That was the joke question asked in a commercial break during the broadcast of Last Comic Standing the other night on NBC. If you wanted to hear the punchline all you had to do was send a text message to NBC on your cell phone to get it. The cost for this amazing and convenient service? Only 99 cents! Have you ever heard anything so utterly lame? Actually holding the punchline of an elementary school level joke for ransom over the airwaves. It irritated me so much that I changed the channel and watched something else instead. Hey, NBC, here’s an idea for you that would be far more entertaining. Why don’t you air a clip of the genius that conceived this brilliant marketing idea actually being fired on national tv. Now that would be funny!

In case you’re wondering, and I won’t charge you a buck for the punchline… What’s orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot. Yeah, I told you it was LAME. And, no, I didn’t pay for it, I got the punchline by doing a web search.

Remember a while back I wrote a post about Stumble Upon? I still like to use it to surf for fun websites sometimes, but unfortunately it’s been sold out to eBay. And eBay is selling spots in the page rotations. Guess what that means kiddies? They sold your eyeballs to the highest bidders, meaning more and more of the webpages they send you to actually paid for the priveledge of having you surf in. Instead of being sites that Joe User submitted as being cool or interesting, you get to see who paid the most money for your attention.

I think this may actually be good in a backhanded way because you get to vote thumbs up or down on every site. If I get even the slightest suspicion that the site submission was paid for, it gets an automatic thumbs down. Hell yeah, just like that! And if the site has pop up ads of any kind on it or if it’s running a script that resizes or takes control over my browser window in any way, it gets an automatic thumbs down too, I don’t care how awesome the website is. If it has pop ups, it sucks!

Check out this billboard photo, notice anything odd about the two ads?

That’s right, it’s the same woman in both ads! LOL

Well, that’s all I got, have a great weekend kids!

I took my car in for some repair work on my A/C system the other day and I went to a place I found in the phone book. Yeah, it’s hotter than Hades here in N.O. and a working air conditioner is always on the top of my list. As an ex-mechanic I’m very picky about who I will trust. I can always tell when someone is bullshitting me or trying to jack me for unneccessary work. The shop was nice and clean and the owner seemed intelligent and straightforward.

Turned out he was someone I knew from high school or at least he remembered me, I couldn’t recall him or his name. I decided to trust him and leave it there for the day for the repair work. As I was leaving though, I started noticing that the walls in the office and waiting area was covered with religious quotes and icons and various other religious paraphenalia. I thought it was just a bit overdone, being proud of your religion is one thing and that’s fine, but this was going way overboard.

Later that day, I went back to pick it up and that’s when it hit me. Well actually he hit me, he clobbered me with Jesus. He asked me point blank if I had the Lord in my heart and if I had found Jesus. Seriously, I am not kidding. And he went on and on telling me all about the goodness of the Lord and asking if I’ve confessed my sins and made my peace, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Then he invited me to his “church”, which turns out to be one that I recognized as a borderline “cult”. You know, one of those independent churches that don’t have an actual denomination. The whole time he was talking, he stared intently into my eyes, like he was trying to mesmerize me or something. I definitely felt like I was being recruited into a future of selling Bibles door to door or wearing Hare Krishna robes at the airport, begging for donations LOL Charles Manson probably recruited his followers the same way!

I wasn’t having any of it though, I lied like a dog, I told him that I had indeed found Jesus and God was in my heart and that I was in regular attendance at a nearby church, etc, etc. just to get him to shut the fuck up. I felt like I was having to chew my frikkin’ leg off to escape his insidious Spanish Inquisition line of questioning. I’m so going to hell…

I’m not against religion in any way shape or form, and I respect your right to worship or not worship, just please, keep it to yourself. Whatever chance he had of ever seeing me at his shop again for future auto repairs was just blown all to hell, so to speak. I never want to encounter that creepy freak again. LOL

I was telling Lisa this story, her response is now my new prayer. “God save me from those who want to save me”. hehe

Hope you guys are having a great weekend!

