Products Endorsed by the NRA Part 5: The Enforcer ICBM

Tired of being able to see Russia from your house?  Still waiting for gratitude from all those Middle Easterners?  Wondering why Kim Jong Il is still breathing?  Well, wait no longer!  The One-Man Operated Home Nuclear Peace-Producing Intercontinental Enforcer Missile will actively impose YOUR American exceptionalism!

Finally, a liberty-loving solution that lets you take matters into your own hands.  This take-charge firearm can be yours for only $20,000,000!*

*I will bet you the price of this missile that someone is lobbying for this already.

Products endorsed by the NRA Part 4: If you can't reload...

A solution for the NRA enthusiast keen to make their mark in personal protection!  If you are attacked by a frightening stranger of indeterminate nationality, can you really be sure you’ve stopped them by shooting them full of your handgun clip?  Stop them FOR GOOD with our handgun bayonet attachment!

Also useful if you are trapped in a Wolfenstein 3D game.

Did you think I was kidding?  This one actually exists.

Products Endorsed by the NRA Part 3: Arm your toddlers!

Now that you’ve protected your home—have you protected your family?  You never know when the Socialist Fascist Communist Anti-Family Gay Agenda might try to brainwash YOUR innocent young children, and they should be able to defend themselves!

Socialism in its many evil forms could be invading your family right now.

Teach your children to protect themselves with our patented A.W.F.U.L.: Assault Weaponry For Underage Little’uns!  These fully functional, kid-sized mini-pistols come in both Princess Pink or Combat Camouflage for gender-appropriate education.

*Safe for 18 months and older

It’s never too early to start them living the NRA Lifestyle!  Be sure to teach your children about the benefits of self-defense and how to avoid Marxist brainwashing.  Watch out for phrases like "social justice" and "community benefits", and words like "equality".  With the A.W.F.U.L, your child can be appropriately and safely equipped to stop Leftist Nazi Communist indoctrination in its tracks.

Turns out he's a missionary, but you can't be too careful!

Customer notes: For an extra $49.99, your A.W.F.U.L. will be monogrammed with your children's initials.  50% discount for NRA Lifetime Members!

I wear goggles

Two posts in one day!  Look at me go!

So I've been wrestling with this one for a little while now.  I wanted to clip the mp3 myself, which I finally figured out how to do, but then I discovered that Blogger doesn't actually let you post mp3 clips.  That also busts any great plans I had of posting new fiddle tunes here.  Oh well.

Therefore I've just decided to link to the YouTube video like everyone else does.  Click on this link and listen for just 30 seconds between 0:43 and 1:12.

Macy Gray - I Try

I wear goggles when you are not here?

Skiing

Sorry for the gap in posts.  I was in Utah visiting some family and skiing with my boyfriend.  It was lovely: great weather, great snow, great company, tons of piste and good glades.   Unusually, it was almost entirely scrape-free.  So I thought I might relate a ski trip from my past which wasn't.

One can really get into scrapes skiing.  One could fall and break bones, tear ligaments, get concussions, or otherwise be injured.  Or one could have chairlift disasters like having your skis fall off (I have done that) or dropping a pole or glove (yup) or my absolute favourite:

For the record, this was not me.

I have never had normal scrapes.  I hope that’s clear by now.  No, I have interesting and ditzy scrapes that involve strange transgressions no one would have thought to prepare for.  One of these occurred while skiing solo in Switzerland—something I will never do again.  Here’s why.

Ski resorts in New England, where I am from, are laid out in a particular way:

All trails lead to the bottom!

As you can see, there are a series of chairlifts that service particular trails and altitudes.  If, from any particular one of these lifts, you decide to ski all the way to the bottom, you will eventually hit an easy trail that will take you back to the central collecting point at the main ski lodge.  This will be a place where one can obtain food, rental equipment, first aid, trail maps, beer, your car, or whatever else you might be searching for over the course of your skiing experience.  Even at the posh resorts in the States, where the area is spread out over several mountains, they work this out either by creating one of those collecting trails to take you back to the central base or by building lift or rope tow access.  So no matter where you go, it’s hard to get seriously, 100% lost.  You can accidentally get yourself onto a trail too difficult for your skills, but you can usually scrape your way down to something easier and eventually find your way down to the bottom.  Then you perspire with fear for awhile and get over it.  At the end of the day, you are not stranded on the mountain for the simple reason that they make sure no one is left on the lifts, and you can always ski down to the car park area.  Job done.

