Waterproof? Waterproof this..

Posted on by JP Shaver

A trend has been developing lately that is quite disturbing to me. Not that it’s doing me or anyone else any harm but whoever decided that waterproofing every last god damned thing we own is now, suddenly, of vital importance? Did something happen? Is global warming super real now? Are the polar icecaps melting at an alarming rate and perilously surrounding us with more and more water? Why are we around so much water all of the sudden that we need our accouterments sealed from this ever-growing and pervasive moisture?

In my mind, this obsession with keeping dry started when we all started carrying our cell phones around like they were life giving oxygen tanks or something. I see people at the urinal all the time reading the news, texts, emails or whatever else they can’t do without for the next 30 seconds. They look ridiculous and I cant help but wish to be there when they drop their expensive phone into a pool of loamy community urine. Can’t we put our phones down for just a few god damn seconds? Long enough to at least take a piss and not drop the stupid thing in the effing toilet? Before cell phones, I cannot think of one thing I ever dropped in the toilet. I’ve never dropped my phone in the toilet but I’m just saying, why is this expensive piece of electronics perilously hovering above the toilet in the first place? One small consolation though is the discovery of a new use for white rice. Drop your urine saturated iPhone into a bowl of rice and it might soak up enough of the liquid filth for it to function again. What about brown rice? Does brown rice work too? Can it be cooked like fried rice?

I thought of a few things where I think waterproofing comes in damn handy and no where on this list will there be an expensive piece of electronics. Shoes and boots should be waterproof. Maybe not all of them but certainly ones meant for hiking and shit like that. Gloves and mittens should be waterproof and diapers. Maps used by people fucking around in the wilderness hiking and shit like that should be waterproof. Along those same lines, matches should always be waterproof.

Lastly, bandages should be waterproof. I cut my finger and every time I wash my hands I have to put on a new bandage? I have a germ problem. Do you know how many times a day I wash my hands? Can somebody come out with a bandage that doesn’t disintegrate every time my hands get wet!?!? Dammit! There is a growing fashion craze amongst the hipster crowd for wooden watches. I believe that a wooden watch, as stupid as it is, should be waterproof so that every time the idiot who bought it sweats, it doesn’t swell up and split.

In addition, and because I have a flawed perception that people actually care about my opinion, I threw together a list of things that, under no circumstances, should ever be waterproof. If for no other reason than as a punishment for being a fucking idiot and dropping your shit in water. I didn’t want to rely on my own insight here and actually Googled the best of all waterproof products and this is what i came up with.

Playing Cards

Really? Cards? Who’s playing poker in the rain? What is the matter with you? The “you” being anyone who bought these things for three times the price of regular cards. I swear to God, 70% of the population of this country is mentally ill. You know what you do when you have a rousing game of pinochle interrupted by a sudden downpour? You go in the fucking house. You don’t sit in it like some kind of a mind numb asshole secure in the fact that while you may be getting wet, your cards are not.

Speakers

Since when did we need to listen to music so badly that we felt the necessity to invent a waterproof speaker? Not the kind that goes in the shower with you although you could just as easily put a regular speaker on the bathroom counter that would offer the exact same quality of sound but wouldn’t be susceptible to  black mold.

You’re in the shower for 5-10 minutes tops. Ladies maybe a bit more if there is some manicuring to do but still, we have become so dysfunctional and in need of instant gratification so much that we can’t go 15 fucking minutes without listening to some stupid song?

Why do we need speakers that float in the pool? There’s even a speaker being marketed as being impervious to salt water. Salt water? Like I’m taking this into the ocean with me? Aren’t there waves anymore? Does this ridiculous product come with an anchor so it doesn’t float away in a riptide?

Phones

We’ve done this one already. You drop your phone in the water and you aren’t in the effing Coast Guard or calling the effing Coast Guard, then you got what you deserved.

Keyboards

Does it make any sense to have a waterproof keyboard but the rest of the computer is not? Is the intent for me to sit in the rain with my new keyboard and run a cable through a semi-open window to the rest of the unit? Why on earth would I do such a thing? What was the impetus behind such a stupid invention? What I want is to run my reports but to sit in the rain while I do it.

The Waterproof Bible

This is seriously a real product. Expensive too, 50 bucks! Why in the hell does anyone need a waterproof book of any kind? Is this stupid thing some kind of a sissy’s cilice? Like I’m not quite into self-flagellation enough to wrap a sharp and rusty piece of barbed wire around my thigh but I do like to punish myself for my sins by sitting in the rain reading God’s word. Can you imagine how pleased God would be if you were to read this Bible in a blinding hurricane?

I also found a few listings for waterproof chalk and chalkboards. At the time it didn’t seem necessary to make note of it but on second thought I got to wondering just how you’re supposed to erase the fucking thing?

Top 5 – People Who Are “Into” Things Make Me Sick

Posted on by JP Shaver

Maybe it’s because I’m old but I’m pretty sure I’ve held this belief as long as I can remember, I can’t stand people who are “into” things. Like so into things that it’s all-consuming and it’s all they talk about. I’m not bothered by a person’s nonchalant or cursory interest in a hobby or in a particular interest but when it borders on an all-consuming obsession, I boil inside. I’m willing to allow some grace here in a couple circumstances, one, my granddaughter has what one would describe as an obsession with Pete the Cat but she’s two years old and besides, Pete is pretty freaking cool. Even in spite of her fixation with Pete, she is still able to mix in a few other hobbies like making Play-Doh jewelry and crapping her pants. Two, I am willing to give some leeway like if you’re autistic and you get off on your fascination with plate spinning. Basically, in my mind, obsessing is okay if you’re a child or if you happen to be mentally challenged.

Lord knows that my house is full of equipment I bought in anticipation of my new hobby. Home improvement tools, exercise doodads and low fat cookbooks to name a few. My saving grace is that I had the sense to wise up. Yes, I made a mistake and got all caught up in something for a few days but I quickly came back to my senses and all it cost me was a few dollars. The people who go into something full bore, hold onto it and act like total d-bags with their stories of running fifty miles over the weekend have lost much more than money. They have also lost their dignity and probably all of their friends.

I’ve made a quick list of the things people obsess about that make me the sickest. These are, by no means, the only ones but simply the ones that will make me avoid you like the plague. “Who am I to say these things?” was a comment I’ve heard quite a bit since I started floating this idea out there. I’ve also been told, “Who the fuck are you to be bothered by anyone? You’re one of the most obnoxious people I’ve ever met,” was another observation made by others. The answer is, I’m me. Most things irritate me and this is my forum for venting. By the way, most of the people who made disparaging comments about my subject matter are the very people I loathe so it only stands to reason.

Yoga –

I see some of my people posting pictures of themselves doing(?), practicing(?) yoga and I think, “Okay, fine, so you do yoga or whatever you call writhing around on the floor carefully balancing on your earlobe. Big fucking deal. Whoopee, so what if you can blow yourself. I don’t care. Do I take pictures of myself sitting in a chair watching television which happens to be my form of recreation? What the hell does Namaste mean anyway?

Are you aware that yoga pants can cost up to 150 dollars? What kind of a mindless and pretentious d-bag pays this much for stretch pants that in all actuality are the equivalent of a couple of pairs of nylons piled on top of each other? Don’t get me wrong. I am totally in favor of women walking around in these things but I have a notion that most people are wearing them as a piece of fashion and are skipping out on the intended yoga session.

Very often you’ll find that your hardcore practitioners of yoga are also into eating gross things like lentils and wheat germ. Not only are they annoying about their Indian exercise fixation but they also smell like a hippie food co-op. This odor does not make them more appealing and frequently only adds to their annoying nature as they won’t shut-up about how I’m killing myself with beef or pork.

I went to a yoga class a few years ago at my wife’s insistence. It wasn’t so much that she demanded that I go, she gave up on the hope of commanding me to do anything years ago, but more wouldn’t stop talking about how great it made her feel. Knowing full well that nothing makes me feel great with the exception of complaining and lethargy and in order to make her stop bringing it up, I went to a class. Everyone in the class was a fucking flower-child weirdo and reeked of cumin. What was worse was the constant stream of farting that ensued once the class began. These freaks had been ingesting beans and hummus all day and were probably already on the verge of crapping themselves then thought it a good idea to sit on the floor and stretch the shit out of themselves. Charming. I don’t think I need to mention that I never went back and blame my wife for scarring me permanently to this day.

Bicyclists –

Of all the people who annoy me, bicyclists are the worst. It’s not that I hate cycling, I really couldn’t care less about any aerobic activity. What bothers me are the get-ups these people think they have to wear in order to properly operate the bike. Why do these people think that in order to be a true cyclist that they have to wear tight fitting spandex clothes slathered in French and Italian words, stupid clunky shoes and those ridiculous elongated helmets? Whatever happened to just riding your bike in regular clothes?

When I was a kid, in order to keep my father from going into a tirade about how he had better things to do than to dig my jeans out of the gears of my bike, my mother would give me a rubber band to wrap around the ankle of my pants. This is the only accessory you need to ride a bike. If you’re tooling leisurely around the neighborhood for a little exercise, you don’t need a 200 dollar featherweight, polycarbonate air-cooled helmet. You look ridiculous trying to be aerodynamic at 4 miles per hour. We didn’t even wear helmets, in my day. If you fell and got hurt, you were an idiot. We laughed at you and you got back on and rode some more. When did people start smashing their heads on the ground?

