Sad Faced Boy

Merrrrrrrrrrrr

Thursday, October 19, 2006

I think you need to a get a deep down sonic, nano, dynamic tooth cleansing.

Fucking dentists. I'm angry and I really thought that I couldn't get this angry about my dental appointments. How angry I ranted to five different people and then HAD to blog about it. About five months ago I get in the mail a little post card with a blurry picture of my dentist shaking hands with another man with the caption saying "I am retiring, this other man he is taking my practice." I don't usually mention real names in posts for fear that some yahoo might actually figure out who I'm talking about and then track me down and sit in the bushes across the street waiting to take pot shots at me. But like Jason Statham has shown me in "Transporter 2" even the highest and loftiest of rules can be disregarded. For him it was for a tasty Asian baby while for me it was for no other reason than the throbbing of my gums in time with the beating of my heart. The person's name? BANG, you know like bang bang your dead, [BANG!] Emeril Legasse [bang], like you touch my mother fucking gums again and I'm gonna [BANG] you in the head [BANG]. It's a ridiculous name, a Hollywood dentistry name and of course to go along with such a silly name one must have some catch phrase associated with it which Bang does.

"Start school with a [bang]."

[Bang], [bang]... [bang] [bang] [bang]. Ugh. Could have been worse but seriously with a name like that Bang you'd be able to come up with groan worthy catch phrases of the elementary school quality. Bang enters exam room, hands in pockets, spins, pulls out each hand formed in a gun like gesture and says "[Bang] [Bang]. Stop gingivitis dead in it's tracks." I wonder if when Bang goes to the bars Bang makes gun like gestures and clicky noises with his mouth when he's trying to get the attention of a fine woman.

My appointment today was at 11am and dutifully I left early enough from work to get to my appointment on time. Why I did that who knows since my scheduled six month checkup took two hours. Upon arriving I am greeted by the Genghis Khan of the gum pillaging hygenist world. She and I have issues though I have a feeling it isn't just me. Maybe I look like a boyfriend from high school that cheated on her or maybe she takes it as her personal mission to make everyone's gums bleed regardless of how healthy they are. Every time she cleans my teeth I walk out with a smock covered with enough gore to make me look more like an extra in one of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies and with enough blood in my stomach to make Dracula turn blood red with envy. Today was worse because not only did she make me bleed but she did some new gum recession test to see if my gums were at dangerous levels of recessiveness. That required another 30 minutes of her poking around EACH AND EVERYONE of my teeth three times sometimes having to poke more because she would loose her place. I'm not sure if anyone has ever had one of these tests however it seems that part of the test is to poke a persons gums until they wince and then poke them again. I'm guessing that the faster you wince the worse off you are so next time I go in I'm going to drink a fifth of Jack to deaden my sense of pain.

After all of this they were like "Your gums are potentially problematic, we shouldn't be seeing this much bleeding" and I was like just wait till I get my hands on a knife so that I can cut you and then we'll see how well your blood coagulates.

Dentistry should be illegal it's a guilt trip with self induced torture wrapped up in an expensive bill with doubting looks for a bow. I tell them that my mother flosses, brushes her teeth twice a day with a Soniccare, uses a prescription mouth wash still has bleeding gums when she come in for her QUARTERLY cleanings. I try to throw out the idea that this could be genetic. Alas while the the dentist and his inquisitor say that can be the case I can see that in their cold dead dentistry hearts that shines out through their dental glares from the corners of their little dental eyes through their mocking tones that they don't really believe it. I'm positive now that one of the required tests in dental school besides the best torture methods found during the time of the Spanish Inquisition are how to look at someone out of the corner of your eye all the while making that smugy smug doubting glance full of hate sprinkled with a pinch of glee for the love of pain. Visualize the class, I'd imagine it would require hours of looking at oneself in the mirror in order to create the proper face. A face that in a moment can communicate so much doubt, loathing, and snideness. The final test would be that each student has to walk up to a complete stranger on the street make their face and if they reduce that person to a mumbling puddle they pass otherwise a big old F.

