MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
@QuantumTurk I like your False Knees chickadee av.
Reminds me of when I was monitoring a bluebird nestbox trail. A pair of chickadees had decided to nest in one of the boxes, which was fine with me. They made a big giant pile of moss and tossed a little fur on top for a soft warm nest. One day, I opened up the front to check to see if there were eggs. Most parents brooding their nests would fly away as I approached, allowing me to do a quick check, after which I'd close the box and leave and they'd return, no harm done.
Not the chickadee though. That parent not just stayed on top of her eggs, guarding them, but she hunkered down and hissed like a snake to drive me away. I closed the box, walked away, and marked that yes there were definitely eggs. The next week, same thing. She must've thought she was the best and most fierce mom ever, driving away a human twice from her nest.
(Six nestlings eventually fledged from that box. Young chickadees look like adult chickadees but slightly fluffier, because that was the only way to make them cuter.)
Bird stories have reminded me of one of my own. A tale of a cat who thought itself an apex predator and a bird who disproved that notion.
My parents have a small one story house with a decent backyard. They also have two indoor cats who are permitted limited outside time provided someone is watching them so they don't go eating plants. They never venture far, always within the fence line, and run back into the house the minute they get spooked.
Their house also has an abundance of birds because of the feeder out back. We've seen so many types just outside the kitchen window, including the mourning doves. In addition, there's two feeders, one in front and one out back, along with an array of flowers for the most numerous species of bird that lived nearby: hummingbirds.
The cats were always interested in the birds, because of course they were. They had no hunting skills whatsoever so they could never catch anything, not even the lizards that oft bask on the warm cement of the patio, but that didn't stop them from trying if a bird decided to get too close, mostly the doves. They'd pounce, catch nothing as the bird took off, and then return to their goal of surreptitiously trying to consume some grass so they could hork it up once back inside later.
Well, one day the cats were out back on a sunny day when a hummingbird zipped through the patio area with its signature noise. This got the attention of one of the cats. The hummingbird zipped back through and the cat followed its path, calculating trajectories in her head. The hummingbird came again and she bounced up flailing wildly, whiffing the hummingbird completely as it zipped by.
The attempt did not go unnoticed though. The hummingbird came back and hovered above the cat. The cat got into pouncing position and dared the hummingbird to get closer.
The hummingbird dive-bombed the cat without hesitation and she immediately went as flat as she could go before it buzzed her head and went back up. She didn't stick around for another pass and dashed back inside the house as the hummingbird moved back and forth in the air with the unspoken, "Come at me bro," before it returned to its original goal of consuming more nectar from the feeder.
Back in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, there was this little thing called the Iran-Contra affair. You've probably heard of it, in light of the corrupt shithead who got HW Bush to pardon everyone in an attempt to cover everything up is now our current Attorney General where he is once again trying to cover up Republican crimes like the pathetic little toadie he is.
Anyways, the Iran-Contra deal was revealed to the public after a C-123 cargo plane full of weapons was shot down over Nicaragua.
However, what many may not know is that the CIA had a second C-123 cargo plane. After the first was shot down, the second never took off and the CIA denied all knowledge of it. It was left sitting in an airport hanger in the capitol of Costa Rica.
Costa Rican officials tried to contact the United States to get them to come take their damn plane, but the reply was something along the lines of "There is no plane there. It does not exist."
Fed up, they eventually just sold the plane to a private individual for a few thousand dollars, and they moved it halfway across the country.
Do you know what they did next?
They turned it into a bar and built a restaurant around it.
If anyone from the CIA asks, I'm just sputtering nonsense and certainly didn't take those photos myself. No-sir-ee. I'd also have no knowledge about how good the shrimp & rice dish is there.
@QuantumTurk I like your False Knees chickadee av.
Reminds me of when I was monitoring a bluebird nestbox trail. A pair of chickadees had decided to nest in one of the boxes, which was fine with me. They made a big giant pile of moss and tossed a little fur on top for a soft warm nest. One day, I opened up the front to check to see if there were eggs. Most parents brooding their nests would fly away as I approached, allowing me to do a quick check, after which I'd close the box and leave and they'd return, no harm done.
Not the chickadee though. That parent not just stayed on top of her eggs, guarding them, but she hunkered down and hissed like a snake to drive me away. I closed the box, walked away, and marked that yes there were definitely eggs. The next week, same thing. She must've thought she was the best and most fierce mom ever, driving away a human twice from her nest.
(Six nestlings eventually fledged from that box. Young chickadees look like adult chickadees but slightly fluffier, because that was the only way to make them cuter.)
That is literally the first good thing I have heard about to have come out of Iran-Contra.
When I was in college, a friend of a friend told us the story of how he was in the Air Force and went on those runs to Nicaragua. Including at least once with HW, who had just left office when I heard the story. It's not a good thing to come out of the story, but it is a story.
I grew up in a tiny town in Idaho. There was never much to do and I was mostly behaved. I still went in the woods to camp, i.e. build a fire and drink then sleep it off. My grandfather was a pack rat and the basement was never really cleaned in my grandmother's basement even after he passed away. My grandfather was also a chemist and you could find all sorts of fun stuff in the basement if you dug around. I know there was a stoppered flask of some bright red something that was there for at least 20 years. I was digging around after visiting my grandmother (we lived next door so it wasn't a big deal) and I found some long forgotten wine bottles in the far corner of the basement. Being probably 17 and dumb the only thing I "knew" about wine is the old wine = good wine. I put a couple of bottles under my jacket and saved them for the weekend. I went up into the mountains with some friends to make a campfire and drink our prize. This is when we learned that old cheap wine becomes vinegar. We pass the bottle around and all gag. My friend Trevor says "fuck it, I'm getting drunk." And proceeds to chug the vinegar/wine. About 30 seconds later he stops, says "I'm going to puke now" and left the campfire to vomit on a tree. Feeling betrayed by the whole experience, we chuck the bottles on the fire. After a bit the alcohol starts to burn off and shoot out flames about two feet from the top of the bottles. We felt this kinda made up for the whole experience.