And what’s with all the Italian writing on the shirts? I’m pretty sure that some of those words translated mean “douche bag” and “pretentious snot rag.”

I drive home from work thru a national park and it doesn’t matter what time of the day it is, the roads are full of these people. “It’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon and you’re riding your bike? You must have jobs or you wouldn’t be able to afford that expensive bike costume you’re wearing so I’ll just assume that you are so much cooler than I am and run you off the road into a ditch.”

Religious zealots –

I don’t expect that I will have to go too far here to make my point as you can turn on the news at any given moment and some ass wipe is blowing up a street full of innocent people who are just living their lives, not interested in being killed for God. We all despise those people, it’s a no-brainer. Why do people find it necessary to post chain letters for Jesus on Facebook? “Repost this if you love Jesus. Ignore it at your own peril.” What? Now I feel pressure to pass this on to my friends to avoid terminal damnation? What’s worse, hell or being blocked as a friend?

My loathing does not only apply only to the devout. Atheists have a belief system that is as much a religion as any, no matter what they may say. They, just as often as the fundamentalists, try to cram their side of the debate down our non-soliciting throats and it’s equally irritating. Why can’t people just believe what they want, no matter how stupid it is, and just shut the fuck up about it? You believe that Grimace from McDonalds is the New Age Messiah? Cool. I don’t care. Just leave me out of the proselytizing.

Meanwhile Pearl Jam and others are cancelling tour events in North Carolina because the people there voted to keep their public restrooms gender specific. Why does it seem that this debate is really about religion? Your hardcore fundies and God, apparently, don’t like women peeing in the men’s room. Frankly, having been in many a men’s rooms myself, I would rather use the chick bathroom. Women seem cleaner and they sit down to pee which eliminates sloshing through the soup of every man’s pee pooling around the base of the urinal station. You ladies need to be careful of which side you take in the transgender bathroom debate. All of the politics and the humanity of the whole thing aside, I’m pretty sure that a man who opts to wear women’s clothing and use the ladies room is still a man and will still pee all over the seat.

Women have nice public restrooms. If I happen to be walking by at the right time at just the right angle I often see a furnished and carpeted lounge area. Why do women have couches in their bathrooms? I make an effort to spend as little time as possible in a public men’s room and women have furniture? I don’t see the need to take a breather on the couch wallowing in the odor of someone else’s fresh dump but women maybe don’t mind so much. Men don’t have any entitlements in our cold tiled men’s rooms. Once in a while, if you’re lucky, you’ll have that jar with the metal lid, filled with some mysterious blue juice and cheap black combs. Like, yeah, why shouldn’t I feel safe combing my hair with those vermin infested things?

You can recognize one of these people who refuse to welcome urine on what was their once untarnished toilet seat by a number of traits, snake handling, blowing up of perceived infidels, rolling on the floor speaking in tongues, protesting soldier’s funerals and / or rallying support at a Trump demonstration. They would also be the ones punching black people for having a differing opinion, sporting a cheap baseball style hat proclaiming the benefits of one of the many truck manufacturers or that they are “retired and have gone fishing.”

Sports fans –

I love sports. I can give you a baseball player’s lifetime batting average from any age of the game within 5 points of the actual. Yet and still, I have never painted my face and refuse to wear a team jersey until somebody pays me for the advertising.

I’ve been an Indians fan my entire life. I don’t know how to root for another team. I have friends who were born and raised in Cleveland and are Yankee fans. I don’t understand that but what I hate more are the people who are so wrapped up in sports that they decorate the entirety of their home in Dallas Cowboy colors or morph their car to look like a Browns helmet.

Hipsters –

Everybody has problems with Hipsters. My particular beef with them revolves around them thinking they discovered every damn thing when, really, they’re just going back and grabbing things from the past, my past mostly.

Take this obsession they have with music, specifically how they listen to their music. Vinyl, as they call them, are really called, records. I grew up with vinyl records so I know. Hipsters are, for the most part, under the age of thirty and don’t remember how shitty records were. They scratched easy, got stuck and we large, heavy and cumbersome. When CD’s came out, the first thing I did was either sell or throw my records away. You know why I did this? Because they sucked. The sound of CD’s blew vinyl out of the water. I couldn’t even listen to records anymore because all I heard were irritating scratchy background sounds. CD’s ruined vinyl and justifiably so. Hipsters act like they discovered this vinyl shit when in reality all they did was just dig through my garbage.

I hate the term “craft beer.” Hipsters drink that shit. Where I come from, one doesn’t pay 15 dollars for a beer. My age group would call you a jackass for doing that but the hipster set thinks it’s cool to piss away money, literally. If you see the words “artisan” or “artesian” before any product get ready to be ripped off and / or stampeded by a group of Hipsters thinking they’ve found the next best thing to prop up their uncertain self-esteem in partaking.

I like to think that this whole Hipster craze is based in being anti-establishment. I get that if that’s the case, and applaud it. But going against the grain set by “the man” does not mean to be a giant sucker buying things that are inferior or pay 12 dollars for a jar of pickles that are holistically bottled by a guy with a beard and a criminal record because it make you look cool.

 

The Top 5 Benefits of Hanging Around My Granddaughter

Posted on by JP Shaver

The Top 5 Benefits of Hanging Around My Granddaughter

As I may have mentioned before, our two year old granddaughter, Leila, lives with us. About the time my wife, Dana, and I figured that we had lived out our usefulness as parents of small children, we were dusted off and brought back into service. I’ve titled this essay as “hanging around MY granddaughter” and not OUR granddaughter because this Top 5 list is specific to me and the things I find remarkably useful in Leila. Dana surely has her own unpublished list but if she wants to write about it she’ll need her own outlet.

When our youngest went off to college our minds were full of things to do with our new found free time. We could eat out all the time, no more cooking heathy, nutritionally rewarding meals for a kid who subsisted off of chocolate and Pop Tarts anyway. Unlimited and spontaneous vacations would be the rule. Like I said, we had done our time.

Enter Leila. There is a quote I read not long ago that’s was attributed to Sandra Bullock. I couldn’t find the quote anywhere but I read it on the internet which means it must be true. Whomever spoke it, it resonated with me especially in my current living situation. It went something like this, “If I didn’t have children my wallet would be full, my house would be clean but my heart would be empty.” That’s pretty true. She has spent a few nights away from home visiting her Granny and those weekends, that we assumed would be full of bacchanalia and debauchery, were instead left empty and rather unfulfilling. Most of our conversation revolved around saying Leila-isms, like, “I do it self!” Or, “Piggy poop,” which is a term she uses to shift blame to the dog when she had pooped in her diaper.

Parenting at the age of fifty is different than when I was in my twenties. Leila would live outside if we let her, I hate going outside save for about eight or nine days of the year when I don’t sweat or freeze to death. Playing on the floor, for me, is, for the most part, an exercise in pain, an exploration of body parts that I haven’t used in decades. I do it but getting up and waiting for my left knee to unlock is an adventure in itself. Leila likes to play with trucks. She makes all the requisite noises as she shoves them across the floor but sometimes I have to use my foot to move my truck while I sit in my chair watching ESPN. It’s just part of what happens when your caregivers are old. I know the things I’m supposed to do it’s just that I’m not physically able or emotionally willing to anymore.

In the end, though, I wouldn’t trade a day with Leila for a vacation to anyplace in the whole world and getting up in the pitch black at 5 AM to slice kiwi in the exact shape she prefers is an honor and never a chore, besides what would I be doing otherwise? Sleeping?

All the syrupy stuff aside, I have found a few rather impressive side benefits to toting your granddaughter around with you that for some reason escaped me when my own kids were little.

Exposure to immunity from viruses

They say that you can only get so many colds in your life as there are a finite number of viruses that cause the common cold. I remember the number being something like 150 but I could be wrong and you know my policy on looking things up while I write. I feel like if you want to know so badly, you can just do it yourself. Having had four kids already, I have been exposed to and suffered through well over one hundred colds in my fifty years leaving me at least fifty more to get out of the way. While I have, for quite some time, assumed that these last vestiges of virus dwelled in some deep, dark jungle, Leila has kindly, yet unknowingly, volunteered to help me discover that I was wrong. In actuality, these viruses live in the dried snot on the toys in her school and in the noses of the other crumbsnatchers she calls friends.

While Dana and I work during the day, Leila goes to daycare, we call it school, and walking into that place you can actually feel the infestation climbing up your arms heading straight for your nasal cavities. In the first month and a half of her attending Typhoid Mary’s Petri Dish for the Young, I had acquired at least three colds and had seen my impressive twenty-three and a half year vomit streak come to an end.

The germs in the place are so big and virulent that you can actually see them crawling up your sleeve towards your nasal cavities! They have faces and they laugh at you when you try to sanitize yourself against them.

The way I figure it, by the time Leila has finished at “school,” Dana and I will have encountered and suffered through the last remaining cold viruses and in retirement, never get sick again. So, we have that going for us.

A Solid excuse for not going out

I’ve never been a “clubbin” kind of guy. I hate loud noises and dancing is stupid so I am left with dinner and a movie. A lot of our friends are twenty years younger than we are. I love them but, “No, I would prefer to not meet you for tailgating at 6 AM in the ten below wind-chill. Thanks though. And, no, I’m not a giant boring douche for not going, I’m actually much smarter than you as I will be warm in my house drinking good beer that didn’t cost me license to my first born. You have fun though and tell me all about it on Monday.”

