Wii Wii Wii All The Weigh Home

Happy Thanksgiving!  Speaking of eating too much food,  I decided to do "Wii Fit" with my daughter the other night.  No lie, when I first stepped onto the balance board - this is what Wii said to me: "Well what do you know, it's Brian!"  Can you believe that?  This animated Wii balance board is giving me the business with virtual sarcasm!  So I responded by giving it a swift wave of a numb chuck coupled with a prolonged press of the controller's A button. This is Wii talk for Wuck You accompanied by a virtual Widdle finger!  Wii tried to soften the situation by singing a cutesy "bluuiip deedee doo deedee" sound but proceeded with another back handed insult by saying it has been 235 days since the last time I worked out with it.  Hey it didn't feel much over 233 days to me, but who's counting?  Wii proceeded to conduct a "body analysis"and finished by concluding that I had gained 12 pounds over 235 days.  I was filled with shock and awe-com'on!!  I yelled at the TV screen: "Oh, cut me some slack you little Wii punk! First of all, it was 230-three days, thank you,  and besides I'm pretty sure these 10 pound jeans and 2 pound cotton socks I'm wearing aren't helping my situation much!"  Without warning Wii proceeded to take my animated "Wii Me" action figure and bloat its gut up to look like a life long Wii Me NASCAR fan....real nice, Wii!!  Reeeeeal nice!  That's suppose to give me motivation? ... I got off the balance board and mumbled under my breath "Screw you, Wii!...catch you around next Halloween."  Wii sang: "bluuiip heehee hoo heehee!"

Hey Mr. Wii, hope you choke on a Wurkey bone this Thanksgiving! 

Have a Safe Flight

Sometimes it's better not to say anything to someone at all. For example, I don’t understand why people are compelled to say “have a safe flight” to me just before I’m about to fly somewhere. What kind of pressure is THAT to give to someone who is about to get on a plane with a couple of hundred other passengers? Really, unless you’re the pilot, what else can YOU do to control the overall safety of a flight?  When someone tells me to “have a safe flight” I feel that I have just been surreptitiously given ownership of the flight's total safety over the next 3000 miles for a group of stinky sandwich eating, drooling, loud mouth passengers.  Sometimes I think the person might be trying to send a covert message to me about a premonition they had about the flight but they really don't want to be the one to tell me about it.

I doubt we'll ever hear a pilot say during a pre-flight announcement: “Uhhhhhh ladies and gentlemen thank you for flying with us today and uuuhhhhhhhhhhhh if anyone has any uhhhhhhhhh suggestions on how to make our flight safer, don’t uhhhhhhhhhhhh hesitate to notify one of our uhhhhhhhhhhh wonderful in flight service attendants. Because uhhhhhhh to be quite frank people, we’re uhhhhh just plumb out of ideas up here! HA!”    

I think the next time I get on an airplane I’m going to put my carry-on bag in the overhead and then proceed to make a scene by exclaiming out loud “Please, if everybody would look up for just a minute; As you can see, I put my bag in the overhead compartment. It fits securely behind this door with a nice latch in the middle of it. I think if you all do this with your bags it will make us much, much safer…Is everyone with me on this one?

So the next time you feel compelled to express such a wish on one of your friends maybe give them something they have a running chance to control. Something like: “Have a reclining seat!” or “have an unoccupied lavatory”.

Have a nice day! ;)

Please Don't Pluck and Drive

Look, everyone knows that my life has been comprised of living exclusively with women. Well, OK, our dog is technically considered a male. However, being that "he" is neutered, the validity of his masculinity is questionable at best and that will be further demonstrated later on in my blog. Not-with-standing the fact that our cat, in her non-verbal cat talk ways makes abundantly sure his presence in the house is nothing short of "emasculation station". But I digress... So it should be obvious that I've grown accustom to what comes with the territory of all things female in the 21st century.....things like hair care (and removal) products, gels, lotions, vanity mirrors made from stolen carnival fun houses, bottle after bottle of gop, goop, ick, greases, waxes, hair brushes that look like they could thatch my lawn, three towels a shower, makeup stations established where ever there's a mirror mounted on a wall, all the various french named tools of the trade...all in the name of "what else can I do that enables me to be late getting out the door this morning?" But like I said, I'm use to it..no big deal. I've learned to just look the other way...but I do draw the line when the dog decides to eat foreign objects, wrapped in tissue pulled from a bathroom waste can that he dumped over because he's pissed that I didn't give him a treat while making the kids lunches in the morning; that's when I call him a bitch! (I'll save writing about doggy "ear-lolly-pops" for another blog).

So today I'm driving to work minding my own B.I. business when this odd kind of movement caught my attention in my rear view mirror. A woman in a Toyota SUV was s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g her neck way, way up like she was trying to smell her ceiling. But I quickly realized what she was doing was plucking, with a peculiar level of finesse, something from from her facial regions (whiskers? What do I know? I'm just a guy!) She was searching her mirror for pluck-able objects on her chin, neck, cheeks, nose etc. with a pair of tweezers. It was a display like I've never seen in the world of bad habits in the commuting world. The picking, the stretching, the plucking, the squeezing, the finger flicking, looking left, looking right, looking up..more picking, squeezing and flicking it all out the window... and the grotesque facial expressions that went along with it to get the job done...Oh my Lord!! I found myself being mesmerized but also completely skived out by this display of commuter hygiene. What made the situation worse was that I would find myself physically wincing and twitching with every tweeze and squeeze she made. It reminded me of when I was a kid watching Alfred Hitchcock's movie "The Birds" where I would subconsciously swat the birds away from me as they attacked the characters in the movie.