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
edited April 2019
@Madican
Hummingbirds are so aggressive; there's a reason why Aztecs depicted their god of war as a stylized hummingbird and believed hummingbirds were the reincarnations of fallen warriors. When you're very small and the world is very big and most things bigger than you want to eat you, you have to be tough to survive.
I like watching their battles, as they zip back and forth making their fierce battle cries, which to us just sound like "squeakity-squeakity."
Madican
Hummingbirds are so aggressive; there's a reason why Aztecs depicted their god of war as a stylized hummingbird and believed hummingbirds were the reincarnations of fallen warriors. When you're very small and the world is very big and most things bigger than you want to eat you, you have to be tough to survive.
I like watching their battles, as they zip back and forth making their fierce battle cries, which to us just sound like "squeakity-squeakity."
Oh yeah they're really fun to watch. There's a particularly territorial one who has "claimed" the back patio feeder and chases the other hummingbirds if they go for a drink. It tried to also claim the front feeders but eventually stopped flying back and forth and settled for the back. It's a very small one, even by hummingbird standards.
@Iloveslimes
Did Trevor learn a valuable lesson from that or did he continue to chug bottles to get drunk even as the consequences got worse?
Trevor made consistently poor choices (briefly huffed gas, pierced his nipple with a safety pin), but he was done for the night. That stuff was awful. Unfortunately he went the way of most of my wild and crazy friends in high school. Sometime in his twenties, he did a 180 and became as conservative as his parents or worse.
@blaket It was supposed to be wine, but I don't actually remember if there were official labels on the bottle, it's been too long. The bottles were in the fire a good while before the liquid started boiling and from what I could tell, the alcohol burning off. That said, it's been over 20 years, so I can't fully recall.
Iloveslimes
Did Trevor learn a valuable lesson from that or did he continue to chug bottles to get drunk even as the consequences got worse?
Trevor made consistently poor choices (briefly huffed gas, pierced his nipple with a safety pin), but he was done for the night. That stuff was awful. Unfortunately he went the way of most of my wild and crazy friends in high school. Sometime in his twenties, he did a 180 and became as conservative as his parents or worse.
Huh, a friend once told me a story of a guy they'd known in highschool, who, during class, pierced his nipple with a safety pin.
Apparently when he pulled the pin out he "shit his pants and passed out."
Iloveslimes
Did Trevor learn a valuable lesson from that or did he continue to chug bottles to get drunk even as the consequences got worse?
Trevor made consistently poor choices (briefly huffed gas, pierced his nipple with a safety pin), but he was done for the night. That stuff was awful. Unfortunately he went the way of most of my wild and crazy friends in high school. Sometime in his twenties, he did a 180 and became as conservative as his parents or worse.
Huh, a friend once told me a story of a guy they'd known in highschool, who, during class, pierced his nipple with a safety pin.
Apparently when he pulled the pin out he "shit his pants and passed out."
Iloveslimes
Did Trevor learn a valuable lesson from that or did he continue to chug bottles to get drunk even as the consequences got worse?
Trevor made consistently poor choices (briefly huffed gas, pierced his nipple with a safety pin), but he was done for the night. That stuff was awful. Unfortunately he went the way of most of my wild and crazy friends in high school. Sometime in his twenties, he did a 180 and became as conservative as his parents or worse.
Huh, a friend once told me a story of a guy they'd known in highschool, who, during class, pierced his nipple with a safety pin.
Apparently when he pulled the pin out he "shit his pants and passed out."
Apparently the scene in Rock Star where Mark Wahlberg's character gets his nipple pierced is 100% Mark Wahlberg getting his nipple pierced. I think he's gone on record as saying that was the dumbest thing he ever agreed to do for a movie.
I was about to say holy shit I can’t imagine how painful that is, but... there were a couple of times when my kids bit down hard enough to tear a flap of skin and yet I would have to continue to let them feed through the pain so I have a slight idea...
I was about to say holy shit I can’t imagine how painful that is, but... there were a couple of times when my kids bit down hard enough to tear a flap of skin and yet I would have to continue to let them feed through the pain so I have a slight idea...
Yeah Id say moms probably have a monopoly on nipple pain
I have a podcast now. It's about video games and anime!Find it here.
I was about to say holy shit I can’t imagine how painful that is, but... there were a couple of times when my kids bit down hard enough to tear a flap of skin and yet I would have to continue to let them feed through the pain so I have a slight idea...
Yeah Id say moms probably have a monopoly on nipple pain
I was about to say holy shit I can’t imagine how painful that is, but... there were a couple of times when my kids bit down hard enough to tear a flap of skin and yet I would have to continue to let them feed through the pain so I have a slight idea...
Yeah Id say moms probably have a monopoly on nipple pain
I was about to say holy shit I can’t imagine how painful that is, but... there were a couple of times when my kids bit down hard enough to tear a flap of skin and yet I would have to continue to let them feed through the pain so I have a slight idea...
Yeah Id say moms probably have a monopoly on nipple pain
You don’t know my life.
i do
I asked you to stop putting those cameras in my room VERY POLITELY.
I was about to say holy shit I can’t imagine how painful that is, but... there were a couple of times when my kids bit down hard enough to tear a flap of skin and yet I would have to continue to let them feed through the pain so I have a slight idea...
Yeah Id say moms probably have a monopoly on nipple pain
You don’t know my life.
i do
I asked you to stop putting those cameras in my room VERY POLITELY.
I was about to say holy shit I can’t imagine how painful that is, but... there were a couple of times when my kids bit down hard enough to tear a flap of skin and yet I would have to continue to let them feed through the pain so I have a slight idea...