When you have a two year old, you have a built in excuse for avoiding just about everything. “You say you’ve signed up for a “can’t miss” multi-level marketing ploy and you’re having a party to tell our of your friends about it? Aww, dammit! I wanted to be there for that but we don’t have a sitter. Sorry.”

What happened to Amway anyway? Is it still a company anyway?

“You say you’re moving and at the age of forty still think your friends are going to help you because you dangled some pizza in front of them? You are aware college ended like twenty years ago and there are companies who specialize in taking your stuff from the old place to the new one, right? I’d be there for you man but we have Leila and if I brought her she would just get in the way. Good luck with all that though.”

“Man, I’d love to come to your Pampered Chef party because there is nothing I like more than spending ridiculous amounts of money on pots and pans that I can get for half that at Walmart. Too bad it’s after Leila’s bedtime. So maybe call me the next time you get into a multi-leveled marketing scheme, cool?”

Stains on my clothes

Leila has no concept or the ability to know just how much I pay for my zip up Tommy Bahama sweaters that I wear just about every day in the winter. In fact, she couldn’t care if I’m wearing a torn up old t-shirt full of holes, it’s all the same to her. I knew this going in. Like I said, I have four kids of my own. What never occurred to me as a benefit to this was that I could blame food stains that I made out of my own carelessness on Leila and actually get away with it.

I obviously can’t wash a sweater every time I wear it and as I tend to have the eating habits of a fat, sweaty hog sidling up to the trough for my next unhealthy meal, I spill. Whereas I used to have to make some asinine excuse as to why there was a huge stain on my sweater, like, “Oh, I did that on the way to work this morning. Thanks for reminding me!” Now all I have to do is say, “Leila.” My disgusting stain instantly becomes cute! The disgusted looks I used to get have turned into comments like, “She’s so cute! How can you stand it?” Why didn’t I think of this before? I could be covered in grease stains and Pop Tart innards, from my own doing, of course, drop a knowing nod of Leila and all is forgiven? Brilliant!!

I am instantly attractive to women again

It didn’t take me long to figure out that Leila is a chick magnet. In fact, the very first time I took her with me to the grocery store, we had barely made it in the door before women started flocking to me like I was Brad Pitt. Now, let’s be clear here, I am not deluded enough to believe for one second that this attention had anything to do with me. I am well aware that I am old and well passed my prime. My hands are getting age spots, if I stay out in the sun too long I get age spots on my face that won’t go away, I’m over-weight, I’m not fun and I’m kind of crabby. None of those qualities are even remotely appealing to women. But take me and all of my grossness and add a cute baby and all of my blemishes disappear. No one notices my gut or that I walk around with a perpetual sneer on my face. In fact, I’m pretty much not there at all in their minds but at least they didn’t run away like I was the Elephant Man or something like they used to. She is like a delicious cherry on the disgusting poop sundae that is me.

I no longer need to hold back

On the list of funniest things to do to my children is to fart in public and blame them. Disgusting? Yes but equally hilarious. As much as I enjoyed doing it I can’t help but think that it may have left some residual emotional damage that they may not recover from without the aid of some deep therapy or until they can do it to children of their own. All of this leads me to the last but arguably the best reason to hang around with my granddaughter, farting in public and blaming her.

Most of this flatulence seems to go down when we’re at the grocery store. Not sure why exactly maybe because it’s one of the few places I’ll dare take Leila on my own. It’s usually a short trip and it’s close to home.

Who hasn’t been stuck in the precarious situation of having to unload a giant fart but can’t because there are people nearby. Even if you could somehow pass the gas silently, the odor would implicate you. I have solved this problem, bring Leila along, hold nothing back and unload on unsuspecting strangers. I have even used the line, “How embarrassing. You probably thought I did that.”

Who would have thought that there was so much more to being a grandfather?

The Top 5 Foods That Are Not Worth the Effort

Posted on by JP Shaver

The Top 5 Foods that are Not Worth the Trouble

Everybody today wants to label the food we eat. By that, I don’t mean labeling in a nutritional sense but rather how it fits into this or that particular diet. I’m a big Pinterest fan. I use it for just about everything but it is especially good for recipes. My friend Dave tells me that Pinterest is for girls and he may be right but as a cook, it is like having access to every cookbook ever written and it takes up no more space than my tablet. The point is that while you can do a search for favorite Italian recipes, say, you will produce, at least in my experience, a more broad return if you search for “low carb” recipes.

It’s no longer just Italian recipes at that point, it becomes a low carb smorgasbord from all four corners of the world. Besides, I don’t believe there are any low carb Italian dishes anyway so this might be a bad example, There’s “high-protein,” high-protein / low carb.” For those of you looking to spend more quality time in the bathroom there is “high fiber.” “Low fat,” “low glycemic,” “vegan,” “non-GMO,” “kosher,” ‘gluten free,” etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

What the hell is gluten anyway and why have so many people all of the sudden decided that it’s bad for them? I looked it up:

Gluten refers to the proteins found in wheat endosperm (a type of tissue produced in seeds that’s ground to make flour). Gluten both nourishes plant embryos during germination and later affects the elasticity of dough, which in turn affects the chewiness of baked wheat products.

Wheat sperm? Had I known that, I would be allergic too.

For what it’s worth, my favorite food category would be the, “I don’t give a fuck anymore and want as much fat and sperm-less gluten as I can get, with a nice dose of sugar for good measure and please deep fry it for me while you’re at it.”

I like a good recipe. I don’t care if it’s complicated and comes with a shopping list that takes me to a couple of specialty stores. If it’s as delicious as I think it’s going to be then it’s worth the effort. Homemade vanilla ice cream that requires fresh vanilla bean? Worth it. I made a Baked Spanish Risotto that asked for Spanish Saffron that I had to buy on the internet because I couldn’t find it anyplace else. Totally worth it.

I make the best hummus you’ll ever eat and I painstakingly peel ever single garbanzo bean so that I can be sure that it will be creamy and delicious. My hummus is so good that any self-respecting Middle-Easterner would have no other option but to hang their head and agree. As I said, though, it takes hours to make. Like I need time alone after I finish a batch so I can recover mentally but it’s worth it.

There are foods, however, that I will not mess with. Stupid foods that, even in their most basic form, like right off the tree, require much but return little or nothing. These are foods we’ve all eaten but probably never to take a step back and say, “Man, this sucks and I just wasted a decent sized piece of my life preparing it.” Allow me, now, to save you some sweat and disappointment.

Watermelon

Why are these things so big? Yes, I am aware that they have genetically altered this god awful fruit into smaller sizes and even weird shapes but let me tell you something, you can have a stripper pop out of it when I cut it open and I still don’t want it. You drag this monstrosity into the house, cut it open, take one bite and you’re like, “Oh, that’s not what I was hoping for.” Now what? What am I supposed to do with it now? What is with all the seeds? Black ones, white ones, everyone is spitting. Disgusting.

I think people used to like watermelon back in the day but then Jolly Ranchers came along and set a flavor expectation bar that this poor pod just couldn’t live up to. Everyone loves watermelon Jolly Ranchers, they’re always the first ones gone from the pack. Nobody likes those light blue ones though, whatever flavor that’s supposed to be. The light blue ones remind me of medicine like a menthol cough drop or somethings which further spoils them. Can you imagine if you tasted the watermelon Jolly Rancher before the actual watermelon?

Wide eyed innocent fruit virgin – “Oh my God, that was so delicious and you’re telling me that the real thing is a twenty pound version of this?!?! Holy shit!”

Hardened produce veteran – “Well, kind of. I mean, yes, but in a really tasteless, watered down, seed-filled nightmarish kind of way.”

Watermelons are so enormous that people actually form them into serving baskets complete with a handle and jagged edges like the artist sliced it with pinking shears. Filled with disgusting chunks of other hellish tasting melon varieties like honeydew and cantaloupe, this basin of foulness is the fruit equivalent of a green bean casserole that nobody wants.

Dogs are supposed to like fruit. There are fruits you don’t want to feed your dog like grapes and things with seeds but on any list of things that I’ve seen of “what not to feed your dog” watermelon is absent. Okay, great! Sophie, our dog, loves people food, Let’s unload some of this eyesore on her. Mind you, this is a dog that eats her own vomit and yet will not even approach watermelon to even give it a sniff. It’s like, “Yeah, I saw that shit on the counter for the last few days and, no, I do not want any. Thanks though”

I can tolerate any culinary disappointment if it’s the size of, say, a Hershey’s kiss, but this thing weighs twenty pounds and is the size of a Buick. My kids wont even eat it. So it sits there until we throw it away or some genius puts it in the blender with some lemonade and vodka. End result of the watermelon? I’m either disappointed or drunk.

Mango

Not really sure when the mango was introduced in the Midwest United States. I think it fell sometime around the introduction of the kiwi. Back when we became bored with simple apples and oranges the produce door was left open for some foreign neophytes to make the scene. No doubt the kiwi has its own carving issues but not nearly as extensive as the exasperating mango. First of all, how are you supposed to get the peel off of this thing? It feels like human skin. Like old people skin. All loose and gross.

I am always astounded at how little fruit actually comes from mangoes. If they were sold by the pound, I would not be a buyer as most of it goes right in the trash. Between the rind and the gigantic seed there is little room left for any edible fruit. Even if you somehow manage to get the skin off, how are you supposed to extract it from the seed? I have yet to win a battle with a mango. In every case I end up with a handful of mangled, wet, yellow meat and a big dose of feeling like I’ve been sold a bill of goods.