Have I ever mentioned how much I loathe cutting grass or doing yard work? I’ve always been that way. When I was a kid I was very allergic to fresh mown grass and it made me extremely miserable with swollen eyes, runny nose, burning, itchy skin and short of breath for hours. Did I ever get a break from cutting it? Hell no, my old man probably thought it built character or someshit and I was forced to cut it anyway. It wasn’t like I needed the exercise, I was always very active. And it didn’t matter that I felt like I was freakin’ dying because I could barely breathe, I had to cut it anyway. For some reason, the allergies have slowly diminished as I got older and older, but I hate it now more than ever. I remember dreaming of the day when I would become an adult and would never have to do yard work again.

That never happened! I became an adult, yes (sort of), but did I ever get a break from cutting it? Well, only when I lived in apartments, then some other schmuck had to cut it for me. Yay! And now I find it’s come full circle, my old man is too old and feeble to cut his own lawn so now I’ve had to take over the miserable ritual. Woe is me. If I had a time machine, I would go back and kill the bastard that came up with the idea that lawns needed trimming. I like to think it’s just a sick fad, why can’t it be fashionable to have a small jungle growing around your home? Think of how much more fun that would be!

When you think about the ecological impact, tall, natural grass makes much more sense. We pour fertilizer and insecticides all over it to nourish and protect it then we have to buy fuel and machines to maintain it. We waste fresh drinking water on it to keep it from dying! The poisons end up in our water supplies and the burnt fuel pollutes the air. Then just think of the impact the manufacturing of the billions of dollars worth of lawn equipment we buy every year has on the planets resources. Throw in thousands of serious injuries and medical emergencies that occur while cutting grass and it’s easy to see why it’s a really bad, bad idea. I believe that keeping a well manicured lawn is one of the most wasteful things that a homeowner can do. If you like cutting grass, then I think you’re one sick fuck.

Notice that I have nothing against veggie gardens or growing flowers, just don’t ask me to help you tend one, LOL And of course growing food crops or garden vegetables is a necessity, to me that’s not a waste of time, energy or resources. It’s a positive impact.

You’re probably wondering what brings up this rant. I was cutting grass at my folks house the other day and ended up with a HUGE gash in my arm from brushing past a freshly trimmed bush in the front yard. It sliced me open like a knife and I was barely able to stop the bleeding, two days later it still hurts like hell. It’s going to leave a massive, ugly scar and I’m PISSED. Now, I look like I was just in a bar brawl and right in the middle of job hunting. Just what I needed!

So, happy frikkin’ birthday to me, which just happens to be tomorrow by the way. So I ask you, in honor of my birthday and for the sake of our planet, I want you all to boycott cutting grass for one day. That’s not hard is it? Please, give the poor grass a break, let it grow dammit! The grass just wants to be free, grass has rights too!! LOL

What does the photo below have to do with this post? Not a thing!

I decided it was time to “repaint” the old FEMA trailer that’s been sitting out in the front yard. It’s been there well over a year now, unused, while we wait on FEMA’s engineering reports on what’s to finally be done about the house repairs. The worst part is that once they actually do something we may have to “live” in the piece of crap. Hard to believe but it has room for 8 people to sleep inside, talk about cramped. Sardines have more space to move around. LOL

I came across this cool quote from Ronald Reagan that sums up the governments laggardly response to Katrina.

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Doesn’t that just say it all? hehe

And speaking of Ronald Reagan, I came across this old cigarette advertisement. Gotta love the “Christamas Card” cartons. Hey Ron, I’ll take a dozen!

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I got a brand new toy a couple of weeks ago and I just can’t stop playing with the damn thing. No it’s not a sex toy, minds out of the gutter please! Although it is almost as fun as sex.

It’s a new LG cu500 cellphone that’s also a music player and a video camera. My old Motorola was getting pretty tired and since I was eligible for an upgrade I decided to go for something really nice. It has a removable 1 gigabyte memory card that can hold up to 250 mp3 or wma songs or 3,000 photos or 300 minutes of video! The memory card even fits in my regular digital camera, so it’s very versatile. Granted, the video quality is pretty low, but the photo quality is pretty damn good, I’m really quite impressed.

And the data is all transferable back and forth to my PC thru a USB cable. It runs on At&T’s new high speed data 3G network and it has quad band so it can be used anywhere in the world. The music player is basically identical to an iPod with song shuffle and repeat and you can create custom playlists. I never imagined a cellphone could be so much fun to play with. Now if it just vibrated a little stronger…

This has been amusing me for a week now, a small green lizard has moved into my SUV grill and seems to think it’s a great place to hang out and catch bugs. He crawls all over the bumper, the hood, in and out of the grill but mostly hangs off the lower edge waiting for tasty insects to pass by.

