you'd ask for a date, you'd be queer too. Perhaps this will require even more designations, whereby you get some percentage for being attracted to someone's birth gender, as opposed to current one. Nah, you'd wind up tarred as some sort of -phobic. Contrary to current belief, there are some benefits to being CIS-hetero.

The fellow who played Darth Vader, in the costume, has passed

When asked for comment, his voice said, "We've got the MEAT."

The UK is the first country to approve a 'fully tested' Flying AIDS vaccine.

It has been stated to be around 95% (that's 15% British) successful. Aside from the conversationally nasty nose hair, tendency for eyeballs to stare at each other (when they're not rolling backwards, into the head, like errant slot machines), occasional sex change, tendency to make you threaten the Nicaraguan President, permanent foot switch from left to right, joining foreign nose-picking competitions,  voting repeatedly for Biden, and repeated efforts to kill your own children, or anyone else's), this is a perfectly safe vaccine. Boris Johnson would have taken it himself, but he is just a hair frightened about the dunking one's head in acid side effect, which the Ministry of Silly Side Effects has listed, in a sealed filing cabinet, at the home of the lead janitor, up on the roof, under 12 other sealed filing cabinets, for public display. 

Twitter - DC Cesspool6%

1. The vaccine should be tested on politicians first. 

2. If they survive, the vaccine is safe

3. If they don't, the country is safe.

Heroes of the Stupid  

France, which is closing its ski slopes over Christmas, to protect everyone from the Flying AIDS, is imposing random border checks to stop citizens from skiing in neighboring Switzerland. And we thought Idiot Governor and Idiot Mayor had some ridiculous ideas...

An apparent Taylor Swift fan defaced Lana Del Ray and Dua Lipa's (2 Lips) Spotify pages. It's good to see, that in these days of the Flying AIDS, that Really Important Work<tm> is being done.

It's Just Lesbians Looking at Your Penis

 

Your love is like  those little flies that fly around your head, pissing you off

You know that moment of screaming terror... when the alarm goes off....

I'm thinking to myself, as I strain not to go back to sleep, that it's pretty nice that we've had no snow the past few years. I hear this weird noise and get up to look. Someone's shoveling the tiny amount of snow that just fell. I don't want to have this kind of control over the weather. 

• Win10 allows you 10 days to roll back a new feature update. 
• The pope wants to grant them a humanitarian award, but his computer won't update.

Today I identify as  Ron Jeremy's penis, 20 years ago

My company is kind of sticky about its processes, and rightly so. My new project requires wiring up some internal seats with 120 volts. I always wanted to do this with keyboards, but chairs are pretty efficient too. The problem is that the seats are on a different circuit, so I have to request the necessary circuit access. Only having been there 6 years or so, I have never done this, so I had to ask. I filled out the required forms, then got a Tuesday Error. It was in huge red letters, in a huge red box, across the entire form. So I figured I should probably do something. I asked my team, which has perfected the skill I never did and never will: total silence, bordering on invisibility. Eventually my boss took pity on me and pointed out how to get rid of the Big Red Box. POOF - no more Big Red Box, POOF - off went my electricity request. The following morning, the same boss who helped me get rid of the Big Red Box looked at the request and asked if I filled out the Chaos Form. The Chaos Form would wire random seats with voltage, instead of specific seats. Honesty is my policy, so I told him no. The reason for the no is that I didn't KNOW about the Chaos Form. To make things more interesting, no one knew where to locate the Chaos Form. My days (and sometimes nights) are filled with this kind of Chaos. Eventually the Chaos Form will arrive, at which point I will fill it out, then my boss will point out I filled it out wrong, not having included the subChaos Addition Form. After another month or so, I'll have the entire request filled out correctly (or so I think), then it will move on to the next stage, which is the next department rejecting the request for some completely vague or way too specific reason. I expect to have these seats wired, roughly in 2025, if not later.

Since it's snowing, it's time for the Snow Removal Game.

There are several ways of getting snow removed..... my favorite is using the sun. Even though I live in Southeast Pennsylvania, the sun shines up to twice a week, so at some point it will melt the snow.