I also believe that if you were to blindfold a person and give them their first taste of a mango, they would swear that you just fed them rotten cantaloupe. The mango has made some inroads into your salsa and chutney markets but even in those cases, the taste is so overbearing and out of the ordinary that it’s all you can taste.

It’s a very sinewy fruit too. Like it has ligaments and tendons or something. Couple that with it having human skin and I feel like I’m eating my grandmother’s rotten, severed hand.

Like the watermelon, though, mangoes go great blended up with some vodka and sour mix. You can’t really ever get rid of the sinewy texture in a mango either, no matter how long you blend it, which leaves you drinking what feels like a vodka flavored ball of yarn martini.

Artichokes

If there was an award for the most useless waste of materials in a given vegetable, why there would be such an award is beyond me but work with me here, it would be the artichoke. When I was a kid, my friends mom tried to sell me on dipping these rather cumbersome and disgusting looking leaves in butter and, using my two front teeth, scrape off the gelatinous sac of green material at it’s base then throw the rest of it in the garbage. Even at that age I thought, “This cannot be all there is to this thing.” It’s basically a disgusting vegetable manipulated into as a spoon with the sole purpose of ingesting melted butter. Why don’t we all just dispense with the artichoke and just fess up that we no longer require it to justify the eating of liquefied animal fat.

Apparently, the heart of this abomination is used to make spinach artichoke dip. I hate spinach artichoke dip. It smells. Bad. Like the worst smell of all foods ever. I wont eat it and just being near it makes me feel like I am going to throw up.

So, two substantial honors for the much adored artichoke, the biggest waste of space and the foulest smelling concoction made using said artichoke. These things aren’t cheap either. Disgusting, useless and expensive? Nice combo.

Pomegranate

I must say that in comparison to the aforementioned botanical abominations, the pomegranate is really not that bad tasting. It has a nice cleansing flavor and it apparently really good for you. In spite of that, getting to the actual fruit of this thing is like trying to dissect a fluke worm. If there’s a place to slice into it initially that allows for easier access to the little juice pockets, I haven’t found it. Which partially explains charging seven dollars for a bottle of it at the grocery store. Cut it open and it looks like the tumor in that guy’s head in Fantastic Voyage.

I am quite sure that you actually lose calories eating a pomegranate. The effort involved in surgically extracting the bounty surely burns more calories than are in one seed. I’ve tried adding these juice pods to my smoothies without regard for the little wooden seed and ended up with a great tasting smoothie filled with sawdust. Fibrous? Yes but the health benefits were greatly outweighed by the time spent on the toilet picking splinters out of my tongue.

Pomegranates are colloquially, and when I say colloquially, I mean, some red-necked gritter racist made it up, known as Chinese apples. Have you ever noticed that anything labeled as “Chinese” is fucking hard? Chinese Checkers? Marbles coming from everywhere. Chinese Finger Lock? I have a hard time believing that the industrious Chinese people slid wicker tubes over the fingers of those they were looking to subdue but they are pretty difficult to wrestle out of. As for the Chinese Apple, it’s like the Rubik’s Cube of produce so I think aptly named, if you’re a bigot.

Pez

I don’t want to spend the entire time picking on, pun intended, raw fruits and vegetables when there is other more deserving artificially made fodder out there. Let me just state for the record that I love Pez. The delicious candy, Pez, is not the problem here. The issue is the frustrating process of loading these ridiculous shaped bonbons into the slots of the various character dispensers. Why do I feel like if I don’t load these things into the machine that I am somehow cheating myself? They just don’t taste the same.

Who is the Pez outfit anyway? I’ve never seen any other products from them and I kind of have the feeling that while they do make enchanting and colorful candy squares that they also dabble a little in defense contracting. Like they make missiles and cluster bombs and stuff like that on the side. Of course their missiles are shaped like Goofy and Santa Claus just like their dispensers and their grenades they manufacture explode off into little rectangular pieces of pastel colored shards of death. Like you almost feel good being killed by something like this.

Surely, in the end, there are many more products to add to this list but these are the best of the best, at least as far as I’m concerned. By the way, if anyone wants my hummus recipe, let me know. I don’t part with it easy. Kind of like you wouldn’t let a child molester babysit your children. Not that you’re a child molester. Not sure where I’m going with this exactly so I’ll just stop here.

Top Search Terms to Find My Blog

Posted on by JP Shaver

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So many stories from the Bible make absolutely no sense and I decided it was my life’s duty to compile them into one glorious volume of hilarity. I mean the material was practically handed to me and I couldn’t resist.

I offer my commentary on Lot, a pretty big deal with God, banging and impregnating his daughters. Like if there was a picture of Lot with God, God would be flashing a thumbs up at this guy.

God clearly hates women too. I have a whole chapter dedicated to God’s disdain for the fairer sex.

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The Top Search Terms to Find My Blog

So I’ve been doing this blogging thing for almost a year now. It would be pretty cool if I weren’t about fifteen years behind the rest of the world but I’m old and slow to adopt. In spite of being behind the curve, I find this whole blogging thing fascinating. At first I thought it would be fun to just write about some of my Top 5 lists, for no other reason but to see what I came up with. Then people actually started reading this stuff and even more amazingly, digging it. Because I loved the reception, I decided to write about anything that came into my head and conjured up even a modicum of emotion. In reality, a lot of things piss me off and I enjoy complaining which provides me with a never ending fountain of material.

The most fascinating aspect of this experience has to be the list my hosting company provides me of search terms used to find my website. The list is rather extensive and you may or may not be surprised to hear that not one of them is even the least bit flattering.

Years ago I read an article making the claim that porn was responsible for 80% of the internet traffic. If that 80% figure was an accurate number back then, then today, based on what I see, in my own little blog world, that figure is 99%. 99% of the terms used to search the internet, causing people to stumble onto jpshaversays.com are porn related. I’m not sure why this is because I don’t write about porn. No doubt, knowing myself quite well, I have made mention of porn but I’ve posted no raunchy pictures nor have I gone into any detail on donkey sex in Tijuana. No, what I believe is going on here is that, like I said, 99% of the searching done on sites like Google are regular people, aka perverts, hell bent on a massive electronic poon quest. Sure you have your standard searches for “how do I get my husband to share his feelings” or “I want to know more about wine without becoming a pretentious douche,” but those are outnumbered almost 100 to 1 by, “how to get in my girlfriends butt” and “erasing my browsing history.”

Retard

I realize that I use this politically incorrect and offensive term too often in my writing and in my regular life but, let’s face it, it’s quite descriptive and funny at the same time. The number one search term in this category is “retard.” Okay, I get this one. I checked and I’ve used this word over one-hundred times in just under forty blog posts but most of the time, in my defense, it was quite apropos. Though the time I referred to Hitler as a retard may be construed as offensive to the actual retard.

In second place, “retard people” and “retard boy” are tied in some kind of race between grammatical troglodytes. The proper linguistic terms would be “retarded people” and retarded boy.” Duh. There is something strikingly ironic about an idiot Googling the word “retard” using improper grammar. Was it a hunt for self-help possibly?

Gary Dean Prewitt Money Laundering

I would have written this off as a simple mistake had it not happened over a dozen times. It’s not one of the biggest words in terms of sheer volume in finding my blog but it is by far the strangest. Who in the hell is Gary Dean Prewitt and why is he in my blog? I’ve never once mentioned him or money laundering. If I alone have over a dozen hits on the Prewitt guy there must be thousands of people on the hunt for the straight poop on felonious doings.

I Googled it and couldn’t even find anything so…

Porno

There are so many porn related terms used to find jpshaversays.com that to list them here would take more words than you have attention to give so I’m going to stick to the most prevalent, weird and of course, perverse.

The first smut password granting entrance into my blog is the confusing phrase, “song then porno.” What does this even mean and why does it find its destination in my blog so many times? What is the intent of this search? Near as I can guess, these people need to be transitioned into their hardcore porn obsession with a nice tune. A seamless transition with none of that annoying extra clicking that comes with so many other “song then porno” sites. Like, “I just want to hit this button once, hear a nice song, maybe some smooth jazz then go straight to my Asian midget anal fisting melange. Is that too much to ask for? Dammit!”

These next two are more specific to my name, which at least adds some relevance but are no less confusing. “Porno JP,” My first thought was that some people, hot chicks, of course, so enjoyed my writing that they immediately thought that they must see if there are any nude pictures of me on the internet. Kind of like when you do a quick search to see if there are any nude shots of the new Bond girl. Fortunately, there are no nudies of me out there. I’m a pretty snappy dresser so it’s best that photos of me are of the clothed variety. The sheer volume of ear hair that I have to wrestle with on a daily basis should serve as a harbinger to anyone looking for more of me to immediately halt all proceedings. Yet and still, I have no idea what “porno JP” means.

“shaver porno,” I think I can format an idea in my head as to what these people had in mind with this search because it also fell in with, “shaver box” and “shaver vag.” I think what horrifies me more than anything, including the references to porn in my name, is the atrocious grammar used by these desperately horny people to discover their odd form of electronic carnal pleasure. It’s “shave her porno” you idiot not “shaver porno!” I not too worried about my fine name being sullied by association with this crowd though as I’m pretty sure that when these “titans of wisdom” hit the first polysyllabic word on my site, they clicked out to rejoin their quest for shorn genitals.