Yeah Id say moms probably have a monopoly on nipple pain
You don’t know my life.
i do
I asked you to stop putting those cameras in my room VERY POLITELY.
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Ugh, ugh. One person making bad decisions (me asking about that guy) just leads to worse consequences. I should tell another story to atone.
The time I accidentally became a forest fire fighter
So one early spring weekend the weather was nice so I decided to go walking around by a local nature center. I could tell that there had been a prescribed burn in the woods nearby, since the leaves and leftover stems from the previous years were burned away, leaving some black char on the ground and a few tree trunks. This was an ecoregion where fires had been common so the trees and other plants were adapted to it; no harm no foul. Oak trees have thick bark so they can shrug off a little fire and woodland plants were already popping up vigorously after the burn; the heat of the fire might've stimulated a few to pop up sooner. I sat down on a log by a big patch of mayapples that had freshly emerged from the ground, to just enjoy the sight and drink a little water. A couple sips, and I noticed that my butt was feeling pretty warm.
I got up, noted that it was a windy day too, examined the log, and was that a spark that just flew up? And now that I noticed it, there was a line of ash coming out one of the ends of the log. I had thought that the skunky old log had made it through the fire since these things are usually fully saturated and you could never get the things to burn if you tried. But no, turns out the prescribed burn (which are usually designed to be low-intensity flames anyway) somehow got the thing smoldering, and it was just burning through the log like a giant wick. It might have just burned through without anyone noticing since there was no fuel adjacent to catch proper fire again, but with the wind sparks could fly to nearby unburned areas and set off new fires.
A few minutes later a woman came by carrying two shovels. She saw me kicking the log apart and trying to kick dirt on all the smoldering bits I found, and handed me a shovel. "This will make your job easier." She'd noticed the same thing, and since she lived nearby she was able to fetch some shovels. We broke up that log and shoveled dirt on anything warm in it, and then spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around through the woods, searching for anything that looked or smelled like fresh smoke, rising sparks, or in one case, small neat open flames. Only the two of us could prevent further forest fires! Towards evening, the winds died down as rains arrived, and that meant anything still smoldering was probably going to be put out, and we could head home.
Monday, I was back at work, and ate lunch with some coworkers. One of them asked what we'd done over the weekend.
"Oh, I accidentally ended up fighting forest fires."
A beat. "Good grief. All I did was play video games."
A few minutes later a woman came by carrying two shovels. She saw me kicking the log apart and trying to kick dirt on all the smoldering bits I found, and handed me a shovel. "This will make your job easier." She'd noticed the same thing, and since she lived nearby she was able to fetch some shovels. We broke up that log and shoveled dirt on anything warm in it, and then spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around through the woods, searching for anything that looked or smelled like fresh smoke, rising sparks, or in one case, small neat open flames. Only the two of us could prevent further forest fires! Towards evening, the winds died down as rains arrived, and that meant anything still smoldering was probably going to be put out, and we could head home.
Sir FabulousMalevolent Squid GodRegistered Userregular
edited April 2019
In Grade 10 I got invited to my first big party.
It was a birthday bash for a girl one grade up from me. She was the star of the school drama department and not only was she talented and popular and pretty but also nice. Like, I’m an unpopular dweeb but she still wanted me to be there?
Anyway, her parents were pretty strict Russian immigrants, but they were gone for the night, and so this girl wanted the party to be WILD.
I get dropped off and the party is well under way. The birthday girl says I can toss my coat up in her room then come join everyone else partying downstairs.
Like I said earlier, I was a total dweebhead and a very good boy so I didn’t partake in any illicit substances. There are a few other people there who are also sober who I chat with, but I’m beginning to feel like the party’s not my kind of thing.
So I call home and ask my mom to come pick me up. In the meantime I’m looking for this girl so I can say “thanks for inviting me and throwing a cool party and hey maybe we should hang out more? I think you’re really special and cool.”
The party’s pretty spread out at this point though and I don’t see her so I decide I’ll just do it at school next week.
So I go up to get my coat from her room and like the big dummy that I am I open the door without knocking and whadda ya know? She’s in there with a dude and they’re getting down to business.
I know I fucked up but there’s no going back now and I need my coat because my mom’s going to be here any minute so I say “I’m uh, looking for my coat.”
They are silent as I shuffle into the room. I remember that I tossed my coat on the bed earlier. I pray that they took it off the bed.
I quickly scan the room. They did not take it off the bed. “I think it’s... under you,” I say. They shuffle around and sure enough under this dude’s ass is my coat.
I snatch it and start to get the fuck out of there when she says “Sorry, [Sir Fab].”
And for some reason my response is “That’s okay, you were just keeping it warm for me.”
The look of embarrassment, shame, and confusion on her face is one I shall never forget.
I’ve heard that occasionally USPS is really great at getting packages with vague/wrong addresses to the right person.
I got a package addressed to me today. It was from the Vermont Country Store (so nothing Mori or I would buy) and it contained a pair of men’s pyjamas.
I was really confused, too, when I read the name on the included receipt - it was my father-in-law’s name. I could possibly see him entering our address by mistake, but not my name or both.
I guess what had happened was that he had misspelled his address, as 11823 instead of 18823. And USPS searched for him, and I came up, and they may have assumed that our last name is so rare that the probability of me living in the same town with the same last name and not knowing the other person was too rare. So they slapped a sticker with my name and address on it over the original label.
And I did indeed give my father-in-law his pyjamas when he dropped the kids off.
I was about to say holy shit I can’t imagine how painful that is, but... there were a couple of times when my kids bit down hard enough to tear a flap of skin and yet I would have to continue to let them feed through the pain so I have a slight idea...
Yeah Id say moms probably have a monopoly on nipple pain
You don’t know my life.
i do
I asked you to stop putting those cameras in my room VERY POLITELY.
So back in middle school I was basically one of if not the biggest designated targets for shitheads for reasons I could go on about but don't want to sound whiney.