When he spots his prey he leaps down onto the pavement below, snatches it up and scurries back, where he jumps up onto one of the tires then leaps across to the bumper. Sometimes I’ve seen it do it from the upper grill which is about a 3 foot drop! And it only takes him a few moments to return to his station. It does this all day long and it’s been going on for a solid week now.

Occasionally it will climb onto the hood and lay there in the sun because they like that warmth. It seems to be most active when it’s really warm in the middle of the day. Here’s a closeup of him ready to pounce. LOL

I haven’t been driving that much all week so I know he hasn’t been disturbed very much, but earlier today I took a 60 mile drive and I feared he would be gone. Not so! Shortly after I returned home, there he was, poking his head out and hungry! He went right to work. These guys are extremely plentiful in this neighborhood, you can’t step outside without seeing one and they eat tons of bugs. They’re actually pretty good to have around.

So now that I seem to have a permanent resident pet, that also fills the roles of bug catcher, security attack lizard and a cool looking hood ornament, I think it’s time I gave it a name but I can’t think of any good ones. I’m taking suggestions, anyone want to name my lizard? I might even let the winner pet him! Hmm, pet my lizard, that sounds kinda naughty actually… Name my lizard!

If you’re ever purchased fresh sliced meat from a grocery counter, I’m sure you’ve run into one of these people. Their grumpiness factor is in direct proportion to how thin you want that ham sliced. If you don’t specify a thickness, you’ll probably be greeted with a pleasant attitude.

Ask them to slice it very thin and they quickly turn from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. The thinner you want it sliced, the more work for them because thinly sliced can require twice as many strokes on the machine. The particularly heinous ones will beligerently show you the first slice from 10 feet away by waving it at you so fast that there’s no way you can really tell if it’s what you wanted. “Is this thin enough”, they’ll ask with a scowl.

You’re lucky if they don’t throw it at you and curse you before you leave the counter. Of course they’re not all like that but I seem to run into more than my fair share. I also hate when they attach the sticker label over the baggie opening in such a way that you have to rip the damn thing to shreds when you get it home.

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I ran into this interesting comparison the other day, now I’m thankful our cars don’t run on printer ink! Holy Crap, Batman! If you thought the price of gasoline was expensive, take a look at this price comparison of various liquids! Apparently we’ve been had, printer ink manufacturers have finally figured out how to turn something ordinary into pure gold.

And you thought alchemy was a lost art, remember all those nutjobs that worked for centuries trying to figure out how to turn ordinary metals into gold? Apparently something very similar is possible. Forget crude oil, forget the middle east, let the ink wars begin, LOL! I think I’m going to become a wildcatter and start drilling for printer ink! That’s obviously where the money’s at!

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On a VERY positive note, I’ve been feeling quite good! Actually this is the best I’ve felt in nearly 5 years. Pretty damn amazing considering how close I came to death. My miserable health odyssey began with liver failure, progressed into double pneumonia, being in a coma for a month, nearly 2 years of hospitilization, a complete liver transplant and top it off with 7 months of chemotherapy. You can’t say that I don’t know how to have fun! LOLMy latest blood test results have come back very positive with only a slight bit of anemia and I feel like the last traces of the chemo drugs have finally left my system. In a word, KICKASS!! hehe I’m ready to take on the world again! Hell yeah! What a change huh? Going from feeling like every day that passed would likely be your last one to feeling like you might live forever. We can dream can’t we? hehe

Love you guys and I hope you have a great weekend!!

Well guys I’m so busy with blog work that I even forgot about my blog’s 2 yr anniversary that passed back in November nearly 2 months ago! LOL I used to write a lot of stories about my experiences in the deep sea diving business and I haven’t put any up in a long time. But today I have a rerun story from way back in my archives, one of my favorites. I hope you enjoy!