The whip cream on top of my pineapple upside down cake of pain was when the dentist said that I would need to come back for three more appointments. The first two appointments would be for some deep sonic nanite gum tooth cleansing that would require them to numb my gums with some sort of local anesthetic and would take two hours per appointment and some two hundred dollars after insurance. A month after the second appointment I'd have to come back for them to check to see if my gums were healing. If that wasn't ENOUGH they said that I would need to switch to a quarterly cleaning regiment for the next couple of years to try to get the plaque and bacteria under control. I've just met this guy and it felt like he/she had come over to my house drank all my whiskey, vomited in my pillow case, shit in my chair and then put his/her head through my T.V. I asked the dentist in a pleading tone, "Can't I TRY to floss more, use mouth wash and then come back in six months. If my gums are still bad we can do your new process to re-allocate money from your account to mine?" The answer? NO, we need to nip this one in the butt, as if he was the head of MI6 and my gums were some sort of "Smert' Shpionam" plot to kill all agents and it had to be stopped. If only he could have said that we needed to assassinate my gingivatis before it killed anymore, or if when I asked him what this process entailed he would said "That's on a need to know basis old chap and you... don't need to know."

So goodbye dentist and goodbye to your crazy cleanings. Maybe I'll have it done in six months when I get another person to tell me that I need it. Until then it will be daily flossing, brushing of one's teeth with special gum stimulating brushes, mouth wash and the drinking of fluffy white baby seal blood. Until then apparently I'm running the risk of all my teeth falling out, heart attacks, stubbed toes and shunning from the village elders.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Test, Read, Nap, Test, Test, Test, Read, Read, Read

TEMPERING THE PENIS IN THE FIRES OF RAGE
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You know that a break down is eminent when you find out that all the code and all the testing you did for days and days was for code that doesn't work the way it should. I've come to the conclusion that I down right suck at making assumptions. If I assume A the reality is always B but I keep making assumptions mainly because if I keep asking people for clarification I start to feel like I am either bothering them or coming across as being particularly stupid. No one likes to feel stupid. It's like a coworker once said about how most people think they aren't stupid which is why most don't ever try to make themselves smarter. He then went on to say that stupid people who know they are stupid are just lazy. I agreed with him with that first part and I agree with him on the second part it's just that I sort of fell into that second group and never got up the desire to get up out of it. So... my break down I think became apparent when instead of trying to walk around my desk to get to my file cabinet I walked over my desk to get to it for my rage knew no going around, it knew no circumventing, it only knew of straight lines much like how a bull only sees the the red cape. I of course found out that my assumption that the peg needed to be square when in fact it needed to be round was the issue which then caused me to take my rage and turn it inwards and attempt to make a hate diamond from my anger coal. So I did what any sane person trying to make hate diamonds would do, I went home.

I'm doing much better today. Yesterday the thought of smashing all the square pegs into round holes with nothing but my dick seemed maddening. Today with a much clearer head I decided to forgo the *Hanzo the Razor dick pounding technique and went instead with the chainsaw to slice off all those irritating angles. My main irritation with all of this is that this isn't the first or the second mis-communication about how something should work or the first time that I was given information about something after the fact. Whatever, this is me bitchy wheel here me meow.

*Back to that Hanzo the Razor because one really needs to explain the whole dick pounding. Well maybe one doesn't but this one does and so I shall. The Wiki description while short and to the point doesn't mention that watching Hanzo the Razor movies has this 70's cop drama/private investigator feel all the while marching around in traditonal samurai clothes, top knots, samurai swords, giant purple sunglasses and afro's. Afros? Japanese guys? Well there was one guy at the beginning. Period based police stories? Sort of. Think of the Hanzo the Razor series as more of a historical fiction where they added little things like Hanzo's ability to have sex with any woman and afterwards they will tell him everything and love him for it. Interrogation via intercourse, not bad Japanese people not bad. There was a point when Hanzo was "interrogating" a woman by doing cunninglingus. It wasn't like they showed him actually going on down on the woman but they did choose to take a more artistic route by basically putting some sort of pink membrane over the camera lens, pointing it up towards some light and then had someone make tongue flicking motions across the lens. Cute. I felt very dirty, so dirty and nearly had to lower the shades to hide my shame. Then it ended Hanzo got his answers and onward he went in his James Bond, Shaft, Spencer for Hire, Samurai strut.