There was one particular time in theater class, we're watching some movie and the room is dark. A couple of the bigger shitheads were throwing things at me in the dark, I could tell it was them because I could hear them laugh about it. Paper balls, maybe some paper clips or something. At one point, they stopped and one of them moved to my front. They threw a pen and it hit my eye.
I did what every kid would do in that situation. I yelled, stood up, took off my prosthetic leg, and chucked it at this dude's head. Back then, since it was an older model, my leg was probably about 10 pounds. It was like boomerang-style, spinning horizontally.
I missed wildly and it smacked into the wall. THAT is what made the teacher finally turn on the lights and stop the movie. I got detention, I'm pretty sure they got detention, and at the very least they stopped throwing things at me.
the rest of it still sucked ass because they never faced any other punishment for the other year or two I was there but I don't wanna go into it
Crippl3 on
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Descendant XSkyrim is my god now.Outpost 31Registered Userregular
This is the story of my first, and last, encounter with Moonshine.
On this particular evening myself and four friends (Heinrich, Phil, Tom, and Jason) were bored and looking for something to do. We went by McDonald's for some fine dining and then went to the local liquor branch store and picked up a 12-pack of Molson Canadian. Then, as we had nowhere to go, we ended up at the house of a co-worker of Tom and Heinrich's. At least I think she was a co-worker. It matters not, because either way we had a place to drink, and that was the point.
We laid into the beer with gusto and it was finished all too soon. Tom and I decided that we required more alcohol, but we had not the funds to purchase anything else. We asked the hostess if she had anything, and she responded that she had moonshine but was reluctant to give us any. After some pleading she decided that she'd let us have a go, probably thinking that we couldn't possibly make a serious dent in her supply.
She was right.
I have no recollection of how much we drank, but I do remember that it was ladled out of a four-litre ice cream pail and mixed with orange juice. The rest of the evening is hazy. At one point Tom yelled "going down" as he drunkenly crashed to the floor in the kitchen, and soon it was time for us to leave. Phil and Heinrich drove me to my house and I told them to go to the back door while I made sure that my mom was asleep. As I walked to my room my mom accosted me in the hall.
"blah blah blah (incomprehensible yelling) blah blah YOU LOOK LIKE SHIT! WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU!
"I'M DRUNK!"
"WELL, GO TO BED!"
"Fine, but first I'ma let Heinrich and Phil in."
I went downstairs to open the back door. My friends were not there. I looked all around the basement, behind the bookcase, under the ottoman, around the furnace, but could not find them. I later learned that they had been told to fuck off by my sister, who knew why my mom was yelling. Apparently earlier in the evening we had put a teeny tiny scratch on a freshly-painted cement floor.
I went upstairs and hopped (stumbled) into bed. As soon as I lay down the room began to spin. Unaccustomed to the room moving independently I had no idea how to cope with this. I then felt a horribly familiar feeling and rolled off the bed, landing on the floor on my hands and knees, retching like it was my only chance at life. Everything came out of me. The McDonald's, the beer, the moonshine, my toenails, everything. The thirty seconds that I spent puking felt like an eternity to my alcohol-addled mind. In the background I thought I could hear someone laughing. When I finally stopped puking, I realized that someone WAS laughing.
"Are you alright?" my mom called from the next room after she stopped chuckling.
"Uh-hunnnh" I weakly called back.
"Okay, now clean it up."
I stumbled to the bathroom, got the Mr. Clean and a rag, and did my best to clean up the stain on my gray carpeting. Then I opened the window and fell asleep.
The next morning I woke up with the worst hangover I had ever experienced. Everything had a sharpness to it. I tongue felt like a piece of cooked beef in my mouth. I surveyed the floor, noting a yellowish-brown stain. There was also dried vomit on the doorknob and the crank for my window. I cleaned the doorknob and the crank as best I could, but the carpet was a lost cause.
Garry: I know you gentlemen have been through a lot, but when you find the time I'd rather not spend the rest of the winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
@Janson Your post office package story reminded me of mine.
Post Office Auction
When I was in college, my mom was supposed to get a package from some relatives in Japan. Due to a series of events from an international address label getting torn off and a few other things, it was not delivered and couldn't be returned to the sender. Mom was rather dogged in her pursuit of this lost package and after a few months came to a final lead: that lost packages eventually go to some sort of post office auction in Atlanta. Mom couldn't go, but it just so happened that the next auction date was one where I somehow wasn't doing anything school or band related, so I could go. Also a very good friend of the family and a friend of hers (who was also my mom's tax accountant) decided to tag along too out of curiosity.
We arrive at the time and date of the auction. It is...much more substantial than what I originally imagined. This isn't just a bunch of boxes; undeliverable packages are eventually opened up to see if there's any identifying information inside as to where to deliver them. If there's nothing and the items are truly lost, the contents are sorted out into giant pallet lots of similar goods. There were several lots just of mixed clothing, and several more of books, and dishes, and all sorts of other common items. There was one lot that was just swords which had been lost in the mail. One "lot" was a locked case holding an emerald-encrusted diamond necklace. There were over a hundred of these lots. Each lot had a starting bid amount: for clothes and common items it was usually around $200, though the necklace started at over $1000.
And then, the bidding. People who wanted to bid got a stick with a number. If they were interested in, say, one of the lots of mixed electronics, they held up their stick while the auctioneer started at the lot price and just increased numbers until only one was left. The auctioneer was selling off a lot every fifteen to twenty seconds. Lots of people were interested in these sorts of things, like collectors, store owners and flea market vendors.