One of the funniest things I ever saw was a diver that was pretending to be working. He was supposed to be guiding an undersea pipeline about 12″ in diameter into a set of saddles going up one leg of an offshore platform. There were cables attached to it from winches and a crane through sets of pulleys rigged up to handle the task. The diver in this situation was supposed to be just guiding the operation from below, giving instructions to the dive controller on how tight each line had to be to get the pipeline into position and then he would bolt the pipe into the clamp in place underwater.

But, once he had the pipe guided in to the clamp he decided he had done enough and took a little nap of sorts underwater. He was working at about 30 feet below the surface and the water was incredibly clear that day and you could see him from the deck. He apparently didn’t realize this because he just sat there on a horizontal brace of the rig giving out imaginary instructions to the dive controller. I was standing on the edge of the vessel tending his hose and had been watching his progress as he did his job, but, once I realized he wasn’t doing anything I motioned the dive controller over to the edge of the deck and pointed to him. After about a minute of watching him do nothing but pretend to work he ended the dive and fired the dude, told him to catch the next boat hitting shoreside. The look of shock on his face was priceless when the dive controller told him he was being watched from the surface!

Another funny one was a newbie diver that nearly bit his own tongue half off because he was too anxious. One of the diver tenders jobs was to make sure the divers breathing hose was clear and snag free at all times, you actually stood on the edge of the deck holding the hose and tried to gently feel the amount of slack in the hose at all times while the diver was in the water. It needed to be lightly taut at all times to ensure there was no slack or droop in the line that could cause his lifeline to get tangled or damaged in any way. Sounds easy but it’s not, the hose asembly is fairly heavy and it takes quite a bit of experience to tell the difference between the divers pull and the pull of sea currents.

When you help dress your diver out with his diving hat and tools you have to feed enough slack over the edge to make sure he can make a clear jump into the water from the deck from as high as 20 ft sometimes in full gear. Once you ensured everything was clear you tapped the diver on the shoulder to give him the sign to jump. This one guy didn’t wait for the high sign from his tender, there was no slack in the hose and he jumped overboard. The hose caught an obstruction on deck and he didn’t hit the water, the hose jerked him up like a hangmans noose to his harness and the sudden stop made him slam into the hull of the vessel and nearly sever his tongue with his own teeth! They took him away in an emergency chopper, not a good way to make one of your first deep sea dives!

I recall one of my first jobs as a newbie tender, me and one diver were on a small barge working in very shallow water. Just me and him were the entire diving crew, that meant I had to care for his gear, the radio equipment, the air compressor (an old hand cranked diesel that was a bitch to start up) plus whatever tools he needed. I was barely seventeen I think and I was stuck with a lot of responsibility. I had to tend his hose and talk to him on the radio to relay instructions to the rigging crew to assist his job in the water, meanwhile making sure everything on deck keeping him alive was working properly and just generally johnny on the spot if shit went wrong. He had been going in and out the water all day, very shallow work and we fell into a routine getting a lot of work done. Since the diesel air compressor was so noisy we shut it off between every short dive when he came up for a break.

He took this one break and I forgot the compressor was off and I got him back into the water and after a few minutes he says on the radio, “hey my air is gettin’ kinda short down here, don’t you think you should start that compressor?” HOLY SHIT! I looked over and sure enough the compressor was off and the gauge on the air tank on deck showed nearly empty! I grabbed that crank handle for the diesel and cranked that damn thing for all I was worth, nearly having a stroke at 17 years old! The bastard thought it was funny, he knew the thing was off before he went in the water and just wanted to hear me panicking on the radio thinking I was killing him! The water was shallow enough there was really no danger of injury and he had a bottle of air on his backpack for emergencies. In the end it was funny but that little incident kept me on my toes for later years, what an experience!

That was a slang expression for: “I’ve had it with this fucked up company and I’m walking off the job now!” I know it was used mostly in the oilfields and construction businesses all across southern La. and Texas. I’m not sure about where the expression originally came from or how widespread it was beyond those two states, but it was a very colorful way to express your disgust about working conditions or company policies.

Back in the days when I used to work in the deep sea diving and underwater constuction business I worked for one company in particular that had just about the worst vacation policies I’ve ever run into. The way it was set up was that after one year of service you got one weeks paid vacation but you HAD to take at Christmas week. The entire company would shut down from the day before Christmas until the day after New Years day and everyone went home, no matter where you were. Even if you were out to sea. If you had less than a year with the company, you got the time off like everyone else but with no pay. After two years with the company you got two weeks paid but you were still forced to take one of them at Christmas no matter what.