This is not the case in Switzerland.  Or at least, not in Grindelwald, where I skied a few years ago.  Here I was stymied by a few things—I don’t speak German or French, and I didn’t have a companion who would moderate my natural tendency toward idiocy.  But most of all, it was the layout of the slopes that got me.

See, the problem here was, you’re not supposed to SKI down to where you started the day.  You take the lift up to a given area, and then STAY up there using only the high-level lifts.  This is totally alien to my mind.  I’m used to, on a whim, skiing downhill for a thousand feet to my point of origin and then going alllllll the way up again.  So the notion that I could not ski down to the carpark where I had to meet my skiers’ shuttle at the end of the day just never occurred to me.

At some point, therefore, I thought I would get a nice long run in to the bottom of the gondola and then take it all the way back up.  So I skied down and down and down, trying to keep the gondola as close as possible on my right.  Eventually I started feeling sneakishly uncomfortable, like I was maybe missing something.  Especially when I started having to lump my way across semi-snowed-up roads on my skis to get to the trail again on the other side.  And finally, when I was level with the gondola station, I realized I was miles away along a road.  So I had to take my skis off, throw them over my shoulder, and start walking.

I took the gondola up again.  Did you think that was the end of the story, or that I’d learned my lesson?  Please.  This is me we’re talking about.  I don’t have those kinds of reasoning skills.  I was still clinging to my notion that you can ALWAYS ski down to the bottom, a notion that had been instilled in me over years of skiing in America.  I was not going to let go of it just because I’d messed up one gondola-locating effort.  No no no, what I actually did was think to myself, hmm, it would be really wise to know exactly how to get down at the end of the day, so let’s try skiing down again!

This second attempt went very badly.  I tried going down a new route this time, keeping the gondola on my left side.  At this point, my German non-language skills came into play, and I passed a suspicious sign at the head of a trail.  It had writing on it but damned if I have a clue what it said.

Potentially an accurate translation?

Now, in an American ski area, this could mean “Caution, Experts Only” or something similar.  Turns out in Switzerland, it means “Trail Closed”.  Of course, I skied straight down it blithely.  This led to a tiny, two-foot-wide trail at the edge of a gorge with a 40-foot vertical drop o n the left and a 40-foot vertical wall on the right, and nowhere to stop or turn till the trail finally rose back onto a wider meadow area.  I stood around there for awhile, thinking, Jesus, the Swiss are hard core. Then I continued downhill, at which point I began running out of snow.

At this point I finally accepted that I had messed up again.  Once more, I hoisted my skis onto my shoulder.  However, at this point, I was looking at a steep downhill stumble on thick mud studded with semi-frozen cow pats, rather than a stroll along a road.  While wearing ski boots.  If you haven’t had the pleasure, it’s roughly like wearing Transformer parts on your legs, only with less flexibility.  So of course it was about thirty seconds before I slipped and went flop into some malodorous cow mud.  I slid downhill about six feet, dropping my skis in the process,  till I managed to stop and trundle back uphill to fetch my gear.  Half an hour of slogging, cursing, and stinking of cow finally took me back to the base of the gondola where, for the third time that day, I boarded and rode back up to the ski area.  I skied for a few more hours, getting more and more worried about the end of the day, when finally I overheard a family group speaking English to one another.  I dashed over and asked them how to get down to the bottom of the hill. 

Turns out you’re supposed to take the gondola.

And just as a final insult., when I finally did take said gondola down to where the skier’s shuttle was to pick me up and take me back to Interlaken, the shuttle driver refused to let me on because I was covered in mud.  He pointed me toward a snow bank and told me to roll around in it to remove the essence-of-cow—or he wouldn’t let me onto the bus.

There are only a few circumstances in which a snowbank is a valid bathtub.  This would be one of them.

Slightly awkward friends and how to cope

I've taken a quick break from mocking the NRA to share some advice and ask for some back. Please help!  I have had my share of weird friends whom I am very fond of but who require special social adaptations.  I’m still not sure whether this is a universal thing, or whether I’m just enough of a weirdo myself to attract even weirder weirdos.  But I need help.  This is a want-ad for your input.  I will even give you up-front payment your advice in the form of some advice of my own to start.

First, the friends I know what to do with:

 The Space Invader Friend

Your personal space is no longer your own.  Your once-amusing friend has become like a badly-shot HDTV program—so close you can see their pores and hear their nose-hairs whistling.  But you’ve had some good times together and you don’t wish to end the friendship.