I’ve saved my favorite one for last. It reads like a mother’s desperate and tragic search for help for her sexually maligned son. This phrase, “son couldn’t take anymore porn” has led to my website more than fifty times and, let’s face it, jpshaversays.com is not visited like say an ESPN.com would be. If over fifty people have stumbled onto jpshaversays.com searching for “son couldn’t take anymore porn” then there are a lot of hurting mothers out there.

What happened to this poor “son” who “couldn’t take anymore porn?” Did he spend so much time in front of the computer looking at porn so withdrawn from the world that his penis exploded? Did he turn into a zombie vegetable with a permanent erection? Something major happened to this poor kid and we are left to only guess at what tragedy befell him. Did he run away and join the French Foreign Legion hoping to outdistance his nasty addiction to smut?

I have a vision of this poor soul slouched in the corner of his dark room looking like a victim of late stage progeria, crooked beret awkwardly balanced on his greasy head, in full French military regalia furiously masturbating himself into oblivion until, in a desperate attempt to save his so called life, his mother bursts through his locked bedroom door and immediately commandeers his laptop and furiously Googles “son couldn’t take anymore porn.”

And as always, who doesn’t want to read about my vasectomy experience or the time The Beach Boys set my car on fire?

http://www.amazon.com/JP-Shaver-Says-Bang-Your-ebook/dp/B0170EV4MG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451666365&sr=8-1&keywords=jp+shaver
http://www.amazon.com/JP-Shaver-Says-Bang-Your-ebook/dp/B01770XWOQ/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1451666365&sr=8-3&keywords=jp+shaver

 

Top 5 Thanksgiving Movies

Posted on by JP Shaver

Top 5 Thanksgiving Movies Ever

No question that I am a huge movie fan. Almost as much as I am of running my life by Top 5 lists. So it only stands to reason that I have a Top 5 all-time best Thanksgiving movies list. I am frequently asked, “Are there any Thanksgiving movies?” The answer to that questions is, yes and I’m not talking about the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving cartoon thing, though that is an outstanding piece of material, no question.

While the catalog of Thanksgiving movies is small, there are some real gems out there that I simply cannot start my holiday season without watching.

Thanksgiving Movies

Hannah and Her Sisters

Grumpy Old Men

Nobody’s Fool

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Uncle Buck

Hannah and Her Sisters

I must warn you here that this is a Woody Allen movie. Some people didn’t like Woody Allen movies even before he started banging his daughter and I’m sure this little PR move didn’t help any but this is still a great film. I have been a Woody Allen fan since I was a kid as thought it would make me seem more adult if I dug his high-brow brand of humor but now that he is freely molesting his kids, it getting harder and harder, no pun intended, to be a fan. The movie starts on Thanksgiving and revolves around some people then it ends on Thanksgiving the following year. Sorry if you don’t care for my description. I’m just trying to tell you what movies to watch. I’m not fucking Siskel and Ebert here. Trust me, it’s good.

Grumpy Old Men

Pretty sure this movie would be on my Top 10 funniest movies ever if I dealt in such things as Top ten’s. Walter Mattheau and Jack Lemmon have been tops on my list of funniest duos since The Odd Couple came out in 1968. I was three then so I had to wait a few years to appreciate them.

I’m a movie crier. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’m not going to start bawling unless it’s really sad though, I’m not a total douche, but when Jack Lemmon has a heart-attack and the nurse asks the visiting Walter Mattheau if he’s friend or family and he chokes up and says “friend,” I almost lose it. To me, a good movie makes you emote. So what if my kids are horrified by my display in the theater and move away from me.

Nobody’s Fool

Possibly the best movie you’ve never heard of and Paul Newman is in it and that should be enough right there but if you need more, Newman plays an old acerbic asshole, Skully, who has ruined every relationship he’s ever had but finds a way to re-connect with his son. And if that’s still not enough to sell you on it, then there is the topless shot of Melanie Griffith that might lure you in. Like a younger Melanie Griffith. Not like she is today, all old and messed up with her wrinkled skin drying up dying around her fake tits.

Nudity and Thanksgiving go together like peanut butter and jelly. Really nudity and anything go together but not so much with that naked housecleaning thing. Watching somebody clean the filth from my toilet and emptying my garbage is not hot.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Steve Martin plays a tight assed, prissy executive, Neal Paige, on his way home for Thanksgiving but gets stuck traveling with John Candy’s ultra-annoying Del Griffith character. Surely most of you have seen this but there is an exchange where Neal goes ballistic when he accidentally washes his face with water used to soak Del’s dirty socks that is priceless and I have memorized and use as frequently as possible:

Neal: You know everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. You’re a miracle! Your stories have none of that. You’re not even amusing accidentally! “Honey, I’d like you to meet Del Griffith, he’s got some amusing anecdotes for you. Oh, and here’s a gun so you can blow your brains out. You’ll thank me for it.” I could tolerate any insurance seminar. For days I could sit there and listen to them go on and on with a big smile on my face. They’d say, “How can you stand it?” I’d say, “Cause I’ve been with Del Griffith. I can take anything!” You know what they’d say? They’d say, “I know what you mean. The shower curtain guy. Whoa.” It’s like going on a date with a Chatty Cathy doll. I expect you have a little string on your chest, you know, that I pull out and have to snap back. Except, I wouldn’t pull it out and snap it back – you would. Blah! Blah! Blah! Blah! And by the way, you know, when you’re telling these little stories? Here’s a good idea – have a point! It makes it so much more interesting to the listener!

“Train don’t run outta Wichita, unlessin’ you’re a hog. People train runs outta Stubbville.”

Uncle Buck

I don’t even know if this is a Thanksgiving movie or not as there is no mention ever made of any holiday but the movie is set in the winter so I have adopted it as the first movie I watch every holiday season. Nothing else hits the DVD player until this classic has. Plus this was the primer to Macaulay Culkin’s brilliant performance in as Kevin in Home Alone, a Top 5 Christmas movie which we will get to next month.

One of the signs of a good movie, to me, is the number of usable quotes that I can utilize in my own life and this movie is full of them. Not a day goes by when I don’t tell somebody, “Get in your mouse and get the hell out of here.”

There you have it. The Top 5 Thanksgiving movies of all time. There is no need to deviate from this list as I have potentially watched every last holiday movie ever made and in order to save you countless hours of horror have narrowed it down to this. You’re welcome.

Top 5 Words No One Says Anymore

Posted on by JP Shaver

JPShaverSays

Available on Amazon for your reading pleasure. New content that has never seen the light of the blog. My dad says that I’m wasting my time writing this mindless bullshit so it must be good.

Top 5 Words No One Says Anymore

I recently put together a little piece about the Top 5 Words You CAN’T SAY Anymore which bears a striking difference in content but not in name to this particular gem of literary masturbation. There is a big difference between words you can’t say and words that have simply lost their luster and gone out of style. For instance, I would still love to be able to drop the occasional “what are you some kind of an effing retard?” on someone who has merited the distinction. However, society has chosen to make that term objectionable, no matter how impactful it may have been, leaving me, the bad guy, sounding like an unfeeling asshole. But uttering the now unfashionable 60’s term “groovy,” which I still use extensively, just makes me sound like a dork. Go figure.

This time I want to address specific words that no one seems to use anymore or have simply fallen out of favor. Per usual, there are rules to qualify for mention and inclusion in this list. There will be no pining for the loss of words used by the gigantic losers who roam the medieval fairs such as forsooth, doth, or any regular words where they just added a ”ith” on the end of it.

I struggled at first to come up with five but then they suddenly started to spill out of me to the point of actually having to break the list down into categories. I don’t feel like I have violated the sacred nature of the Top 5 List but if I have offended, I apologize.

Top 5 Words No One Says Anymore

Household words

Personal Items

Food

Body Parts

Miscellaneous

Household items –

Davenport, rubbish, parlor, icebox, rummage sale, milkman

So apparently, a Davenport is another term for a couch. A little research showed that Davenport was actually a company who made couches. Sort of like how we call a tissue a Kleenex, I guess. In any case, it sounds stupid. When you invent another term for an already established word, it should be shorter and easier to say. Couch is a five letter, single syllable word. You simply don’t move from that to a nine letter, polysyllabic term where when you say it, no one has a fucking clue of what you’re talking about. “Hey, will you go grab my coat, I left it on the Davenport?” What? Where the hell is that? What are you talking about?

No one says rubbish anymore. I feel like garbage and rubbish used to run neck and neck in usage volume but somehow rubbish lost its way. I don’t know, maybe rubbish still has some legs in say the south or something but up here in Ohio, it’s dead. Maybe the ease with which the word “bullshit” falls off ones lips helped ruin rubbish. People used to say, “that’s rubbish,” but now they say, “that’s bullshit.”

Does one go to a garage sale or a rummage sale? Rummage to me sounds like rubbish and rummage sales are really an adventure in digging into another person’s garbage so I opt for garage sale. It lets me know ahead of time that I will not be allowed to actually enter their dwelling. Like I’ll happily sell you my trash but please don’t think about going in my home. Estate sales are always held in the house though and usually after someone has died. The kids selling off their parent’s stuff to collect every last penny possible, Garage sales are basically a way to clean out the old shit so there’s room for new shit.

