Things Overheard at the Local Supercuts

Supercuts. Every Time.
Except When We Screw Up. Then, You Know, Someplace Else Might Be A Better Option.

It says that right there on their website. Okay, not the second line, that was my own addition. I got my hair cut at Super(duper)cuts yesterday and came home with a lopsided head. Unfortunately I didn't notice my Gumbyness until I'd been home for an hour or two, and by then the fine establishment had closed. So, I went today after work to ask that they please cancel the hex they'd placed on my 'fro.

I've got to say, I'm glad I did. After explaining my plight and sitting down to read Time Magazine whilst I waited, a woman came in with her son, who was maybe seven years old. Mommy explained that she'd called ahead and the tyke's name was already on the list, blah blah blah, and then they walked over to the little half-shelf where every Get Your Hair And/Or Nails Did place keeps all their magazines. The boy started digging through the literary treasure trove, and Mommy kept saying "did you find it? Is it there?" Naturally, I thought that maybe they'd been waiting in the store earlier, and the kid accidentally left his copy of The Great Gatsby behind (kids read that, right?) and was anxious to retrieve it.

No, actually he was looking for the stupid book with all the pictures of hairstyles in it. People actually use that book? I thought it was there for comedic purposes. Apparently, it's for seven-year-olds who want to look like douchebags but can't decide between Summer's Eve and Massingill. Anyway, while he's perusing the Date Rapist Directory, the store's radio, which is tuned to one of our Greatest Hits From the 80s, 90s, and More stations, begins to play "Jessie's Girl." And I hear the boy singing along. Every word. Why does a seven-year old know all the lyrics to "Jessie's Girl?" I blame Guitar Hero. This is probably a completely baseless accusation.

Then, his mom decides to make a phone call. After sitting and yapping on the phone for about ten minutes, she says something along the lines of "I'd better go outside, I'm being rude to the people in here." Over the course of the next five or six minutes (while still standing inside the store) she repeats it no less than two more times: "I'm being rude to the people here, talking on my phone," before finally stepping outside. One: Supercuts does not equal Library. Two: I get the distinct impression she was sitting in front of the TV with her carrot-cake-flavored Bon Bons this morning and heard Doctor Phil say that it's rude to talk on your cell phone while standing in the middle of a semi-populated retail establishment, and it came as some sort of novel revelation to her. So, like an elementary school student who learns a new swear word, she repeated it at every opportunity. Evidently it's all right to be rude, as long as you acknowledge that you are being rude and make it clear that you don't really want to be. I did not know that.

When she saw through the window that her little pop superstar's name (which I intentionally neglected to file away in my memory) had been called, Mommy stepped back into the store for... some reason. I didn't hear anything she said to the clerk until "sorry, I just stepped outside because I didn't want to be rude." In case you're wondering, the phone was in fact still adhered to the side of her head. It seemed the thought of simply hanging up had completely eluded her, like Dr. Kimble to her mind's Clouseau (Protip: Pop-culture references are not to be mixed lightly). She then darted back outside to continue the conversation. Instead of, I don't know, making sure her little darling's scalp didn't end up perforated by a pair of finely-honed shears.

Oh, there's more. While I was sitting in the barber chair getting my dome reupholstered, I overheard the boy (who had been seated in the chair next to mine) calmly explaining that he would like his hair cut to look like Batista's. So, quick Risk Factor check: Big Rick Springfield fan? Check. Big pro wrestling fan? Check. Inattentive, dull-witted mother? Check. Let that simmer for ten, twelve years, he'll be a real keeper.

Finally, after my coiffure was repaired and I stepped out the door of Supercuts, I overheard a snippet of Mommy's phone conversation: "I'm making money. Oh, I am making money."

Dear Lord, please don't let her be rich, too. The world does not need another Nick Hogan.