It was interesting to me and a bust for my mom, but it ended up opening up a new opportunity for her tax accountant though. The accountant thought it'd be fun to buy something and ended up winning a lot of silverware. She took it home, sorted it out, realized she had birthday and Christmas presents picked out for everyone she knew, and then went to the next auction. Tax accounting is a very busy and job for the first four months of the year, but there's a lot less work the other eight months so she'd make extra cash doing some side hussles. What she ended up doing as her main hussle after that was buying random lots at minimum price at the post office auctions and then selling them at a flea market. Get a lot that's several hundred umbrellas for $200, sell them for a couple bucks each, make a profit and meet people who are happy to get a good umbrella at a really cheap price. She ended up getting several years of enjoyment and profits out of that flea market stand before she retired from that and accounting and moved to Florida.
Here is a story about a dude with his priorities in order who held up an entire plane's worth of people so he could take off the tiny shitty combination lock on his overhead luggage*, pull out a cheap neck pillow because God forbid you sit through takeoff without a neck pillow, then took ten minutes to relock his goddamn pointless combi lock. It's a short story, but powerful.
I should have done the world a favour and pulled the lock off as I walked past.
*He had to get out fucking reading glasses to manage it,so that was at least another three minutes fiddle time
I was about to say holy shit I can’t imagine how painful that is, but... there were a couple of times when my kids bit down hard enough to tear a flap of skin and yet I would have to continue to let them feed through the pain so I have a slight idea...
Yeah Id say moms probably have a monopoly on nipple pain
You don’t know my life.
i do
I asked you to stop putting those cameras in my room VERY POLITELY.
i am sure we can come to some kind of
financial
agreement to get them removed
LOL If you think I have money plus also the only thing I do is masturbate to extremely boring porn, so I mean, you really got nothing actionable.
Basically I dare you to try to ruin me.
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astrobstrdSo full of mercy...Registered Userregular
Many of my best stories are related to my job in the trenches of Blockbuster Video as man-child low-level manager of actual-child employees in the early-mid aughts (after proving my valor as a tux shirt and cumberbund doofus in the Wild West of Hollywood Video). My natural capacity for bullshit convinced the idiots running the show that my constantly high/drunk ass could be trusted in a leadership/mentor role.
The story I'll share here though concerns my favorite man I have ever interacted with. A people's champion and my hero to this day.
He was an unassuming older white dude who came to rent movies on a rainy and crowded night. Four cash registers were open and each line was at least six parties deep. Our normal sales pushes were halted to just efficiently get angry folks out the door with their 5th choice movies due to our depleted shelves. I was moving without thought, just concentrating on how high I was going to be when I stomped my roommate at Soul Calibur to blow off steam, when my savior arrived and told me he needed to sign up for a membership.
I motioned for him to follow me to a computer terminal near the entrance of the store and asked him to start filling out the membership form (Quick aside: Can you believe that BBV had the fucking stones to ask for SOCIAL SECURITY number on that dumb form?). I started navigating the menus and looked up to see that three or four parties lined up behind this dude to check out. I informed them in a weary, but polite tone, that the computer I was on didn't have a register and I wouldn't be able to ring them out. They would have to join one of the longer lines.
The young woman directly behind him let out a very small scoff. I have faced much ruder in customer service, but it still stung. This guy just turns to her and very casually states, "Hey, fuck you." It hit her like a punch to the face and the whole line quickly dispersed with a mixture of shock and shame.
When we are alone again, he just looks up at me with a twinkle in his eye, taking in my stunned grin, and uttered the words that ring crystal clear in my mind a decade and a half later.
I was about to say holy shit I can’t imagine how painful that is, but... there were a couple of times when my kids bit down hard enough to tear a flap of skin and yet I would have to continue to let them feed through the pain so I have a slight idea...
Yeah Id say moms probably have a monopoly on nipple pain
You don’t know my life.
i do
I asked you to stop putting those cameras in my room VERY POLITELY.
i am sure we can come to some kind of
financial
agreement to get them removed
LOL If you think I have money plus also the only thing I do is masturbate to extremely boring porn, so I mean, you really got nothing actionable.
Many of my best stories are related to my job in the trenches of Blockbuster Video as man-child low-level manager of actual-child employees in the early-mid aughts (after proving my valor as a tux shirt and cumberbund doofus in the Wild West of Hollywood Video). My natural capacity for bullshit convinced the idiots running the show that my constantly high/drunk ass could be trusted in a leadership/mentor role.
The story I'll share here though concerns my favorite man I have ever interacted with. A people's champion and my hero to this day.
He was an unassuming older white dude who came to rent movies on a rainy and crowded night. Four cash registers were open and each line was at least six parties deep. Our normal sales pushes were halted to just efficiently get angry folks out the door with their 5th choice movies due to our depleted shelves. I was moving without thought, just concentrating on how high I was going to be when I stomped my roommate at Soul Calibur to blow off steam, when my savior arrived and told me he needed to sign up for a membership.
I motioned for him to follow me to a computer terminal near the entrance of the store and asked him to start filling out the membership form (Quick aside: Can you believe that BBV had the fucking stones to ask for SOCIAL SECURITY number on that dumb form?). I started navigating the menus and looked up to see that three or four parties lined up behind this dude to check out. I informed them in a weary, but polite tone, that the computer I was on didn't have a register and I wouldn't be able to ring them out. They would have to join one of the longer lines.
The young woman directly behind him let out a very small scoff. I have faced much ruder in customer service, but it still stung. This guy just turns to her and very casually states, "Hey, fuck you." It hit her like a punch to the face and the whole line quickly dispersed with a mixture of shock and shame.
When we are alone again, he just looks up at me with a twinkle in his eye, taking in my stunned grin, and uttered the words that ring crystal clear in my mind a decade and a half later.
Posts
this is pretty fucked up, tito
Reminds me of when I was monitoring a bluebird nestbox trail. A pair of chickadees had decided to nest in one of the boxes, which was fine with me. They made a big giant pile of moss and tossed a little fur on top for a soft warm nest. One day, I opened up the front to check to see if there were eggs. Most parents brooding their nests would fly away as I approached, allowing me to do a quick check, after which I'd close the box and leave and they'd return, no harm done.
