The Day After Tomorrow

Look out California, here we come!

For the first time since we’ve been married, HoBiscuit and I are traveling together on what some people would call a ‘vacation’, but what we call a ‘Destination Of Convenience’, or DOC. DOC means that we’re going to California for a wedding and tacking on a getaway week for ourselves because we really need to take a breather from all the work we’ve been doing. Now don’t be sad, we’re not going away forever and I promise to tell you all about our trip when we get back. Come on now, there’s no need to cry. Turn that frown upside down…

Oh stop it! I’ll be back on June 7th, you big crybaby.

Anywaste, we’ll be going all over northern California, from San Francisco to the Oregon border to Yosemite to Monterey, so even though I’ll try to update this site with stories of our travels while we’re there, if I were you I wouldn’t be holding my breath. During our stay out west, we’ll also work in a day to meet and greet two of my favoritest Bloggers ever, despite the fact that the Governator has declared our meeting to be an act of terrorschism. And if our meeting doesn’t cause an interdimensional rift of cataclysmic proportions, then I guess we’re just not trying hard enough. Jules, JadedJu, Hobiscuit and GeekMan will meet in California this Saturday, and the world will quake beneath our feet.

May god have mercy on us all.

Designer Geek

TV is my friend.

I am completely and totally in love with the show Designer Guys. I don’t think it’s simply because I’m in the process of buying an apartment that has me so infatuated with these guys and although I’m sure that’s part of the reason it’s just not the whole story. I mean, if buying an apartment automatically meant that I would like all home decorating shows then I probably wouldn’t still find Richard Lowell so repulsive, and I definitely wouldn’t need couch-restraints to keep me from throwing things at the TV whenever I watch the so-called ‘designers’ on Surprise By Design screw up another person’s home by using materials so cheap that you just know everything’s going to fall apart in a week of real-world use.

A balsa wood coffee table? I mean, honestly… balsa wood?

I think the main reason I like these guys is that they don’t have an arbitrary budget imposed upon them by a clueless producer who wants to show the world that anyone can have a stylish, French country living room for under $1,000. Anyone who’s ever tried to decorate a room in their own home knows that making it look the way you want costs money. Sure, you can cut corners by making your own couch out of spare cardboard boxes, some fabric remnants and a roll of toilet paper, but let’s be honest here. It will never be a nice couch. And no matter how much you may paint, stain or buff that IKEA dresser, it will never, ever look like an antique English bureau.

Even if you do paint flowers on it.

In other news, I woke up this morning with the feeling that something was amiss with my body and after spending the last three hours collecting clues I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong. See, my first clue was my nose; it was trying to escape my face by slowly liquefying itself from the inside out and running down both my face and my throat. Then, my eyes and eyelids began waging an ecological war, with my eyeballs turning into a vast ocean of salt water and my eyelids turning into a desert of itchy, stabbing pain. Now my throat has entered the fray by becoming both dry and coated with mucus forcing me to clear my throat and then cough from the pain. All of this leads me to three possible conclusions.

  1. My body is so filled with disgust at finally discovering that I really am the world’s biggest Geek that it is self destructing in the hopes of bringing about extinction of all Geeks.
  2. Having made my final plans to leave on a weeklong vacation to California with HoBiscuit in two days, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Californian government have launched an all-out biological war on my body in order to keep us away and thus save the West coast from utter annihilation.
  3. It’s allergy season and this is a particularily bad day for allergy sufferers.

Have I mentioned lately that I fricking hate allergies?

Weekend Update

I feel violated.

This weekend HoBiscuit and I went down to Virginia as moral support, and living/breathing second opinions, for friends who are moving there in a few months due to a job offer. We drove all over Virginia looking at over a dozen apartments in two days trying to help them find the ‘perfect’ place to live in for a year until they decide whether they’ll stay down there or come back to NY.

I, for one, hope they come back sooner.

Anywaste, we were in the parking lot of some apartment complex when my wife, the Lovely HoBiscuit, starts screaming and pointing at me. She’s hopping from foot to foot as if she were doing the pee-pee dance and turning in circles while screaming “Ew! Ew! Ew!” over and over again. Now, I’ve grown used to the reaction HoBiscuit has when the mind altering, GeekMan-isn’t-really-Quasimodo, love-potion-like cocktail of drugs I give her wear off, but something told me this was different.

The fact that she wasn’t pointing at my face gave me my first clue.

Then I noticed the feeling of a little extra weight on my back. And the weight was moving. Now, since I have the quick reflexes of a striking viper and the mental dexterity of a flying walrus, I quickly deduced that I was being attacked by some sort of creature that could sting me to death, like a giant Geek-killing wasp or a flesh-eating woodpecker. So, taking into account my years of training as a Green Beret Bonnet, I did exactly what I had been trained to do under such circumstances.

I panicked.