And the perfect cap to my outing? On the way home, I saw this huge anti-war protest going on around the clock tower at Largo Central Park. I mean, there must have been at least... three people there, holding signs. No, that's exactly how many there were. Three. And one of them was dressed up as Rorshach. I wouldn't lie about something like that. I'm genetically predisposed towards not making up that kind of crap. Mitch Hedberg once said, "six people isn't convincing." So, even if you allow that Rorshach (even an imposter Rorshach) is as persuasive as four normal men... they still aren't convincing anyone. But it was definitely an "I wish I had my camera" moment.

Next time you need a haircut, go to Supercuts. Every Time.

Useless Cat.

Sheila and I have a pet cat. Well, Sheila has a pet cat. What I have is an animal which I must tolerate living in my home. Anyway, Zorro (that's the cat) is completely useless. He just lounges around and occasionally vomits on something. If there's a bug in the house and he knows about it, he might chase it. That's about it.

Zorro isn't like some cats, the cats that do funny or cute things and you take pictures of them doing said things and then e-mail the photos to all your coworkers and clog up their Outlook inbox with banality and hey look people, they only give us 50MB limits on these things so why don't you get back to work and stop harassing me with your dumb pets and by the way I checked on Snopes and that story you e-mailed me about the Nieman-Marcus cookie recipe is totally bogus.

No, Zorro does nothing worthwhile at all. I can't even make a decent lolcat out of him. I've tried:








I mean, these are the worst lolcats ever, right? I won't even waste the time, bandwidth, and server space of the good folks at I Can Has Cheezburger with these failed attempts at kitty humor. Zorro just isn't funny. Except for his extreme irrational fear of foam pool noodles (apparently also known as water logs). That is hilarious.

Over-Thinking Children's Television, vol. 1

Franklin is a Canadian cartoon aimed at preschoolers, based on a series of children's books. It's about a little anthropomorphic turtle named Franklin who is, as near as I can tell, mentally retarded, and manages to wiggle his way into any stupid, easily-avoided predicament that may present itself at any given time.

The show also endorses genocide.

That's a shocking claim, but stay with me here. Almost none of the other characters in the cartoon aside from Franklin's stupid turtle family have names (and even then it's only him and his little sister). They are all just called by whatever animal they happen to be. Franklin's best friend is a bear named Bear. Other idiots he hangs out with are named Rabbit, Snail, Beaver, and Fox. The soccer coach is Mrs. Porcupine, and the teacher is named Mister Owl.

The very few characters who do have proper names are younger siblings (a couple of Franklin's friends have these, I think), fictional characters like Franklin's favorite superhero, and the occasional professional athlete or something.

What this leads me to believe is that in the twisted Franklin universe, the turtles reign supreme and have virtually wiped out all other species. Only a single breeding pair of each other type of animal has been allowed to survive, hence there being a Mr. Bear and a Mrs. Bear, for instance. With no diversity, what need is there for names other than a generic species identifier? If they were enslaving the populace they might at least have ID numbers and barcodes tattooed on them, but nope. The skunk is Skunk, the raccoon is Raccoon, all parents and authority figures are Mr. and/or Mrs., and that's all there is to it.

The fact that other characters with real names only appear in one or two episodes is further proof of the atrocities that have taken place off-camera. They're probably all being shipped off to concentration camps after their token appearances. Or maybe slaughtered for food.

I don't know why nobody has spoken up about this before. These hard-shelled dictators must be stopped at all cost.

Here's how much of a nerd I am:

Okay, the new Pepsi logo:




bears a very slight resemblance to the Seamonkey logo:




So when I first started seeing all these Pepsi billboards that just had words written across them and nothing else, with the new logo in place of the letter "O," like this one here, I actually believed for a little while that it was a new Seamonkey logo... and I thought to myself, "Wow, where did the Mozilla Foundation come up with all the money for this big ad campaign?"


Clearly, I am not a Pepsi drinker.