Not the chickadee though. That parent not just stayed on top of her eggs, guarding them, but she hunkered down and hissed like a snake to drive me away. I closed the box, walked away, and marked that yes there were definitely eggs. The next week, same thing. She must've thought she was the best and most fierce mom ever, driving away a human twice from her nest.
(Six nestlings eventually fledged from that box. Young chickadees look like adult chickadees but slightly fluffier, because that was the only way to make them cuter.)
My parents have a small one story house with a decent backyard. They also have two indoor cats who are permitted limited outside time provided someone is watching them so they don't go eating plants. They never venture far, always within the fence line, and run back into the house the minute they get spooked.
Their house also has an abundance of birds because of the feeder out back. We've seen so many types just outside the kitchen window, including the mourning doves. In addition, there's two feeders, one in front and one out back, along with an array of flowers for the most numerous species of bird that lived nearby: hummingbirds.
The cats were always interested in the birds, because of course they were. They had no hunting skills whatsoever so they could never catch anything, not even the lizards that oft bask on the warm cement of the patio, but that didn't stop them from trying if a bird decided to get too close, mostly the doves. They'd pounce, catch nothing as the bird took off, and then return to their goal of surreptitiously trying to consume some grass so they could hork it up once back inside later.
Well, one day the cats were out back on a sunny day when a hummingbird zipped through the patio area with its signature noise. This got the attention of one of the cats. The hummingbird zipped back through and the cat followed its path, calculating trajectories in her head. The hummingbird came again and she bounced up flailing wildly, whiffing the hummingbird completely as it zipped by.
The attempt did not go unnoticed though. The hummingbird came back and hovered above the cat. The cat got into pouncing position and dared the hummingbird to get closer.
The hummingbird dive-bombed the cat without hesitation and she immediately went as flat as she could go before it buzzed her head and went back up. She didn't stick around for another pass and dashed back inside the house as the hummingbird moved back and forth in the air with the unspoken, "Come at me bro," before it returned to its original goal of consuming more nectar from the feeder.
Anyways, the Iran-Contra deal was revealed to the public after a C-123 cargo plane full of weapons was shot down over Nicaragua.
However, what many may not know is that the CIA had a second C-123 cargo plane. After the first was shot down, the second never took off and the CIA denied all knowledge of it. It was left sitting in an airport hanger in the capitol of Costa Rica.
Costa Rican officials tried to contact the United States to get them to come take their damn plane, but the reply was something along the lines of "There is no plane there. It does not exist."
Fed up, they eventually just sold the plane to a private individual for a few thousand dollars, and they moved it halfway across the country.
Do you know what they did next?
If anyone from the CIA asks, I'm just sputtering nonsense and certainly didn't take those photos myself. No-sir-ee. I'd also have no knowledge about how good the shrimp & rice dish is there.
When I was in college, a friend of a friend told us the story of how he was in the Air Force and went on those runs to Nicaragua. Including at least once with HW, who had just left office when I heard the story. It's not a good thing to come out of the story, but it is a story.
Satans..... hints.....
Hummingbirds are so aggressive; there's a reason why Aztecs depicted their god of war as a stylized hummingbird and believed hummingbirds were the reincarnations of fallen warriors. When you're very small and the world is very big and most things bigger than you want to eat you, you have to be tough to survive.
I like watching their battles, as they zip back and forth making their fierce battle cries, which to us just sound like "squeakity-squeakity."
@Iloveslimes
Did Trevor learn a valuable lesson from that or did he continue to chug bottles to get drunk even as the consequences got worse?
Oh yeah they're really fun to watch. There's a particularly territorial one who has "claimed" the back patio feeder and chases the other hummingbirds if they go for a drink. It tried to also claim the front feeders but eventually stopped flying back and forth and settled for the back. It's a very small one, even by hummingbird standards.
Trevor made consistently poor choices (briefly huffed gas, pierced his nipple with a safety pin), but he was done for the night. That stuff was awful. Unfortunately he went the way of most of my wild and crazy friends in high school. Sometime in his twenties, he did a 180 and became as conservative as his parents or worse.
@blaket It was supposed to be wine, but I don't actually remember if there were official labels on the bottle, it's been too long. The bottles were in the fire a good while before the liquid started boiling and from what I could tell, the alcohol burning off. That said, it's been over 20 years, so I can't fully recall.
Huh, a friend once told me a story of a guy they'd known in highschool, who, during class, pierced his nipple with a safety pin.
Apparently when he pulled the pin out he "shit his pants and passed out."
That sounds reasonable.
Apparently the scene in Rock Star where Mark Wahlberg's character gets his nipple pierced is 100% Mark Wahlberg getting his nipple pierced. I think he's gone on record as saying that was the dumbest thing he ever agreed to do for a movie.
Yeah Id say moms probably have a monopoly on nipple pain
You don’t know my life.
i do
I asked you to stop putting those cameras in my room VERY POLITELY.
Get a Faraday cage, cheapskate.
What am I, just made of aluminum foil?
Oh, wait, now, that could work.
The time I accidentally became a forest fire fighter
So one early spring weekend the weather was nice so I decided to go walking around by a local nature center. I could tell that there had been a prescribed burn in the woods nearby, since the leaves and leftover stems from the previous years were burned away, leaving some black char on the ground and a few tree trunks. This was an ecoregion where fires had been common so the trees and other plants were adapted to it; no harm no foul. Oak trees have thick bark so they can shrug off a little fire and woodland plants were already popping up vigorously after the burn; the heat of the fire might've stimulated a few to pop up sooner. I sat down on a log by a big patch of mayapples that had freshly emerged from the ground, to just enjoy the sight and drink a little water. A couple sips, and I noticed that my butt was feeling pretty warm.