The whole beating one's penis came from a point in the first movie where Hanzo is constantly torturing himself for no other reason than he needs to know the extent of pain that the human body can go through. That way when he is torturing/interrogating men (and no he doesn't "interrogate" men) he will know when people are faking pain and when they are in pain. Among is favorite choices of torture are to lift, yes lift, his penis onto a piece of wood that has a nice cutout made in the shape of a penis. He then hits it as hard as he can with a wooden paddle and after that starts pelvic thrusting into a bag of dry rice. Now that I think about it I'm not sure if that's a form of testing himself with torture or if he is tempering his penis like a blacksmith heats, hammers and cools a piece of steal to make it stronger. Then when Hanzo interrogates there is no oopsy to his "interrogations". That all aside it actually is a decent movie, sure it feels like you are watching a black exploitation movie like "Foxy Brown" or "Shaft" but production values are high (ish) and if you can get past all the weird sexual things it's a lot of fun to watch.


INCHY WORMS
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Last night after my whole pounding square pegs into circular holes with my dick experience I was quietly enjoying an episode of "The Avengers" in my man cave. Man cave? Yes. A place for a man to be a man with his manly and sometimes childish possessions. It doesn't have to be a cave like a basement it can just be a normal room where all of a man's shit that his significant other can't stand goes into and is agreed upon will never leave. Among my prized positions in my man hole besides my broken cameras and 1:1 replica colt peacemaker cap guns is a picture from Tiny Showcase of two gorrillaz. For some reason when SG was really young and visiting the zoo with her parents a Gorilla grabbed her when she got to close to the bars and started screetching and spitting at her all the while cursing her in gorillaeeze. Ever since then she has been terrified of Gorillaz and for that reason the picture of the two Gorillaz sits in my office. (Actually I think her Dad used to freighten her with a Gorilla mask)

So sitting in the man trap enjoying some goofey spy stuff when I hear:

"Why are there black worms on the ceiling in the bathroom."

What's YOUR first thought when you hear the words "black", "worms", "ceiling", AND "bathroom"? Mine are scenes from "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" when Willie (Kate Capshaw) had to walk through that giant bug infested corridor to pull a lever to get Indi and short round out of that room with spikes. Ick.

Actually ick doesn't cut it but I have no idea how to find or even correctly write onomotopeia words in English, shit I didn't even notice that I was using "versus" where I wanted to use "verses" in the last post. Now a language that is chocked full of it's chocolaty goodness of onomotopeia's is Japanese. When I took Japanese I slowly started to realize there was this whole array of onomatopeia words. Maybe that's not so remarkable maybe other languages have them and maybe English has them too but because I'm a native speaker I don't relize it. The interesting thing isn't so much that Japanese has them but that there seem to be so many and that they are used so frequently. Examples? Err well "pera pera" is usually used in a sentence to describe how someone is speaking very fluently or smoothly. Then there's "giri giri" for when you barely complete something or get to something on time. I could go on but then you'd have to speak Japanese and I don't even do that anymore so on with the worms.

Visions of ceiling worms danced through my head before I entered the bathroom. Worms crawling through little holes in the ceiling, some inching, some napping while others standing at some sort of worm attention with their little wormy heads looking around as if scouting for next head to drop on. Where would they have come from? Who knows I've stopped wondering the why and started trying to embrace the "how do I fix this shit" questions.