Years ago, my crazy neighbor, who was only 425 years old, had someone clear her areas with a snowblower. He was a nice fellow and did ours too. We gave him alcohol (and other incendiary devices). Crazy Lady forbade him from doing our sidewalk, for some reason. 

Since it rained up to 7 days a week, that usually washed the snow away.

Before the Flying AIDS, I worked in an actual place that wasn't my house, so I had to remove the snow, at least to get the car out. Mrs lefty used the Guilt Card, so I had to do the sidewalk too. If it snowed hard, I usually moved my back into interesting positions, sometimes for days. Drugs didn't help, nor did alcohol, nor did drinking. Even YooHoo failed me.

Last year, an enterprising youth came by. We haven't seen any enterprising youth in years, so it was exciting. The little bastard charged me $25 to clear a few feet of sidewalk. I'd still hire him to mow.

Pennsylvania has a Patreon account to buy itself a climate.

Dear lefty  

• Imma axe you a question.
• Stop listening to that rap stuff. It's not good for you.

It's not that I hate Windows, it's that I hate Windows. And Microsoft in general. I spent an incredible amount of time trying to figure out how to compare 2 Excel files. It did not go well. Then I brought in a coworker. We continued to work, with absolutely no success. My company has no Subject Matter Expert on Excel. Or much of anything else. If you're not familiar, a Subject Matter Expert is someone you can call on when you're stuck with that program. You become a Subject Matter Expert by being seen to operate the program once. I'm Subject Matter Expert on several programs, after my team saw me use them in a meeting.

So I asked a very smart friend of mine, who does this sort of thing for a living, and he gave me an idea. So with 10 suggestions from a search, plus my friend's suggestion, neither my coworker or I could move things an inch. Many of the suggestions revolved around a huge COMPARE WORKSHEET button at the top left. I liked where this was going, only I had no COMPARE WORKSHEET button anywhere on my sheet. After a bit more searching, I found out I didn't have a COMPARE WORKSHEET button because that was a different version of Excel. Of course it was. I needed to install an Excel addin, a feat which required its own set of instructions, and was not called anything like COMPARE WORKSHEET. After much wrangling, and a break for target shooting, I got the addin added in. We were off, and when I say we were off, I mean we were way off - the addin completely failed to work. I must say one thing about Microsoft: they're consistent.

We're saying out loud that billions of people use Excel, and it's a pretty important function to see the difference between 2 files. When Bob's Auto puts together a spreadsheet of part prices, then gets another spreadsheet with 157 more parts, Bob might not have the time to go down the list manually, adding in each of the 157 parts, after he finds them among the 6136 existing parts. So.... a difference function might be handy dandy. Yet the 2 of us have had no luck getting 1 going. Mind you, several of the searches we found were directly from Microsoft, so we had some faith in them (fools that we were). 

So now we're at the point where we've spent way too much of our employer's time on this, not that our employer cares, plus one of us is out on a pre-planned sick day. Another method of determining the difference is giving me hope, except it keeps looking for other things that I don't care about and don't know where they are. This might sound hilarious to you because there are 4 types of Excel Users: actual experts, functional users, casual users, and me. I can very successfully open the program, yes sir, with the best of them. I can open spreadsheets with the program. I can even do stuff with the '@', if I must say so myself. I probably opened DOS spreadsheets when these people were babies. But this is getting to me. As God is my witness, I will have a difference between these 2 *$*#ing spreadsheets if I have to have someone else do it for me, for fear I'll have an aneurysm (then show me how for next time). 

Oops, no. Several coworkers felt sorry for me and offered to take a look. I'm not one to go into conspiracies (STOP LAUGHING) but they're absent the following day.

• Somebody hid my shaver and now my mustache hairs are doing battle with my nose hairs. It's all very itchy, until the battle starts to involve swords.
• As a result, my fingers are always either on my mustache or up my nose. This would be unbelievably cool if I weren't working from home.
• Speaking of working at home, it could be several lifetimes more, as I keep hearing there was an instance of the Flying AIDS in the building. Or someone who knew someone who walked by someone who might have been exposed to it. I like it at home - I really do. It just makes me work that much harder to terrorize my coworkers.