I got up, noted that it was a windy day too, examined the log, and was that a spark that just flew up? And now that I noticed it, there was a line of ash coming out one of the ends of the log. I had thought that the skunky old log had made it through the fire since these things are usually fully saturated and you could never get the things to burn if you tried. But no, turns out the prescribed burn (which are usually designed to be low-intensity flames anyway) somehow got the thing smoldering, and it was just burning through the log like a giant wick. It might have just burned through without anyone noticing since there was no fuel adjacent to catch proper fire again, but with the wind sparks could fly to nearby unburned areas and set off new fires.
A few minutes later a woman came by carrying two shovels. She saw me kicking the log apart and trying to kick dirt on all the smoldering bits I found, and handed me a shovel. "This will make your job easier." She'd noticed the same thing, and since she lived nearby she was able to fetch some shovels. We broke up that log and shoveled dirt on anything warm in it, and then spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around through the woods, searching for anything that looked or smelled like fresh smoke, rising sparks, or in one case, small neat open flames. Only the two of us could prevent further forest fires! Towards evening, the winds died down as rains arrived, and that meant anything still smoldering was probably going to be put out, and we could head home.
Monday, I was back at work, and ate lunch with some coworkers. One of them asked what we'd done over the weekend.
"Oh, I accidentally ended up fighting forest fires."
A beat. "Good grief. All I did was play video games."
... but the one flame they couldn't put out ...
... was their passion.
[queue the Celine Dion]
... Coming this summer ...
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
It was a birthday bash for a girl one grade up from me. She was the star of the school drama department and not only was she talented and popular and pretty but also nice. Like, I’m an unpopular dweeb but she still wanted me to be there?
Anyway, her parents were pretty strict Russian immigrants, but they were gone for the night, and so this girl wanted the party to be WILD.
I get dropped off and the party is well under way. The birthday girl says I can toss my coat up in her room then come join everyone else partying downstairs.
Like I said earlier, I was a total dweebhead and a very good boy so I didn’t partake in any illicit substances. There are a few other people there who are also sober who I chat with, but I’m beginning to feel like the party’s not my kind of thing.
So I call home and ask my mom to come pick me up. In the meantime I’m looking for this girl so I can say “thanks for inviting me and throwing a cool party and hey maybe we should hang out more? I think you’re really special and cool.”
The party’s pretty spread out at this point though and I don’t see her so I decide I’ll just do it at school next week.
So I go up to get my coat from her room and like the big dummy that I am I open the door without knocking and whadda ya know? She’s in there with a dude and they’re getting down to business.
I know I fucked up but there’s no going back now and I need my coat because my mom’s going to be here any minute so I say “I’m uh, looking for my coat.”
They are silent as I shuffle into the room. I remember that I tossed my coat on the bed earlier. I pray that they took it off the bed.
I quickly scan the room. They did not take it off the bed. “I think it’s... under you,” I say. They shuffle around and sure enough under this dude’s ass is my coat.
I snatch it and start to get the fuck out of there when she says “Sorry, [Sir Fab].”
And for some reason my response is “That’s okay, you were just keeping it warm for me.”
The look of embarrassment, shame, and confusion on her face is one I shall never forget.
Switch Friend Code: SW-1406-1275-7906
What you want me to freeze to death? Of course I wore the coat.
Edit: Besides his ass touched the outside whereas I was safely on the inside.
Switch Friend Code: SW-1406-1275-7906
I got a package addressed to me today. It was from the Vermont Country Store (so nothing Mori or I would buy) and it contained a pair of men’s pyjamas.
I was really confused, too, when I read the name on the included receipt - it was my father-in-law’s name. I could possibly see him entering our address by mistake, but not my name or both.
I guess what had happened was that he had misspelled his address, as 11823 instead of 18823. And USPS searched for him, and I came up, and they may have assumed that our last name is so rare that the probability of me living in the same town with the same last name and not knowing the other person was too rare. So they slapped a sticker with my name and address on it over the original label.
And I did indeed give my father-in-law his pyjamas when he dropped the kids off.
i am sure we can come to some kind of
financial
agreement to get them removed
There was one particular time in theater class, we're watching some movie and the room is dark. A couple of the bigger shitheads were throwing things at me in the dark, I could tell it was them because I could hear them laugh about it. Paper balls, maybe some paper clips or something. At one point, they stopped and one of them moved to my front. They threw a pen and it hit my eye.
I did what every kid would do in that situation. I yelled, stood up, took off my prosthetic leg, and chucked it at this dude's head. Back then, since it was an older model, my leg was probably about 10 pounds. It was like boomerang-style, spinning horizontally.
I missed wildly and it smacked into the wall. THAT is what made the teacher finally turn on the lights and stop the movie. I got detention, I'm pretty sure they got detention, and at the very least they stopped throwing things at me.
On this particular evening myself and four friends (Heinrich, Phil, Tom, and Jason) were bored and looking for something to do. We went by McDonald's for some fine dining and then went to the local liquor branch store and picked up a 12-pack of Molson Canadian. Then, as we had nowhere to go, we ended up at the house of a co-worker of Tom and Heinrich's. At least I think she was a co-worker. It matters not, because either way we had a place to drink, and that was the point.
We laid into the beer with gusto and it was finished all too soon. Tom and I decided that we required more alcohol, but we had not the funds to purchase anything else. We asked the hostess if she had anything, and she responded that she had moonshine but was reluctant to give us any. After some pleading she decided that she'd let us have a go, probably thinking that we couldn't possibly make a serious dent in her supply.
She was right.
I have no recollection of how much we drank, but I do remember that it was ladled out of a four-litre ice cream pail and mixed with orange juice. The rest of the evening is hazy. At one point Tom yelled "going down" as he drunkenly crashed to the floor in the kitchen, and soon it was time for us to leave. Phil and Heinrich drove me to my house and I told them to go to the back door while I made sure that my mom was asleep. As I walked to my room my mom accosted me in the hall.
