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What the fuck is up with eye patches?

What the fuck is up with eye patches? Why is it that every time someone looses an eye and chooses to wear an eye patch, they always end up wearing the cliche black, pirate-esque eye patch? People have been losing eyes for thousands of FUCKING years. Ever since the first BB gun was forged in the fires of Mordor's Mount Doom by Oliver Winchester in 13043 BC, people have been loosing their depth perception in record numbers. With such an extreme FUCKING influx of new eye patch users, don't you think that there would be some type of new development in eye patch fashion? Maybe an eye patch that was, I don't know, maybe a DIFFERENT FUCKING COLOR? How about a camoflouge eye patch? Or a blue eye patch? Doesn't the United States have some of the best creative minds on the planet? Why don't some people put their FUCKING HEADS TOGETHER and maybe roll out the first new eye patch design in 15 thousand FUCKING YEARS?

What the fuck is up with trampolines?

Trampolines cripple and injure countless kids each year. Who the fuck thought that it would be a good idea to take the trampoline, originally intended for use in the FUCKING CIRCUS and manufacture it for home use? What the fuck is is up with this shit? When some baby chokes on a furby and dies, there is an immediate recall, yet when someone gets double bounced by his fat neighbor and does a faceplant on the concrete, nothing happens? Why is it that we go crazy and induce a NATIONAL FUCKING RECALL of tomatoes when a couple hundred people get sick, yet we do nothing when trampolines continue to put kids in FUCKING WHEEL CHAIRS? That's right, I know where the caps lock button is.

What the fuck is up with the weather always changing?

What the fuck is up with the weather always changing? Just when it gets to be how I like it (75 and sunny) something goes and changes it. It might get cloudy, it might rain, or the season might change. What the fuck is up with having four seasons anyway? God, one is enough. After I finish this post, I will be writing a letter to my local senator complaining about this. Hopefully, if enough of us write, we will one day make a difference. See this helpful article if you are unsure of how to write a letter to congress: http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa020199.htm

What the fuck is up with old ladies and their hair these days?

Why is it that old ladies always seem to cut their hair shorter and shorter as they age? Is there some un-fucking-written law that requires them to do so? If there is, I want to see it. I know that when I get old, if my wife cuts her hair shorter than ear's length, then she is getting the backhand.

Parking Citation

I stumbled upon this on the internet today, I photoshopped it and added an extra field on the bottom for "other."

I plan on heading down to kinkos sometime this week to get a bunch of these printed out. I suggest you do the same.

Luncheon? What the fuck is up with this shit?

For years I have been boggled by this word. Have you ever been invited to a luncheon and thought to yourself, "What the fuck is this shit?" Well, I have too. Everybody pronounces it, lunch-in, but the spelling of the word leads you to believe that it is pronounced lunch-ee-on. Such a pronunciation sounds like some type of futuristic lunch where rich Texan oil tycoons hover around on their jet packs, sip fine wine, and talk about how much they hate minorities. Seriously people? You know, this is why we have wars and hate and greed in the world. We need to end this bullshit before it ends us. If you have observed another word of this nature, please let me know in the comments and I will rant about it for you.

Funny Essay

Here is an essay I wrote a while back for my freshmen writing seminar class up at Providence. It was the summary of a 17 page article about "The Use Of Sidewalks." Great. Sidewalks. Enthralling. Surprisingly, I got a passing grade on this. I will be sure to scan the original with all the teacher's comments and upload that soon. I would have posted this a while ago, but I didn't have a blog until now.

Tim Pleines

The Use of Sidewalks

03/06/08

In Jane Jacobs' essay entitled The Use of Sidewalks she discusses the factors that go into making a sidewalk/street “equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, out of the presence of strangers...”(Page 241). Apparently, Jacobs was unable to think of a more interesting topic to write about. Jacobs, a college dropout, manages to construct an essay that rivals the 9/11 Commission Report in terms of sheer boringness, which is a feat that even I would be proud of if I was a college dropout turned renowned urban theorist.