Now normally I didn’t mind this set up very much because being offshore a lot meant you were going to miss a lot of holidays but you always got the one that mattered the most, and that was Christmas. You probably missed Thanksgiving and birthdays and Easter and whatever else but you still got Christmas off. On one particular job though the company decided to throw that policy right out the fucking window which pissed a lot of people off, giving them the “red ass”. And of course they wanted to “drag up”, including me.

On this job I was in charge of the entire diving crew and I was responsible for making sure we had enough people to keep the diving going on around the clock. The underwater construction we were doing required a large support vessel with huge cranes, heavy offshore construction equipment and a couple of hundred support personnel on board to assist the diving crews to get the job done. It was a very important job for a major oil company that was trying to get an offshore oil drilling platform up and running to get oil out of the sea floor. This was not possible without the diving crew.

The job was long and arduos and the entire crew had been out for about 3 months with no relief, which was pretty normal for diving crews. Once you went on the job you stayed till the project was completed or three months. We were tired and beat down from working 12 hour days 7 days a week. That’s just about all a guy can handle without a freaking break! We had already missed Thangsgiving for craps sake!

Of course we were all looking very much forward to that week off at Christmas and I for one couldn’t wait, I mean we were counting down the minutes till it was time to catch the helicopter to shore. At the very last minute though the company decided the job was too important to shut down for the week and sent the department heads notices that the company was only going to shut this one job down for ONE FUCKING DAY! We would leave the vessel during the day of Christmas eve and have to be ready to fly back out to the jobsite offshore on Christmas day in the evening! That would have given us barely more than 24 hours off the job! Did I say I had the “red ass?” I was absolutely furious. And to top it off they left it up to me to tell my crew this extremely shitty news!

That was it for me, I decided I had had enough BS and I plotted my evil revenge. I figured that if I didn’t tell my crew that they would have to return the next day and I didn’t pass on the info as to when to meet up to head back offshore that it would shut the entire operation down for a couple of days. This would kick the company right in the ass err.. pocket book, because they would have hundreds of other support personnel just sitting out there at sea getting paid to do nothing because there was no diving crew on board to continue the work! This would cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars!

Revenge can be so deliciously sweet! Hell yeah!

Very early the next morning after Christmas day the phone rings. I was sound asleep but I knew who was going to be on the line before I even picked it up. It was the head of the diving division and he started chewing me out big time because none of the diving crew had shown up, I swear the fucker sounded like he was gonna have a stroke right over the phone! I quietly and calmly let him finish screaming at me and then when he was done, I replied…

“I’ve got the red ass and I’m dragging up!” Then I hung up on the bastard and I never heard from them again!

Have a great weekend everyone!

One of the cool things about deep sea diving is a situation where there is so much work to be done at a relatively deep depth that it makes much more sense to “saturate” divers for up to 30 days at a time. Saturation technically means that your body tissues can not absorb any more gas from the environment at pressure and that decompression time will not increase any further because of that fact. To do this you need chambers large enough to live inside and be able to lock out of into a diving bell and ride in it to the sea floor to accomplish your job. The pressure on your body remains the same for the entire 30 days. Decompressing is accomplished at the very end of the job one time only instead of every single time the diver surfaces. Divers generally love it because the pay is very high compared to other forms of diving.

Ok, now that the techie stuff is done with lets move on to the fun. Living at depth in a very small chamber crowded with 3 other men can be tough, especially when there is no privacy at all when it comes time to take care of business. There are specially designed toilets for this and they use the pressure inside the hull of the chamber to evacuate waste thru a large valve on the outside, thru a large fire hose that has its end in the ocean. When the diver is finished he has to call for a flush and a deck tender must go and manually open the valve for a few moments and allow the piss and shit to blow thru the hose into the sea. The highly pressurized waste is too much for the shipboard waste systems to handle so letting it fly overboard is the easiest solution.