"blah blah blah (incomprehensible yelling) blah blah YOU LOOK LIKE SHIT! WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU!
"I'M DRUNK!"
"WELL, GO TO BED!"
"Fine, but first I'ma let Heinrich and Phil in."
I went downstairs to open the back door. My friends were not there. I looked all around the basement, behind the bookcase, under the ottoman, around the furnace, but could not find them. I later learned that they had been told to fuck off by my sister, who knew why my mom was yelling. Apparently earlier in the evening we had put a teeny tiny scratch on a freshly-painted cement floor.
I went upstairs and hopped (stumbled) into bed. As soon as I lay down the room began to spin. Unaccustomed to the room moving independently I had no idea how to cope with this. I then felt a horribly familiar feeling and rolled off the bed, landing on the floor on my hands and knees, retching like it was my only chance at life. Everything came out of me. The McDonald's, the beer, the moonshine, my toenails, everything. The thirty seconds that I spent puking felt like an eternity to my alcohol-addled mind. In the background I thought I could hear someone laughing. When I finally stopped puking, I realized that someone WAS laughing.
"Are you alright?" my mom called from the next room after she stopped chuckling.
"Uh-hunnnh" I weakly called back.
"Okay, now clean it up."
I stumbled to the bathroom, got the Mr. Clean and a rag, and did my best to clean up the stain on my gray carpeting. Then I opened the window and fell asleep.
The next morning I woke up with the worst hangover I had ever experienced. Everything had a sharpness to it. I tongue felt like a piece of cooked beef in my mouth. I surveyed the floor, noting a yellowish-brown stain. There was also dried vomit on the doorknob and the crank for my window. I cleaned the doorknob and the crank as best I could, but the carpet was a lost cause.
Post Office Auction
When I was in college, my mom was supposed to get a package from some relatives in Japan. Due to a series of events from an international address label getting torn off and a few other things, it was not delivered and couldn't be returned to the sender. Mom was rather dogged in her pursuit of this lost package and after a few months came to a final lead: that lost packages eventually go to some sort of post office auction in Atlanta. Mom couldn't go, but it just so happened that the next auction date was one where I somehow wasn't doing anything school or band related, so I could go. Also a very good friend of the family and a friend of hers (who was also my mom's tax accountant) decided to tag along too out of curiosity.
We arrive at the time and date of the auction. It is...much more substantial than what I originally imagined. This isn't just a bunch of boxes; undeliverable packages are eventually opened up to see if there's any identifying information inside as to where to deliver them. If there's nothing and the items are truly lost, the contents are sorted out into giant pallet lots of similar goods. There were several lots just of mixed clothing, and several more of books, and dishes, and all sorts of other common items. There was one lot that was just swords which had been lost in the mail. One "lot" was a locked case holding an emerald-encrusted diamond necklace. There were over a hundred of these lots. Each lot had a starting bid amount: for clothes and common items it was usually around $200, though the necklace started at over $1000.
And then, the bidding. People who wanted to bid got a stick with a number. If they were interested in, say, one of the lots of mixed electronics, they held up their stick while the auctioneer started at the lot price and just increased numbers until only one was left. The auctioneer was selling off a lot every fifteen to twenty seconds. Lots of people were interested in these sorts of things, like collectors, store owners and flea market vendors.
It was interesting to me and a bust for my mom, but it ended up opening up a new opportunity for her tax accountant though. The accountant thought it'd be fun to buy something and ended up winning a lot of silverware. She took it home, sorted it out, realized she had birthday and Christmas presents picked out for everyone she knew, and then went to the next auction. Tax accounting is a very busy and job for the first four months of the year, but there's a lot less work the other eight months so she'd make extra cash doing some side hussles. What she ended up doing as her main hussle after that was buying random lots at minimum price at the post office auctions and then selling them at a flea market. Get a lot that's several hundred umbrellas for $200, sell them for a couple bucks each, make a profit and meet people who are happy to get a good umbrella at a really cheap price. She ended up getting several years of enjoyment and profits out of that flea market stand before she retired from that and accounting and moved to Florida.
I should have done the world a favour and pulled the lock off as I walked past.
*He had to get out fucking reading glasses to manage it,so that was at least another three minutes fiddle time
LOL If you think I have money plus also the only thing I do is masturbate to extremely boring porn, so I mean, you really got nothing actionable.
Basically I dare you to try to ruin me.
The story I'll share here though concerns my favorite man I have ever interacted with. A people's champion and my hero to this day.
He was an unassuming older white dude who came to rent movies on a rainy and crowded night. Four cash registers were open and each line was at least six parties deep. Our normal sales pushes were halted to just efficiently get angry folks out the door with their 5th choice movies due to our depleted shelves. I was moving without thought, just concentrating on how high I was going to be when I stomped my roommate at Soul Calibur to blow off steam, when my savior arrived and told me he needed to sign up for a membership.
I motioned for him to follow me to a computer terminal near the entrance of the store and asked him to start filling out the membership form (Quick aside: Can you believe that BBV had the fucking stones to ask for SOCIAL SECURITY number on that dumb form?). I started navigating the menus and looked up to see that three or four parties lined up behind this dude to check out. I informed them in a weary, but polite tone, that the computer I was on didn't have a register and I wouldn't be able to ring them out. They would have to join one of the longer lines.
The young woman directly behind him let out a very small scoff. I have faced much ruder in customer service, but it still stung. This guy just turns to her and very casually states, "Hey, fuck you." It hit her like a punch to the face and the whole line quickly dispersed with a mixture of shock and shame.
When we are alone again, he just looks up at me with a twinkle in his eye, taking in my stunned grin, and uttered the words that ring crystal clear in my mind a decade and a half later.
"I only said that because I knew you wanted to."
challenge accepted
I want to be that guy when I grow up.