I started turning in circles while trying to swat the thing on my back and screamed at HoBiscuit, “Get it off! Get it OFF! I’m allergic to stings. Help me or I’ll die! Get it off! Get it off!” All the while HoBiscuit is screaming at me, “Get it off! Get it OFF! Don’t come near me! I’m not touching it! It’s disgusting! Get it off! Get it off!

As you can imagine, you’ll never see either of us on Survivor.

Finally, after what felt like forever, I realized that it was not some super-sized stinging insect on my back, but a large, slow-witted and harmless cicada. Sighing in relief that I would not be dying this day, I calmly asked HoBiscuit to flick the little thing off me so we could go look at the apartment with our friends.

The look of horror I received was not encouraging.

After calmly explaining to HoBiscuit that cicadas are harmless bugs that would never hurt her, she calmly told me that she didn’t believe my lying ass because it looked dangerous to her and she would rather watch it eat my empty skull than risk touching it. After trying and failing to reach it myself, and after calming her down from hysterical to moderately anxious, she agreed to help me remove the bug as long as she didn’t need to actually touch it to do so. Then, trusting fool that I am, I turned my back to my wife and calmly waited for her to remove the bug. This may help you understand why I wasn’t prepared for her to start dancing from foot to foot while hitting me with her purse while screaming, “Ick, ick, ick!” Now, all you nature people out there shouldn’t worry because the cicada flew away before HoBiscuit was able to calm down enough to properly aim her Handbag Of Doom.

On the other hand, I’ve got three broken ribs.
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It All Starts Here

Blogger Tag.

If someone tags you, you must name and link the person who tagged you (for example, GeekMan got me!) and then tag someone else by writing “Tag! You’re IT!” in your Blog with the word “You’re” being a link to the person you want to be ‘it’. It’s up to the person you ‘tagged’ to figure out that they’re ‘IT’ and then tag someone else. I know it’s silly and childish with no real point to it, and I also know that a game like this has been done before, but I think by actually forbidding people from telling the person who’s “IT” that they are, in fact, “IT” makes it more interesting. It will certainly let you know who actually reads your site as opposed to those who just say that they do. And wouldn’t it be awesome if someone you admired and read every day ‘tagged’ you?

Tag! You’re IT!

Fun With Google – Part II

Smart-bombing Google.

According to this highly reliable, non-partisan website’s latest internet poll, 87% of the world’s internet users who have an epidermis and are not mentally retarded are in love with the person who writes for this witty and wonderful website. Now, even though I fully acknowledge that 50% of all statistics are completely made up, this is one statistic that I think is 73% accurate. This guy is considered the world’s best at what he does, and what he does is write the world’s best funny stories.

He’s like a humor deity made flesh for our amusement.

And, although I’ve made fun of this guy on many occasions in the past, it should be obvious by now that deep down I’m in awe of his abilities and would love to one day be thought of as even half the writer he is. I mean, he’s everything I’ve ever aspired to become. He’s the world’s greatest humor writer, ever! The best of the best! The High Priest of Low Humor!

I have a shrine devoted to him above my toilet.

Now, even though his latest post might be considered by some to be a self-aggrandizing, ego-stroking piece of Google-bombing fluff, I beg you to overlook it and dig a little deeper because I honestly believe he is one of the greatest people writing for free on the internet today. So do yourself a favor and check out his website every day because, in my own humble opinion, he just may be the greatest writer in the history of the internet.

We are all blessed to have him in our lives.
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Following The Trend

Like everyone else out there, HoBiscuit and I are buying a home.

Now, before you rush to congratulate us, let me reiterate to you non New Yorkers just what it means to be purchasing a ‘home’ in NYC. A home in NY is not what you might be used to, especially since NYC prices are so outrageous that rats have been known to migrate to New Jersey when their families got too large to fit in their rent controlled, two-tin-can rat’s nest. The truly poor rats actually move to Staten Island!

Oh, the horror.

But wait, I see you shaking your heads and chuckling to yourselves as you say, “That GeekMan, he’s so silly. I know it can’t possibly be as bad as he says it is. I mean, I know NY is expensive, but come on! It can’t be as bad as all that, now can it?”

Hell yes, it can.

For those of you who might not live in the Big Rotten Apple let me explain in a little more detail why buying a home in NY is completely different than buying a home anywhere else in the country. You see, when anyone else in the US says that they are ‘buying a home’ they mean that they are buying something with rooms and closets and possibly even stairs. If they’re real lucky, they even have some land with grass and trees on it, and all for a reasonable price. But in NY when someone says they are ‘buying a home’ it should be translated as the following;

Hello. I am an idiot New Yorker who is willing to live in a space that in any other city in the United States would hardly qualify as a walk-in closet. The apartment I am currently in the process of purchasing is a mere 300 square feet, including the kitchen and bathroom, and the down payment alone will likely cost me more than the total cost of your current residence. I will have one closet into which I can place three articles of clothing, steam heat that I cannot control, two windows (one of which will be blocked by the fire escape and the other by an air conditioner) and the tranquil sounds of fire engines and gunshots to lull me to sleep. Please express your shock and awe at my stupidity by taking this straw, sticking it into my eye and sucking the life out of me. Thankyouverymuch.