Unfortunately, sometimes the seas can be rough and very windy and if the flush is done when the tip of the hose comes up out of the water you can have a huge vapor cloud of waste blow back up and over the deck. What fun it is to watch the riggers on deck run for cover when the control room calls for a flush on one of the chambers. They quickly learn how nasty it is to get caught in the cloud and the smell is incredibly bad. The would often be tripping all over each other when they hear that call over the deck speakers.

Tugboats and supply boats often come alongside and eventually wear a hole in the side of the hose above the water line and if they are tied up alongside when a flush is called for they get sprayed down with some truly godawful stuff all over their decks and hull. Of course this is a lot of fun to watch if there is some activity on their deck and we would find a strategic location on the top deck of the ship to watch the fun when a flush was imminent. The looks on peoples faces when they realize what just happened to them is priceless! You ever see a grown man cry because he was just sprayed down with a high pressure mist of finely vaporized piss and shit? It’s hilarious!

I recall one job in particular where the shitter hose was taking a constant beating from tugboats coming alongside and we had to change the hose often. I was a technician on the job and I scrounged around below deck in the machinery rooms and found some hose that I thought would work ok. I had a couple of tenders move the reel up to the deck and instructed them on how to replace the old shitter hose. I told them to put 2 new clamps to hold it to the valve assembly and to make sure it was very tight so that it couldn’t blow off when a flush was done. They turned out to be a couple of wimps apparently because the hose was not tight enough…

The very next time that a flush was done the hose blew off the valve right there where the hapless tender was standing when he cranked the valve wide open. The explosion of vaporized piss and shit was literally right in his face and the vapor cloud engulfed that area of the deck and chambers and the man was soaked to the bone with some of the absolutely nastiest stuff you could imagine. His screams were heard all over the deck at the moment he realized what had just happened to him. He started cursing and crying and running to the stairwell to go below deck and get into one of the showers fully dressed. That entire area of the deck and chambers had to be scrubbed down with soap and water over and over again and they still could not get rid of the smell. No one ventured over that way unless they absolutely had no other choice.

The tender smelled for days afterward, the odor seemed to have permeated his skin almost permanently and of course he became the butt of many jokes about what had happened to him. I was certainly glad it wasn’t me although I did get yelled at about the whole thing, the superintendent on the job tried to reprimand me for not installing the hose myself, but he could barely contain his laughter the whole time he was supposedly yelling at me. Me? I thought it was one of the funniest things ever!

I know I’ve been slacking lately on posting, I think it’s just a phase though. I still enjoy it very much, I just can’t seem to come up with any good topics lately except for my diving stories. I have plenty of those but I don’t want this blog to be about that alone. There’s a lot going on in my life right now but nothing that I want to blog about for fear of messing up a couple of good things. Really good things. Hell yes!

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I’ve never done one of these so forgive me for doing it once! A list of silly searches that found my blog!

10) One man firehose handling- I personally don’t ask for assistance when I take a leak, so hands off beotch!

9) Right place, wrong time- Haven’t we all been to that place at the wrong time? What’s the point of Google searching for it. Must be looking for trouble with that one.

8)Raped by 2 girls- One of my fantasys that came true! Can’t blame ya for that one buddy.

7)Nude pictures of Morgan Webb- Woooo she is so hot. Hell yeah, when you find some, send me the links will ya!!

6)Kate Beckinsale bodacious- She’s one of my faves, right under Sandra Bullock, but is she truly bodacious, I have no idea. You’re looking in the wrong place pally!

5) Grandma sex with dogs- ok this one just blows my mind, what the hell is grandma sex anyway, doing it with grandma bent over her walker maybe? And then enticing a Great Dane to join in? Jeez, get a freekin’ life whoever did that stupid search…

4)Cannibilism sex- Ok, now I have the creepys, this brings a whole new meaning to the phrase hungry for love…. go eat somewhere else dammit!!

3)Penis spurting- Ok, I understand where that one came from, one of my favorite activities actually. Apparently, I’m not the only one….

2)Blowjob cock-biting – Ok I admit it, I like teeth dammit, yeah so I enjoy a little pain with my pleasure…. so what! Leave me alone!! Dammit !!

1)Picture of penis wiper blades- Haha This one is my favorite. Can you buy penis wiper blades? Anyone know? If so I think I might want a set for my car!!! Hell yeah!!!

Have a stellar weekend!!!