I went to a garage sale probably in the thirty years ago realm. This creepy old lady who lived a few doors down, we called her Madam Piss because she reeked of a loamy human urine smell, was clearing out some obsolete items, items that no one in their right mind would ever want. I remember that she had up for sale an old afghan throw blanket that, if it were possible, smelled even more of human piss than she did. But the thing of most interest was her son, who had to be retarded at least in an emotionally developmental kind of way and whom we referred to as Prince Pee, was selling sculptures he created out of dried up used condoms, ribbed for our pleasure, of course. Now let me be clear here, Prince Pee was not getting laid and, if he was, it certainly was not at the kind of volume that would provide him enough used prophylactics to go into the art business. If you ever get the chance to see a mini-sculpture of Mickey Mouse formed from used condoms, it will be forever burned into your brain. Prince had set up shop in the back corner of the dark garage and once I saw what he was purveying I had visions of the garage door slowly closing. With my next lucid thought coming when I woke up in their basement sucking my thumb with my pants down around my ankles. I quickly exited.

Madam Piss, who was officially named Rose, was a cat lady before we had the term cat lady but I don’t think she had any cats to speak of. I’m pretty sure that being a cat lady is a modern emotional disorder. I feel like we didn’t really care that much about animals fifty years ago to have dozens of them in the house peeing and shitting all over the place. PETA wasn’t around and we didn’t have sappy commercials begging for money to the tunes of Sarah McLachlan. I feel like I will start giving money to starving cats and dogs when all of the people are fed first. Kinda feel like humans are a bit more of a priority at this point in our evolution.

Old people don’t seem to smell like pee as much as they used to. When was the advent of the adult diaper? Before, did old people just change their underwear a lot? I guess old women could sport a maxi-pad, like one of those super pads but what did men do? Isn’t it bad enough that I’m peeing all over myself but now you want me to wear a feminine product? Remind me again why I want to continue to live.

Anyway, back to the word study, there are, of course, other out of date words that are beyond the time frame I’m talking about here like parlor, milkman and icebox. I’m, as always, most concerned with the time frame that is JP Shaver.

Personal items –

Pocketbook, dungarees, slacks, girdle

I could be wrong on this, because I’m not a girl, but I swear the last time I heard the term pocketbook used was at one of my grandmother’s friend’s funerals. It’s a dumb term and it need to be pushed to the wayside. Where is the “wayside” anyway? I have never used the word in any other context outside of, “pushed to the wayside.” It’s a purse. It is neither a pocket nor a book. Was purse always a word that you could use instead of pocketbook? If so, then why did people still opt for the longer, less descriptive word?

Body parts –

Bosom, gams, buttocks

Bosom is a horrible word. My grandmother had bosoms. The word itself is the most sexual deflating of all time. Ladies, if you’re looking to fend off your husbands amorous intentions, just ask him to play with your bosoms, problem solved. No one ever uses the word bosom in porno movies. Not that I watch porn. I’ve just heard that from people who do.

Gams may be a bit out of my time wheelhouse but I really like it. I’d like to hear people start using it again. Nice gams! It has a Humphrey Bogart kind of air to it.

No one says buttocks. Forrest Gump tried to resurrect it when he got shot there but it didn’t stick. It’s too clinical and we have become too desensitized to use such words. Now we just come out and say things like ass or in the case of bosoms, tits.

Food –

Pimento / olive loaf, oleo, supper, Jell-O, Black licorice, the black Chuckle

I think you can still get olive loaf at the deli but I can’t say that I have ever seen someone order it. If they did actually order up some olive loaf, I suspect that they would be over the age of eighty. Those of you with kids, can you imagine their reaction to being served a couple of slices of this stuff?

My grandmother used to call margarine “oleo.” I had to look that one up and found that it is a colloquial term for oils used commonly to make margarine. It’s also a type of shock absorber used in aircraft landing gear.

How many different terms are there for the various meals we eat every day? Breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, supper. What is the difference between supper and dinner? Are they the same thing or am I missing out on another potential meal here? Supper seems to have been phased out though and replaced solely by dinner. While you can sup and dine, I prefer to not think of myself as supping. It sounds gross and is unappetizing.

Does anyone eat Jell-O anymore? I don’t mean as an alcohol delivery system but as an actual side dish to their dinner. We had it almost every night when I was a kid. My mom put fruit and shit in it to dress it up but I always dug it. I think it’s downfall started when we all found out that gelatin is made from things like horse hooves. That doesn’t really bother me that much I’m more interested in how they figured out that Jell-O needed horse hooves in it in the first place. “Something is missing here. It’s just not Jello-O-ey enough for me. You know what we need? Horse hooves!”

Miscellaneous –

Pound sign, Goodies headache powder, Doan’s Pills, mongoloid

Do they still make Doan’s Pills? You couldn’t be on a game show in the seventies and not, at least, come away with a consolation prize of a year-long supply of these mysterious pills that seems to know exactly how to target pain specific to your lower back. How is that possible? Like they were some early version of nanobots created by this mad scientist, Dr. Doan and were available for virtually nothing at your local drug store. Little known fact, Dr. Doan was killed in a freakish car accident back in the early eighties under very suspicious circumstances. That’s not true. I don’t even know if there ever was a Dr. Doan. I just thought it sounded cool to say.

Goodies Headache Power is another one of these freak remedies that can target specific pain. I never saw the stuff sold up here, only in the South, but I do know they sponsor a NASCAR race so maybe they and their magic elixir are still around. I don’t know, I barely leave the house let along go south for headache medicine.

Was mongoloid a term ever used as a derogatory slur? Like clearly dropping an N bomb on someone can only be construed as horrible but I think we’re still allowed to say Mongoloid? Are people from Mongolia known as mongoloids? Oh, wait, no that’s Mongolian.

I blame the people at Twitter for killing the term, pound sign. Why couldn’t they just stick with that? Why hashtag? You have to be a pretty big deal to just go in and rename something. Like I would like to rename the prostate gland to the bifarcal valve but I don’t carry enough weight to pull it off. Maybe if I can get somebody who wields some real power to start telling men over the age of fifty to have their bifarcal valve checked. Wilfred Brimley may be able to pull that off. He already sells diabetes supplies on television so what’s the harm in mentioning at the close of the commercial, “and don’t forget men over fifty, have your doctor, on your next visit, shove their finger up your poop-hole and get that bifarcal valve checked. You wont be sorry.”

Things That Took Too Long To Invent

Posted on by JP Shaver

Things That Took Way Too Long To Be Invented

I am fascinated with the famous statement “necessity is the mother of invention.” Basically it means that a need will create a solution. Since people need more capacity to store their electronic data, engineers continually produce better, faster and larger hard-drives to fill that need. Pretty simple right? Wrong. Porn gave us video tapes and then DVD’s and let’s face it, it drives the internet. I read that still over 70% of the activity on the internet is porn driven. However you may feel about porn, we wouldn’t have much of an internet without it.

I have been and continue to be amazed at just how long some things take to come into being. Fire. That one I can see taking a while to discover. Airplanes? Same deal. Computers, Roku’s, cell phones even the little beeper thing I use to unlock my car, I understand that it took a while to throw the technology together to invent those kinds of things. Plus, and most importantly, there has to be a need. While some Paleolithic dude may have sat around watching birds fly wishing he could do the same, I seriously doubt that he wished for remote start device for the family minivan. Mostly because minivans hadn’t been invented yet but also because Paleolithic guy probably wasn’t as effing lazy as we are today and would have, if given the opportunity, just start his shit himself.

I’ve never invented anything, though I like to say that the idea for being able to digitally record television shows was my idea. I originally wanted it for the radio so that I could hit a button and re-listen to a cool song but it’s the same thing.

Whatever happened to water powered cars and food machines like the ones they have on Star Trek? How about a cure for fucking cancer? I’ve got this stupid Keurig thing that makes one cup of delicious coffee at a time and my neighbor is dying from his liver being eaten out by voracious cancer cells. Weird corollary, I know, but it just seems like if they can’t mass produce it, then no one cares to invent it.

Anywho, I threw together a quick list of the Top Things That Took Too Long To Invent. The advent of these things is beyond my comprehension as to why it took so effing long to for some genius to come up with it. I get angry and disappointed in humanity as I think about it and when I get that feeling, it’s time to make another list.

The doorknob

Are you aware that the doorknob wasn’t invented until 1878?! 1878? Really? Surely the door itself was invented sometime after somebody got sick of the Jehovah’s Witnesses just walking through an open hole or right after the first house was built which had to be somewhere in the vicinity of about ten thousand years ago or before.

For the sake of a peaceful argument, let’s just say that the first house was thrown together five thousand years ago; surely the Egyptians had doors. In almost seven thousand years of door history, you mean to tell me that not one guy had had enough of being robbed and in his frustration and need designed a mechanism that would make it so his door shut and stayed that way until he decided that it was time to open it? SEVEN THOUSAND YEARS!

Just to offer a little perspective here, on May 27th, 1843 the patent was issued to Alexander Bain for the Electric Printing Telegraph which we today refer to as the fax machine. So the fax machine, albeit in its crudest form, was invented thirty five years before the simple fucking doorknob? So unbelievably dumb that it makes me despise humanity even more.

The wheel

By all accounts the oldest discovered wheel was found in what was Mesopotamia and dates back to the year 3500 B.C. Of all of the inventions that were slow to come, this one makes me angrier than any. So, the Egyptians built the pyramids by just dragging twenty ton boulders around with what? Rope? In every description or movie involving American Indians, they dragged stuff around behind their horses on sticks with a piece of animal skin tied between them.