Ah, the joys of being a homeowner.

A Sad, Sad Day

Today is my Blog’s anniversary.

Having a web site for as long as I have (three years with this site and seven years altogether) I’ve learned a few things about Blogging that I thought might be nice to share with those of you who are not, like me, massively popular and worshiped as gods. So, without further ado, here’s a list of the Top Ten Things You Can Do To Become A Massively Popular And Universally Loved Web Site Writer.

Top Ten Things You Can Do To Become
A Massively Popular And Universally Loved Web Site Writer
  1. Publicly insult a popular blogger who has a short fuse.
  2. Write about your sex life. Involve barnyard animals.
  3. Express an unpopular opinion on a hot political issue then back it up with fake statistics and rambling, irrational & emotional diatribes.
  4. Write about your favorite sexual positions. Involve homemade appliances.
  5. Post an angry and self righteous farewell post, wait two weeks and then return by saying you no longer care what other people think because you’re now writing only for yourself.
  6. Write about your sexual fantasies. Involve foodstuffs.
  7. Blackmail a famous Blogger for linky-love by PhotoShopping images of them dancing with the Star Wars Kid.
  8. Write about your sexually deviant tendencies. Involve leather and pony paraphernalia.
  9. Post pictures of your boobies. If you do not have boobies, post pictures of Michele’s boobies. Don’t worry; everyone’s seen them so I’m sure she won’t mind.
  10. Write about your sudden discovery and acceptance of your homosexuality. Involve disappointed family members.

There. If you do any three of these ten things you will soon be among the Blogging elite, eating caviar on saltines and sipping Champaign in a hot tub with all the other famous A-List Bloggers. Should you do all ten things then I dare say you might become a Blogging god, able to write anything and still garner 50 to 100 comments and earn over $500 a day in ad revenue and PayPal donations from your adoring fans.

Not to mention all the casual sex from your fanboys/fangirls.

One last note on becoming a popular Blogger. The kiss of death for any Blog is the writer’s insistence on trying to be funny. Never, ever attempt to humor your readership for you will fail miserably and very soon you will find yourself celebrating your Blogiversaries all alone without a single visitor to wish you a happy anniversary. Then you will spend an hour coming up with a stupid list of silly things no one will ever find humorous in the vain and ultimately futile attempt to gain even a single visitor to your pathetic and useless site.

Oh god, I’m so lonely…

Summer Camp II

“Heads up GeekMan, here comes Big Julie.”

Art, my best friend at camp, said this quite calmly as we sat on the bleachers by the baseball field pulling the legs off of daddy long leg spiders to pass the time between lunch and dinner. Usually such a pronouncement would have been met by my indifferent nonchalance, but earlier in the day I had been informed that Big Julie seemed to want to ‘talk’ to me and that caused me to raise my head in alarm and begin calculating the success probabilities of hiding vs. fleeing vs. suddenly developing psychic powers and destroying Big Julie in a ball of fire. Seeing how close she was to the bleachers, I quickly rejected the first two plans of action and desperately searched for a means of implementing the third.

Needless to say, I was unsuccessful.
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Tooting My Own Horn

I am still funny.

Some people out there seem to doubt my ability to be funny anymore so, in order to prove them wrong, I’m going to attempt the infamous, and highly dangerous, Double-Warznack maneuver. As we all know, only two people have ever successfully completed the DW without dying in the attempt, but for my readership, I will do anything to make them laugh. So, without further ado, I will now attempt to fart to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” while being repeatedly hit on the head with a frying pan by twelve angry midgets.

Wait. That was no fart…

Sad Day

I’ll never be an A-Lister.

My writing contest, which I thought had some pretty cool prizes up for grabs, has yielded a whopping THREE entries. And since I just happen to be giving away not one, not two, but three prizes, I guess I don’t really need to go through the whole agonizing task of reading through thousands of entries to narrow my choices to the top three and then fend off a slew of angry emails from all the jilted hopefuls.

In a strange way that could almost be considered a plus.

Anywaste, to show my three loyal minions just how benevolent and generous I am I’m going to forego the whole first, second, third prize thing, and simply offer each of them their choice of which of the three prizes they want. Each of them can choose any of the three they want with no penalties should two, or even three of them want the same thing. So they can all choose to have an item from the TMG store, or two can get something from their Amazon wishlist, or they can all get different things.

Aren’t I a great guy?

You may be asking yourself, who are these lucky SOBs? Well, wonder no more for I shall tell you. They are;

  • Cableman for “Bird World”
  • Michelle S. (no website given) for “A Living Nightmare in Periwinkle”
  • and, Solonor for “Quack Another Day”

Congratulations winners! You have just proven that you have no lives.