Solution: find an inanimate piece of furniture and back up around it as they talk to you, ever maintaining Face Space as they try to get closer.  Choose the furniture wisely—you must be able to back around it indefinitely, or you will be cornered!

 

On the plus side, these table-laps do count as your cardio workout for the day.

  

The Friend With Bad Breath

You genuinely like this person, but anytime they open their mouth to speak, dinosaur tear gas comes out.  Conversation, once your basis for tear-streaming laughter, has become a form of torture appropriate for Abu Ghraib.  Solution: find a head angle that is out of the blast.  Do your best to shield your nose and mouth while maintaining an expression of extreme interest .

The Friend Who Talks To Your Chest

This is the friend, or maybe the friend of a friend, who is irresistibly distracted when speaking to a woman.  You spend the evening getting increasingly irritated, but you know won't be able to avoid them.  Solution: wear helpful clothing.

And now, the most awkward friend for whom I beg, beseech, scream, for help in coping with.

 The Stinky Friend

How do you break it to someone that they are smelly?  I have no idea.  I’m soliciting advice here.  How many of us have been in the situation where your close friend/coworker/housemate /other person you must frequently interact with is extremely stinky and does not know it?  Worse, people who stink but are absolutely confident that they don’t stink yet can offend the hell out of even anti-deodorant hippies?  Or worst of all, those who have made a conscious decision that their hygiene is perfectly adequate and anyone who says otherwise is a snobby anti-environmentalist with ideas above their station?  What do you even say to them?

When I lived in Massachusetts, I had a housemate who qualified.  I should have paid attention to the alarm bells when I first met her--she was vaguely disheveled, but I thought, don’t be demanding, I can deal with disheveled.  I could qualify as disheveled 65% of the time.  Usually it indicates a person who is so BUSY! and ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT LIFE! that they don’t always take the time to put on runway model clothing before going to the bar.  And that’s cool, and it often means we'll get along.  In this case, however, being disheveled was an indicator of zero personal hygiene whatsoever.  It quickly became clear after this girl moved in that her concept of sanitation was to glance in the mirror once a week to make sure she didn’t have peanut butter stuck to her face.  This was an actual risk, as she could not shut her mouth to chew.  Breakfast was always oatmeal, and was always carefully rearranged inside her mouth using her tongue before swallowing—at which point she would finally close her mouth.  I don't eat oatmeal anymore. 

Now again, laziness about appearance I can deal with.  I’ve explained why my hair doesn’t always look as presentable as it might.  It’s a rare occasion that I get out the mascara, let alone all the “foundation” and “toner” crap that magazines pretend I need.  (If I did use it, I'd probably look like the cast of Jersey Shore, only not as photogenic.) But this girl—let’s call her Smellody—didn’t differentiate between personal grooming and vanity.  To her, all self-care fell under the heading of egocentric narcissism, which meant that not only did she not usually bother to shower, she would look down her nose on anybody who did.  She was convinced that as long as she didn’t have visible parasites, she was doing just fine.

She knew she was way too busy to spend time on stuff like soap.

But she wasn’t doing fine.  Her odor was pervasive, sharp, and animal.  She smelled like a combination of armpit pheromones, mold, and crotch rot.  She could clear a room just by removing a jacket, and frequently did.   Her potentially lovely hair would go unbrushed for days at a time, which meant it turned into a frizzly nesting ground for nastiness and random animal parts.  Leaving aside incontinent old people (who make me feel sympathy rather than disgust anyway), she was the foulest-smelling person I’d ever met.  Worse, when she moved in, I realized it wasn’t just her body that smelled—it was her car, jackets, and entire bedroom as well.  This meant that she didn’t even have to be physically present for you to be olfactorily assaulted.  Leaving her door open would lead to a meaty, rotten aroma of dead skin cells and secretions wafting through our entire apartment, which could only be dispersed by leaving all the windows open for an hour.  It became a choice between Smellody’s body odor and being frozen to death in winter.  I tried to simply shut her door whenever I walked past, but she would obstinately leave it open and the one time I asked her to shut it, she challengingly asked, “Why?” and I didn’t have the heart to explain.