How on God’s earth did it take so effing long to invent something as simple as a round wheel? Did the square wheel come first? I have a fairly big yard and spend way too much time in it in order to maintain it. Let me tell you something that I know for sure. I would have to spend about an hour pushing a lawn mower guided by sticks before I thought of an easier way, aka, the wheel. Even the stupid Dung Beetle forms the poo it lays its eggs in into a ball shape for easier movement. Am I to believe that ancient man was even more stupid than the lowly Dung Beetle? Apparently, yes. I don’t know why I’m surprised because even today, most of humanity is captivated by the machinations of Kim and Kanye.

The fork

I had to Google the answer to this quandary and was even more amazed than I was before I started my search. I found that the fork was not invented until the fourth century and not B.C. time either. There are rumors that the personal eating fork may actually go back to ancient Greece but still, this is a tool that, frankly, should have come about the first time somebody sat down for dinner.

People have obviously been eating for thousands of years. Again we’ll go back to the end of the last ice age around 10,000 B.C. as our starting point. So it took, and let’s be liberal here and go with the Greeks, over nine thousand years for someone to think, “Eating would be so much easier if I had something to stab my food with.” I think that person, whoever they were, had to be a germaphobe or a wife who was sick of her dirty assed husband sticking his hands in everyone’s lunch.

Chopsticks are stupid too. So the chopstick, more than likely, predates the fork, I’m assuming here though. Not one Asian person after struggling with these fucking sticks to eat their food and seeing a European using this new-fangled thing called a fork never thought to chuck the sticks and start eating right? Dammit!!! Today we use them to enhance the experience of eating in a Chinese restaurant but they are seriously the most inefficient tools ever made. What’s the deal with that giant spoon they give you to eat that watered down soup? It barely fits in your mouth. The Chinese may have made some real advancements with pasta and gunpowder and all but they are seriously lacking in the utensil department.

Pants

I did a little bit of research on the advent of pants and the general consensus is that they were invented for horseback riding about three thousand years ago. This is astounding to me. You mean to tell me that freezing to death wasn’t the impetus for pants? Holy hell! People are so effing dumb. Like it’s okay to freeze to death but, God forbid that I would chafe while riding a horse. I simply cannot understand how this is possible. My 18 month old granddaughter knows how to wrap herself in a blanket when she’s cold so wouldn’t you’d think it’s entirely possible that a grown-up would be able to take that up a notch and invent fucking pants!

The can opener

There are other inventions that I considered putting on this list but I have a hard fast rule that I stick to, Top 5. Are you aware that self-adhesive postage stamps weren’t invented until 1993? I suppose some of the delay is easily assigned to the government as they run and manage (sarcasm intended) the Postal Service but damn. 1993? I guess it wouldn’t have been such a big deal if somebody in the government had bothered to invent a glue that didn’t taste like ass when you licked it.

The printing press wasn’t invented until the 1400’s. People actually hand copied books until then. Hand copied! You make me start hand copying a Bible and I can promise that by the time I hit Genesis chapter two, I will have invented something to make this easier. Again, in eleven thousand years of book copying no one ever thought of carving some letters into a potato and dipping it in ink?

The can opener is the most egregious violator of human intelligence ever. In 1810 a guy named Nicholas Appert won a twelve thousand franc prize from Napoleon for designing a way to preserve food long enough so that it could reach the front lines before it spoiled, hence the tin can was invented.

Problem was that even though the fighting men on the front lines now had access to fresh food they had no way to open the stupid thing. No one thought to devise a way to open the can without shooting it and exploding the contents all over creation. So they traded one problem for another, well more like one problem for two problems because now, not only could they not open the can but if they did somehow manage to get it open, lead poisoning would probably kill them. You see, it took a couple of decades more to come out with a non-lethal can.

Amazingly, it took forty years, to invent an implement that would be called a can opener. Forty years? You have got to be kidding me! Seriously, how could this have gone on for more than a week without resolution? This is like coming out with a cell for my iPhone case back in the 60’s and selling it to me on the premise that it will come in handy in a few decades.

“Hold up! Hey! Who’s been putting out their Kools on my floor?!?!”

So Bill Cosby Is A Rapist?

Posted on by JP Shaver

So Bill Cosby Is A Rapist?

I know what the picture of a molester is supposed to look like. You have monsters like John Wayne Gacy who back in the 70’s sexually assaulted and murdered over 30 teenage boys and buried their remains in his dirt floored basement. This guy made his living as a clown for little kids parties and once he was charged and tried for his crimes, was labeled The Killer Clown. Horrible story? Yes. But not really out of the realm of believability. The guy lived with his mom. Hint number one. He found work that allowed him to move in adolescent circles. Hint number two.

I’m sorry but anybody who makes their living off of hanging out with little kids and that gig doesn’t involve an extensive background check, I suspect shenanigans.

I can say that in all of my years of creating Top 5 lists that I never even considered the idea that I should throw one together of the all-time biggest celebrity creeps but when Bill Cosby was outed this week as being the giant predator that he apparently really is, I thought it was about time to do a little research. I found pretty quickly that I didn’t even need to go to the Internet this time though as I had been subconsciously keeping this list in my head for years, Cosby and Jared from Subway just helped bring it to the surface and for that I owe them a debt of gratitude. In no particular order because I’m pretty sure that I can’t assign a degree to the sin of molesting someone, here we go…

Pee Wee Herman

This guy’s real name is Paul Reubens which may come as a surprise to some of you who understandably assumed that his given name was Pee Wee. So this guy was a really big deal back in the late 80’s and early 90’s. He had what I still to this day think was a kick ass show, Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Of course given the nature of Pee Wee’s crimes, he was all about the kiddies.

In 1991 Mr. Reubens was arrested for exposing himself in an adult theater. I don’t have a problem with a person exposing themselves in a porno theater. Let’s face it, you’re not there for the cinematography, you’re there to watch porn. And porn watching usually leads to things that leave one “exposed.” Pee Wee was arrested for jerking it in a theater. Okay, fine whatever. Just thank God for the Internet so people can do this in the comfort of their own homes now.

What happened to these adult theaters anyway? They actually used to have listing in the paper for porno show times right next to the legit stuff when I was a kid. I’d go to the paper, back when the newspaper was the only way to get the skinny on movie times, to see what time Star Wars was showing and inevitably end up asking my father just why exactly we couldn’t go see Assablanca.

Porno movies that are parodies of real movies are some of the most creative thinking we have going on in the world today. I think my favorite is the XXX version of the classic movie Forrest Gump brilliantly titled, Sorest Rump. Or how about Throbin Hood? Shaving Ryan’s Privates, Good Will Humping, Ass Ventura or this oldie but goodie, Edward Penis Hands. This is modern day Shakespeare going on here.

Anyway, back to Pee Wee, ten years later in like 2001, the police raided his house and found all kinds of kiddie porn. First, how do the police know to raid your house? You are totally effed up if that’s going down. They didn’t just stumble on your fucked uppedness, they studied on you and shit for a while before they kicked your door in.

Kiddie porn Pee Wee? You are and have been ever since, dead to me and if it were up to me, you would have been castrated before you ever saw the light of day again. Always be leery of those who hang around kids too much. I love my kids. I love my granddaughter but I need a break sometimes dammit or they will run you into the ground.

Asshole number two is:

Jeffery Jones

Right? Who the hell is Jeffery Jones? Never heard of him you say? Is there anyone out there who hasn’t seen the cult classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at least ten times? Well, Jeffery Jones played Principle Rooney in that movie. That’s right Principle Rooney is a sex offender.

This creeper had to register as a sex offender back in 2004 for hiring a teenage boy to pose nude for him while he took explicit pictures. What goes through one’s mind that says, “Yeah, this is cool. Nobody will think this is wrong.” At what point does your penis interfere with your ability to reason in a lucid manner enough to think that even though you’re a famous celebrity, no one will ever find out that you’re taking naked pictures of little boys? How did he find this kid anyway? Did he run an ad in the local Sun Times? How did he make it enticing enough to generate any interest? What teenage boy is reading the classified section of the newspaper anyway?

Tired of playing in the same old paper delivering rat race? Looking for easy money? If you’re a boy between the ages of 12 and 15 and comfortable with your body, this is the gig for you. Possible sodomy if interested. Those with man hair need not apply. Prefer testicles to not have dropped.

Jared from Subway

This is pretty recent news and I must say that I was not really surprised. Not that I ever, even for one second, thought that the most famous purveyor of sandwiches was using his powers for evil and found naked children enticing. He just struck me as a sort of lumpy, fat loser who discovered a way to melt away his considerable poundage by eating disgusting subs. Even thin he still looked fat. Like he had a lot of lose skin or something.

I have tried every diet known to man except the Subway thing. First, their food is abhorrent. There is a Subway near my work and I would frequent it two or three times a month mostly because it was close by. Problem was that the guy assembling my rather flavorless and unsatisfying meal always had a circular Band-Aid over a particular spot on his left cheek and whatever it was covering never seemed to heal enough for him to go without it. I have enough of an issue with germs to begin with but this thing was really weighing heavy on my mind. My desire to know just what he was hiding under that bandage was at that point outweighing the horror of that thing falling off into my sandwich so I kept going back and going back even more than ever.

Finally, one day while waiting in line for another foul assed sub, I noticed that the bandage was dangling by a few unkempt stray hairs of his beard. This was my chance to see what this poor bastard was hiding all these months. When I, at last, was close enough to get a bead on it, was horrified to see that the bandage was covering a hole in his face! I swear I could see his teeth if the light hit it just right! I had been letting Freddy Krueger make my lunch for me on a fairly regular basis. I left before ordering and have never been back.