Jacobs argues that an ideal sidewalk or city street is to perform a couple of basic functions: to act as a mode of transportation for pedestrians, to properly handle strangers, and to perform as a self policing safety asset. For these functions to be performed properly, the sidewalk must operate in a “delicate sidewalk ballet”(Page 252). This ballet has three parts. First, “There must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space”. Second, there must always be eyes on the street. Buildings must be oriented towards the street so that residents' eyes are directed there. Third, the sidewalk must have a sufficient amount of traffic to “both add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in the buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers”(Page 241). To create this traffic, there needs to be a proper “sprinkling” of local businesses such as bars, night clubs, strip clubs, monasteries, chop shops, meth labs, Starbucks and a sweat shop full of illegal Chinese immigrants working around the clock to make those little umbrellas that you put in your iced tea. Such a “sprinkling” will keep the sidewalk relatively busy at all hours of the day and ensure that users of the sidewalk are safe. Jacobs goes on to talk about the negative effect that urban renewal has on a self-policing community. Urban renewal is to pedestrians' safety as to what this poorly thought out analogy is to my grade on this assignment. As buildings are modernized and rebuilt, they attract a different kind of resident, a resident that is not part of the close knit community and has no intention of becoming one. These types of people live the dog-eat- dog work-a-day on-the-go bluetooth headset microwavable hot pocket lifestyle and take the security of the neighborhood for granted. Eventually these people become the neighborhood, and thats when they really get screwed over. Violence reemerges and eventually gets so bad that a father, struggling to support his family, cannot even take a stroll down to the neighborhood drug dealer to buy a gram of cocaine for his starving wife and kids without risking getting shot, stabbed, iced, popped, capped or otherwise smoked. The residents eventually move away to a safe neighborhood and start the cycle again, still ignorant as to why things got so bad in the first place. Jacobs later goes on to criticize the way that some cities have handled the gang violence and turf warfare that have resulted from the urban renewal and the accompanying overall decline in safety . These cities have ignored the source of the problem- a “sidewalk ballet” so bad that you would have thought that Michael Bay had directed it- and have addressed the problem with only topical solutions. They have put up fences and created treaties between gangs dividing the territories up amongst them.

I think that it is important to keep in mind that although Jacobs' so-called urban theories seem to hold water today, in a year or two when things start to look more like Star Wars Episode 3 and we have cities built way up in the sky, flying cars, guns that shoot laser beams, fancy new side walks and a woman in a charge of the galactic senate, we will have to re-work Jacobs' theories which means that I will have to read yet another essay by Jacobs that will probably be called something like The Use Of Futuristic Looking Particle Beam Sidewalks and frankly, that is not a future that I am looking forward to.

Enzyte Fiasco

Well, this is my first post. I can only hope that this blog goes on to bring me great fame and fortune, and perhaps even will aid in my being elected the President of Earth someday, but I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. So where to start...

As an unemployed student home from his first year at Providence College for a long summer, naturally I was bored. I decided to drive down to Wal-Mart and walk around aimlessly. I eventually ended up in the vitamins and supplements aisle. After a few moments, I noticed a one month supply of enzyte on the shelf. As you know, enzyte is the popular "male enhancement" pill that frequently appears in commercials. Because the commercials are so intentionally vague as to the pill's affects, I was a little curious. TAKE NOTE LADIES: I SAID I WAS CURIOUS, NOT THAT I NEEDED IT. Fast forward five minutes, I am scanning the item at the self checkout station. The item set off a red flag, meaning that a store employee had to come over and check my ID to make sure I was 18 before I could make the purchase. I didn't have my license with me. Oh Monkeyballs. Keep in mind, there were five people behind me in line, and this was the only item I was buying. So, one of the employees eventually lingers on over and rips my item out of the plastic bag on the checkout station, holds it up, and says loudly and in an incriminating and disaproving tone of voice, "Enzyte huh?" I explained to her that I didn't have my ID. She says, "You can't buy this" and walks away. At this point I could feel myself being judged by every single person behind me. I left as fast as I could.

That is a little taste of what this blog is going to be about.