You might ask, "why didn't you just stop watching her? But I couldn't! Aside from my morbid curiosity of this freak show that was thrust upon my rear view mirror, I had to make sure she wouldn't plick and flick herself to complete distraction and rear end me. The last thing I needed was that tense, post accident dialogue with someone who is not only freaking out at me, but also has a pair of tweezers rammed up her nose. Thankfully the show ended when she turned left and I continued straight along with the rest of the morning traffic all the while thinking that I just lived through some kind of weird Seinfeld episode "it was a rub!! No pick!! NO PICK!!"

The Daily Stain - Don't Lead Me On!!

True story...I'm scheduled for a 12:00 noon interview today with a major pharma company. Seemed like a great opportunity.. a good career move for me. Four different recruiting agencies contacted me for the same position. I was confident about being a good fit for the job. I spent significant time prepping with practice questions and answers, job desc. review, etc. Put on the newly dry cleaned suit, shoes shined..doing all of those things to prepare for an interview that I have advised gobs of people to do during the course of my recruiting career. I was locked and loaded for this one. Grabbed my black leather portfolio with the extra resumes, got in my car, started it up; found the right radio station to help me focus in on the interview mood and pulled out of the driveway. As I hit the street I took a quick glance at my cell phone and noticed there was a new voice mail message. So I pulled back into the driveway to retrieve it. It was from the recruiter. They canceled the interview. She said they ID'd an internal candidate and would not be hiring someone from outside the firm. Now I'm all dressed up and no where to go!!! So I called my wife and we went out for a nice lunch. In the end, I think I would classify the outcome of this situation as having major league blue jobs.

The Daily Stain - Times Haven't Changed Much

When I was a kid, my family would spend much of our down time in our living room. Today, in our house this same gathering point is called the "family room". Today's modern "living room" is where all of the best furniture goes and nobody is allowed to use it. It's really more of a non-living room isn't it?

But I digress. In the living room of the olden days as my kids now call it (circa late 60's early 70's..now that's OLD isn't it?) my parents would sit in their chairs and read the daily edition of the Flint Journal while my sister and I would watch TV. I remember the scene and sounds as if it were yesterday...the sudden swish and crinkle of changing newspaper pages; my mom asking my dad "you done with the front section yet?", that rapid fire click of the channel changing followed by either my mom or dad scolding us with.. "Would you STOP that?! You're going to break that dial and that will be the end of the TV because we're not going to buy another one if you do!"

"But what the heck, mom? I just wanted to see if the Tiger's game started yet. You gotta jump on the dial because it takes forever to go from channel 5 to channel 12 and back by just one click at a time!"

Fast forward to our family room this morning...as I type this blog. My wife and I are sitting in our "chairs" and instead of reading newspapers we have our noses plastered into our laptop computers while my two daughters are watching a movie we taped on the DVR (Tivo). My younger daughter just asked my older daughter to pass her the remote to the TV so she could pause the movie. She wanted to check to see if iCarly taped last night.

With blind instinct I literally just said; "Hey, would you stop throwing that remote across the room?! If you break it I'm not buying another one!"

The Daily Stain - Jesus, Mary and Joseph!!

When my wife puts a return address on an envelope she uses labels that have her name first and then mine. Sometimes my traditional "man of the house" ego gets a little piqued by the order of names, but then I figure if she's putting out the effort to mail something she should get to put her name first...what do I care? So I always wondered how Joseph felt when he heard his neighbor yelling; "Abraham, verily I say, thou gettest down from that olive tree before you fall and breaketh your arm...Jesus, Mary and Joseph do I have to watcheth thou from sun riseth to sun seteth until we die!?!?" (I don't think the phrase "24/7eth /365" had caught on quite yet).

If someone were to create and market a three name, global phrase to express an individual's exacerbation over any kind of situation but used my daughter's, my wife's and then MY name last... I'm thinking I would start to feel a little resentful after a couple of hundred years of hearing it being used by millions of complete strangers. After Joseph died I can hear the faint snickering as people passed by his headstone that read something like "Here lies Joseph, of the Jesus, Mary and Joseph trio fame. I can only imagine how PEEVED he became when he learned not only did his son get first billing on that phrase but was also given the second slot on the holy trinity marque. Only adding insult to injury when Joseph found out that the " Our Father" wasn't even referring to him.

I think from now on I'm no longer going to say "Jesus, Mary and Joseph"...Instead I'm going to say; "Jesus, Mary and Rodney Dangerfield"!!

The Daily Stain

Attractive Woman Seen Leaving Victoria's Secret Store

An attractive female was reported to have been seen leaving a Victoria's Secret lingerie store this past Thursday afternoon. Speaking on condition of anonymity a male shopper told reporters that while sauntering by and peering into the store an attractive woman briskly walked out garnishing what appeared to be a petite shopping bag in hand.

"I couldn't believe my eyes", the source said. "In all of my years of walking by a Victoria's Secret I have never seen such a site, this has to be a once in a life-time occurrance", he added.

Store management admitted to a woman being in the store at the time of the sighting but declined to comment any further until the results of the investigation are in.

The unknown shopper was last seen sitting in a parked Mercedes Benz posing a stiletto adorned leg out an open driver's side door before speeding off onto Route 287 and into rush hour traffic.