What did this Jared animal do before he picked up this Subway gig? We know it wasn’t anything in the field of fitness unless one can make a living posing for “before” pictures. No, I see him, in light of finding out his proclivity for naked children, as a department store Santa. Certainly he was fat enough and he seems jolly.

Who in the hell wants to be Santa Claus anyway? What a stupid job if you think about it. Like, you work for like a month every year. Not enough to support yourself and I’d be surprised if it paid better than minimum wage. Your good Santa’s have a real beard and I just can’t comprehend maintaining that stupid thing all year just so you can play Santa for the five weeks after Thanksgiving. And how stupid do these professional Santa’s look rolling around in Hawaiian shirts in June? And inevitably some dumbass upon seeing June Santa says something to the effect of, “Hey kids look, Santa must be on vacation!” Hearing this kills my will to live. Let’s not forget that the five weeks when you actually get to live out the ridiculous fantasy of being Santa is spent either listening to bad kids spewing out their unrealistic demands or crying in holy terror. I fail to see the fun.

So as a recap, Santa is paid an unlivable wage, has to walk around with that stupid beard all year long, is subjected to listening to asinine comments about his vacation destinations and gets kicked, pissed and cried on. The only kind of person willing to endure this kind of treatment has to be up to no good.

Bill Cosby

I’m not going to lie, I love Bill Cosby. The Cosby Show still ranks as one of my Top 5 sit-coms of all time. It suffered the same effects that any good show does in that characters leave or the kids grown up but it still is one of the best.

I also love to watch old re-runs of M.A.S.H and Leave it to Beaver and both of those shows suffered the same growing pains as The Cosby Show. Like when the Frank Burns character was written out of M.A.S.H. the show took a horrible turn for the worse. If I was the creator of the popular early 60’s show Leave it to Beaver I would have been pumping that little bastard full of anti-growth hormones because listening to him get in trouble for cutting his own hair is not funny when his voice has changed and he’s got man hairs. Listen Beaver, it just isn’t funny anymore. Time to move on and get a grown up job.

The Cosby Show got awful when Rudy started to grow a horrendously dark mustache. For some reason, deep facial hair on a girl kind of ruins the childhood innocence they were trying to convey. Cousin Pam was also responsible for the demise and I believe that this is the point when Bill may have started drugging women and taken sexual liberties with them. Rudy’s mustache may be responsible for dozens of sexual crimes.

What is this guy’s deal anyway? I mean, I guess he’s never been convicted of anything but he did pay out a large sum of money to buy some woman’s silence and to me, that’s as good as just coming out and admitting it. He is Bill F-ing Cosby! Why did he feel it necessary to ruffie women? Surely there are and were plenty of women lining up for a chance to trade sex for a chance to get their break in Hollywood, right? Is this guy so messed up that he actually got a little extra boner by slipping them a mickey first?

Let’s not forget that this guy has been vehemently denying these acquisitions for over a year now and has also made quite a reputation for himself as being a bit self-righteous in talking down to the African American community about what he thinks is an aberrant lifestyle. Can’t imagine there’s much sympathy coming Bill’s way at this point.

The British Parliament

This story is just now starting to get legs and is really quite disturbing. It seems that up to twenty current and former members of Parliament are on their way to serving time for participating in an elite pedophilia ring. These are like members of Congress! Raping little kids!

I think I’m done here.

“I’m a karate man! I bruise on the inside!”

Top 5 Reasons Why Seafood Sucks

Posted on by JP Shaver

Top 5 Reasons Why Seafood Is So Disgusting

I hate anything they call food that comes from the sea. I have never liked it and, at 50 years old, probably never will. I love going to the ocean but there is nothing more disgusting to me than being taken down by a wave and getting a mouth full of the briny deep. It tastes just awful and anything harvested from it for human consumption tastes exactly the same. I am less bothered that the world uses the world’s oceans as a toilet than I am with the taste of seafood and I have serious germ issues!

Once in a while I inevitably have to go along with the crowd and dine at one of these restaurants that trolls the world’s sewer for its menu offerings. While my friends and family binge on lobster, crab and God forbid, clams, I am content, instead, with a constant flow of cold beer and free bread.

Take caviar for instance, I used to go trout fishing a lot when I was a kid and once in a while I’d catch a bloated female that when cut open for cleaning would spill an indecent amount of fish eggs all over the ground. The egg sac would even make a popping sound when poked with the knife. Let’s not get lost here and gloss over the words “egg sac.” Egg sac? I don’t want to eat anything that has an egg sac.

Who had the bright idea to eat these raw fish eggs in the first place? Surely the scenario went down quite similar to my experiences as a youngster but I never once had to urge to scoop them up and start eating them. I was too busy gagging and lamenting the fact that I had just killed thousands of potential baby fish. Caviar is absolutely disgusting and I have NEVER understood the “royalty” involved with fish eggs, simply disgusting and I’ll never try them…”delicacy” my ass.

I don’t fish anymore because I believe you should eat what you catch and I just cannot stomach the rancid flavor or your local Red Lobster’s fare. Is there a worse name for a restaurant than Joe’s Crab Shack? It invokes thoughts of a bucket of rotting chum served up from some dark back room by a bearded sea farer with a wooden leg named Skully or Poop Deck Paddy.

I’ve heard that caviar should never been served with a metal spoon as it may give the raw fish eggs an unpleasant flavor. Really? First of all, any caviar I’ve ever seen comes in a metal can so what the eff? Secondly, give the caviar an unpleasant flavor? Its raw fish eggs and they are already profoundly unpleasant. Sticking a metal spoon into it can only make it better because it cannot possibly get any worse.

I have a suspicion that the people who clamor to the closest seafood buffet or those willing to pay $25 for a nice lobster don’t really like fish either if they were being honest with themselves. No, I believe that what they are really looking for is just an excuse to eat butter. Butter is delicious. It’s a rectangular slab of sweet, salty fat and there is nothing better. In fact, my parents would find my teeth marks in the butter when I was a little kid.

With that said….

Crab –

People love them some crab legs but I would like to point out one factor that most people seem to miss. A crab is nothing more than a wet spider. Both have eight legs, both are arachnids. Hello! You are eating a sea spider! Even if I could get past the feted flavor of these vile beasts, I would surely gag it all out when I remembered that I had just ingested a Daddy Longlegs. What’s the number one condiment when it comes to your crab eaters? That’s right, butter. I would also prefer to be able to dip my spider meat into butter before I ate it.

Lobster –

Continuing along the lines of ingested insects, a lobster is just a sea scorpion without the venom. Why doesn’t it need venom like its land bound cousin? Because it’s so disgusting on its own that no one in their right mind should be effing with them in the first place. It needs no defense.

Again, number one condiment for the wet scorpion? Butter.

Shrimp –

I like to compare a shrimp to a sea caterpillar but when you step on a caterpillar all that green juice squirts out so it would be unfair to apply that comparison. But it’s hard not to see the similarities in a worm like land insect with a shrimp with all the legs and grossness. Unlike your lobsters and crabs, though, people don’t shellac their shrimp in butter, instead they use cocktail sauce. I suspect it’s because shrimp carry an even stronger sense of the sea in their flavor and need the extra boost in cover-up ability offered by the cocktail sauce.

And the poop? So, as I understand shrimp, I have to make sure that these things have had their rectal cavity cleaned out before I shove it in my mouth? Ugh.

Snails –

Ugh. Snails are snails. Same on the land as on the sea. Disgusting and also used as an excuse to eat butter. I cannot imagine what these sea floor dwelling creatures must eat given that the ocean is the repository of much of our raw sewage.

Have you ever seen the tool used to strip these things from their shells? It looks like a complicated surgical instrument.

Sushi –

I have a coworker that ate 107 pieces of sushi out of his own free will, all the while looking like he was being punished and sitting in timeout.

I will be the first to admit that I wish I liked sushi. The packaging is outstanding with all the colors and such stuffed into a stubby little green tube. However, it is truly the most revolting of all fish options because it’s raw! The number one thing we are told is to not eat under-cooked meat and what do we do? Take it up a notch and just eat it raw. Cooking fish, at least in some circumstances, seems to cut down on the atrocious taste but cooking it also leads to your home smelling like a whorehouse at low-tide. When stuck between a rock and a hard place, I opt to starve.

The horrendous taste of sushi is very often covered up with the delicious condiment, wasabi. Little known fact, wasabi was invented during the late 1800’s as a way to cover up the taste of raw fish. In fact, in Japanese, the word “wasabi” literally means, “God, this fish tastes like shit.”

Butter and wasabi are to seafood what salsa is to tortilla chips. They are symbiotic, neither subsisting without the other. No one eats tortilla chips without salsa, they’re disgusting plain. Similarly, I have yet to see someone eat crab without a big tub of butter nearby because crabs sucks alone. Additionally, I like tartar sauce. Anything made with mayonnaise is delicious to me but I do not like it enough to eat fish and there really isn’t any other use for tartar sauce other than covering up the taste of fish.

I wish that I liked seafood, I really do. It looks fun with the aprons and all the tools you need to crack stuff open but there needs to be some reward for all that work and from where I sit all you’re getting is a mouthful of sea water.

“Didn’t I tell you the phone in my limousine was busted?”

“Yeah, what is you, ignorant?”