Our friends started to avoid visiting my apartment.  When she would turn up at social events (which happened whenever she heard about them, invited or not), people would find excuses to leave, making our parties very short-lived—especially since she was always the last to leave.  (She did like a party, she had that going for her.) Whispered discussions were held as to how on earth we should address this nose-assaulting problem.  Should we keep our social affairs a secret?  That would prevent new friends from joining us, and we were a welcoming bunch.  Plus we would have to have everyone on board in a mutual pact not to say a word.  Should we ask her not to come along?  Given that she'd cried in the corner of the bar for weeks the last time she'd broken up with a guy, this did not seem like a good option either.  Should we actually explain to her that she stank?  This was the mutually approved approach—but who would do it?

Naturally, eyes turned toward me as her housemate.  I shouldered the burden with an Atlas-like shrug.  After all, we were friends; how difficult could it be to subtly drop the hint if I lived with her?

Unfortunately, these efforts often ended with me thrown by her inability to pay attention to subtext.

“Smellody, I’m washing a bunch of jackets, can I throw yours in?” I would say.

“Sure, go ahead,” she would reply, continuing to stink obliviously.

Clearly I needed to be blunter.  So I upped the hint.

One day, with a big smile, I said, “Ha ha, what is that smell… oh no, Smellody, I think your shirt might have gotten into the wrong laundry pile!”

“Huh?” she replied.

Me: “You can’t smell that?  I think your shirt might be… dirty…”

Smellody: “Smell what?  It’s fine.”

And I had to slink off with my tail between my legs.

I steeled myself to try again.  Should I give her a gift basket from Body Shop?  No; she would see the use of such products as unnecessary vanity that she was far too busy to bother with.  Could I stage a “makeover night” with someone else?  Sure, but most likely Smellody would just say how all this was so hilariously beneath her and leave, or make a melodramatic fuss about how annoying it all was.  I couldn’t imagine that the lesson would stick.  So I kept on thinking, and putting off saying anything.

Then one day I realized that the armpit/crotch/meat smell had spread—it was now coming out of the bathroom as well.  I had to ask.

Me: “Smellody, can I ask you a personal question?”

Smellody: “Sure.”

Me: “When was the last time you washed your towel?”

Smellody: “I dunno, a couple of weeks ago?”

Me: speechless silence

This made me realize I was up against more than a poor shower regime.  As I understand it, body odor is produced by two factors in concert:  sweat glands in the armpits and groin producing mostly odorless but thick, nutritive gunk, and the bacteria that live on skin which enthusiastically consume said nutritive gunk. 

Yummm!  GUNK!

The resulting excreta produced by the bacteria are the source of the stink.  For most people, showering removes both gunk and bacteria.  But with Smellody, not only did she shower infrequently enough to ensure a good buildup of gunk, she was constantly re-inoculating herself with stink-bacteria every time she did shower, by drying off with a towel that might as well have been a petri dish.  Around the same time, it dawned on me that she’d lived with me for about five months and I had never once seen her wash her sheets.  So she was getting her bacterial starter culture from all over the place!

This was a major setback.  It meant that addressing her stinkiness would take way more than a simple gift of a deodorant can.  If I was going to unstinkify Smellody, I would have to convince her to change her entire hygiene regime, including teaching her about regular sheet and towel washing, explaining to her that she must shower every day, and that no, a quick application of cheap deodorant was not a sufficient substitute.  In short, I would need to be her mother.

So what did I do?  I despaired and moved out.

Suggestions welcome.

Products Endorsed by the NRA Part 2: Home Defense Hand Grenades!

Not for use by children under 5.  Otherwise, go nuts!

Is your home adequately protected?  Are you secure when you sleep at night?  Remember, anyone can fall victim to the millions of home invaders in the United States.  They’re everywhere and YOU could be next!  Get the latest in domestic protection with the NRA-Endorsed Home Defense Hand Grenades!

Remember, security cameras and alarms won't protect you from a determined invasion, and especially not from ninjas or aliens.  Security cameras don’t kill people— PEOPLE WITH FIREPOWER DO! 

These easy-to-handle, ergonomically molded grenades feature an E-Z Pull Timing Pin and monogrammed casing straight from God via the United States military.  Guaranteed stopping power for any home invader under 900 pounds! 

 Our NRA-Endorsed Home Defense Hand Grenades will not only protect your home and belongings from ninja invaders, they will blow your invaders into Self-Assembling Smithereen Artwork!  This fetching decor for your post-invasion home shows your patriotism by  depicting an American flag imprisoning your home invader!

"Yeah, that's the guy that came in here and tried to steal our shit.

Turns out he was just trick-or-treating, but hey, bonus flag art!"