Reality TV Memes

It is with great, agonizing shame that I confess to occasionally watching the circus that calls itself "reality television." I am fully aware that these shows are utterly devoid of intellectual, moral, or sociological value, but there's something almost therapeutic about subjecting myself to this assault on good taste. I can't help but feel better about my own life when I see a bunch of idiots volunteering themselves to be publicly humiliated for weeks on end, in the hopes of gaining some small measure of fame and/or fortune. However much of a fat loser I am, I will never be the guy getting into a drunken fistfight with two other guys over a plate of cold nachos to impress some skank with serious self-esteem issues and a third-grade reading level who, even if I should emerge victorious from the gamut of debasement that comprises this "competition" for her "affection," will only dump me a week after the cameras shut off anyway.

In short, Sheila and I make sport of laughing at morons. We take great joy in it. You do too, don't lie. I can't even count how many ridiculous and sometimes even slightly clever one-liners we swipe from these shows and use in daily interaction with each other, because making fun of stupid people doesn't stop when the TV is turned off. Oh, no.

There's the fake drinking game inspired by Whitney "I Shouldn't Have Beaten Anya" Thompson from ANTM (do a shot every time she says "I'm plus size"), which later morphed into the "I'm a retired model" drinking game that ended too soon when whatever-that-dumb-waif's-name-is was forced to drop off the Rock of Love bus due to health problems. I was looking forward to making fun of her some more. There's our impersonation of Jason and Grant from Ghost Hunters ("Well, we got some video where you can see an eight-foot tall apparition of some sort of ungodly goat-man, which pointed at us and said 'Hey, I'm a ghost, get the f**k out of my house,' and then the dining room table levitated off the ground and anally violated our camera guy, but I just don't think that's enough evidence for us to say this house is haunted"). Then, Real Chance of Love gave us "Fake-ass Puffy," which we declared to be the new "Nappy-headed Ho."

These things are stupid as hell but they make us laugh. We started jokingly referring to them as memes. Really, the only thing that separates a stupid inside joke from a meme is the number of people who are in on the joke.

So our current brain-rotting poison of choice is Tool Academy. This show can only be described as awesome by way of pathetic. Plus, by the time the first episode was halfway over, it had served up two such "memes." In fact, I'd like to see these become actual Internet memes, because everybody should find humor in the things that I think are funny but really shouldn't because they are actually just stupid.

The first (and weaker) of the two is the transformation of the phrase "Mister Awesome" into an adjective. Is something so truly mind-bogglingly amazing that "awesome" alone is painfully ill-equipped to describe it? Well, then, it is Mister Awesome.

I shall present an example:

Dude 1: "Dude, did you see the trailer for Transformers 2?"

Dude 2: "Oh, hells yeah, dude, it was...
"

But the crown jewel in this regalia of buffoonery is: "Mega please." The words tumbled out of that heifer Margo's mouth and into my very central nervous system. To truly appreciate it, it must be understood in its original context, so if you haven't already seen it, check it out here. Suffer through the ad, jump to about the 6:45 point and enjoy.

This phrase (much like the entire show) exudes some kind of primordial, incomprehensible blend of idiocy and brilliance that it makes me want to laugh just thinking about it. It cries out to be meme-ified. Are you perusing your favorite news aggregate site, or discussion forum, or blog, when you come across an incredibly inane, implausible, or otherwise ridiculous comment made by some trollish fop (or, y'know, a stupid post like this one)? Hit 'em with one of these...

...and hear the "Oohhh, snap!" reverberating all across the interwebs.

I might just shop this around over at 4chan. Everyone knows if you want a meme to take hold, it's gotta start at 4chan. Every single Internet meme in the universe originated there. Even memes that existed prior to 4chan originated at 4chan. I don't know how that works. 4chan is a strange and frightening place, to be avoided at all cost. Unless you're trying to get a meme to take root.

I don't want to be that guy, though. You know, the guy who tries to force something to happen that really ought to just happen organically. The guy who makes up a random nickname for himself and insists that other people call him by that nickname in everyday conversation. You can't give yourself a nickname.

I also don't want to be the guy that people come looking for in six months when "Mega please" has run its course, is all over the Internet, and everybody is sick of it but people still keep using it and why won't it go away it's not funny anymore aahhhhhh!!!

So, like I was saying, this is the new Rickroll, people. You saw it here first. Well, no, come to think of it, you probably didn't.