Meanwhile, Mrs lefty goes out foraging for chicken sandwiches, taking Penny for support. While in the drive thru lane, somebody buys Penny an ice cream, and several children come over to say hello. The ladies in the lefty household are hot. The lone guy at home has to pay for his own ice cream. But all is well, except for the tornado warning. There's a lot of weather out there today.

• Amazon would like me to know that the "no sweat, we'll have it here today" package will not, in fact, be arriving today. 
• Welcome to Amazon, where quantum physics rules: today is tomorrow or today could be the next day. It's the Quantum Delivery Uncertainty Principle
• you'd never know I flunked science 

After our friends, those inimitable jokesters, the aliens, deposited and removed a 'monolith' in Utah, another has appeared in Romania. When asked for comment, both the US and Romanian governments said, "It is a curious happening. We have no idea how it got there, but we know it wasn't aliens - that's for sure." The large metal thing has circular scribblies all over it; some call it art. 

Meanwhile, the aliens are hysterical. "Earthlings call anything art," they say through their laughter. "We made scribblies on it with an Illudium Q-32 Explosive Space Modulator, and the Earthies (that's what we call you people) are already listing artists who could have produced it. You Earthies are so brainwashed by your governments into thinking we don't exist that our next gag will be a 100' monolith by the White House, that says 'Aliens Exist - who do you think put this here?'  You see, our scientists have conquered space and time travel, so we have a lot of free time on our hands."

If all your energy goes into keeping yourself awake, maybe you should be sleeping

- Frank Zappa, Frank Sinatra, Dan Rather, Dan Rowan, Tracy Lords, me

At the Airport 

Ma'am, did you ingest any drugs?

No.

You're looking awful lumpy.

I'm on a diet.

We're going to x-ray you.

Ok.

Ma'am, the x-rays show you have a shit ton of packages inside you.

I'm visiting for the holidays-they're presents.

If they're drugs, you could be dead in minutes.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Ma'am, how many packets of drugs did you swallow?

24.

You've expelled 42.

I'm dyslexic.

These slightly discolored packets test positive for cocaine.

It's not mine.

It came out of your body. 

That's not my body.

How did the drugs that aren't yours get into the body that also isn't yours?

They forced me.

Who forced you?

The guys.

What guys?

The guys. You know, the guys at the airport.

What guys?

They told me my brother would never get the sex change operation unless I swallowed these packages. I never swallowed in my life. Don't you understand - my brother worked all his life for a vagina...

At the Other Airport 

Sir, we've selected you for a random search, based upon your suitcase, your travel plans, and the size of your earlobes.

Ok.

Did you buy your ticket?

Ah, no.

Who bought it?

A friend.

What's your friend's name?

I dunno.

Not a very good friend, then.

Why do you say that - he bought me a plane ticket to Columbia.

Did he give you anything?

Yeah, this suitcase.

Anything else?

Yeah, he said he'd pay me to take the suitcase.

Didn't anything occur to you?

Yes - how nice of him it was to buy me a plane ticket and give me a suitcase to go to Columbia.

Sir, as you can see from the scale, you're carrying 5 kilograms of cocaine.

It's not mine.

It was in the suitcase you were carrying.

It's not my suitcase; my friend gave it to me.

Sir, if you cooperate with us, we can get your sentence cut down from 8 years to 6 years. What was your friend's name?

He called himself Whitey.

Not Bob? Not a last name?

Nope, just Whitey. 

Any other identifying characteristics?

He was black.

Officer, take him away. Tell the judge 20 years.

Narrator: all over the world, ugly people are targeted to smuggle drugs.

Don't be ugly. Don't smuggle drugs.

This has been a public service message on behalf of the Ugly Stupid People's Association on Stopping Drug Trafficking.

Happys 

Clare Torry - Pink Floyd's The Great Gig in the Sky

John Mayall

Billy Idol is 65. Isn't that enough?

Jaco Pastorious

Bye Byes

Allan Sherman - Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda

George Harrison - Something