I got up walked into the bathroom to check out these "black worms" to find out that they look more like fat eyelashes and instead of a drippy ceiling of worminess there was two. In the morning I remember SG saying something like I need to go into the bathroom but I don't want to be in there with the worms. Little tiny harmless worms, Jeez. SG will of course be the first person to proclaim to everyone that I don't like bugs either. To back that up she almost always has to tell the story about me shrieking over a little green bug on my jacket while sitting in her car on the way to high school. Shriek.. as if. That last bit was a perfect example of the potentially negative aspects of being a "high school sweetheart".

Is high school one word or two.


Alright, so why is it when you tell people that you have been together since high school and they almost always make that cooing "ahh" sound which is a "all isn't that wonderful", "darling", "sweet", "adorable", wrapped up in one exhalation. We always tell people that it's because we were lazy and they laugh and then we look them in the eye and say it again and it starts to dawn on them. So yes the only real issue with dating someone for nearly a decade is a giza pyramid of dirt that one could potentially have on the other but thankfully there will always be first corinthians to set us along the right path when that desire cometh and the bell ringeth and all of that gong stuff too.

ONWARDS TO GLORY AND RANDOMNESS THROUGH READING
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Today I was doing a little reading via the interweb in an attempt to avoid doing testing which really amounted to nothing more than me reading Slate and getting caught back up on my anger management sessions by reading some old posts on THL blog.
A little nugget that was lodged into one of THL rants about VH-1's top hottest guys was a link about CEO Joe Francis founder of Mantra and maker of the fine video products "Girls Gone Wild". Beware monkey cats the article is long and it will require some concentration to get through it. If you don't want to read the article let me sum up one of the more humorous things it mentioned about Joey. In 2004 some guy broke into Joe Francis's house and made him at gun point sodomize himself with a dildo in front of a camera. The assailant then tried to blackmail Joey with the video tape but sadly was caught by the Police with the help of a "hot" tip provided by no other than Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton and hot tips, can't you just see her kicking down doors and screetching tires as she tears around LA looking for the Joey F.'s blackmailer in true private investigator fashion? No? Err well I can't either but I still find it humorous.

I can't remember if I have raved about the webzine Slate but if I haven't let me just say that if you like humor and news and aren't easily offended it's a great site to read. I like how Slate has articles that are all over the place from current world events, politics, and business to articles about Jay-Z and what champaign he should switch too. If Hip-hop and champaign isn't your style then there's always an photo article on the history of the bikini, or examples of how famous composer Johannes Brahms was a wise ass much like Hugh Laurie's character House. Then there's an article about how some companies are making box wine that isn't terrible. Prepare thyself box wine haters. Truthfully I was never a box wine person probably because most of what comes in a box is that hyper sugary white zinfandel that no one but underage girls, middle aged mothers and a friend of mine Lobster consumes. My favorite in college was always the Carlos Rossi jugs of Burgandy, two glasses and you were swearing like a sailor and vomiting like Adam Savage.

Of all the articles I've read so far though one of my favorites has to be one about a guy who went to India a second time to see if he really did hate it the first time. I found it to be a great article not because I hate India but because he dosesn't attempt to gloss over the aspects of India that make my mid-western, bug phobic, dirt phobic, WTF phobic personality cringe. I still want to go to India don't get me wrong and I have no illusions that it will the be one of those sipping Corona's on a white sandy beach vacations. NOTE: Before any link clicking begins realize the article is a five part deal where you can get to the next part by clicking the numbers in the little boxes at the top of the article.

Did I read all of that in a day? Well no I lied most of the Slate articles I have read over the last couple of weeks but was just to lazy to mention them. Read up bitches taste the interwebs liquid knowlege.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

A whirlwind of middle eastern tidbits.

WHISPERING SATANIC FATWA VERSES
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Over the last couple of months I have been reading Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" and last night I finally finished it (Really correction I finished it over a month ago). (Note to SG) I know I've already talked to you about this and countless others, I'm sure you are tired of me talking about it and maybe I would have been better off having done an entry about this earlier but I will talk about it again. "Satanic Verses" is the novel that Salman Rushdie received among other awards the most undesired fatwa by none other than the past Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeinia. Supreme Leader, it has quite a ring to it I think instead of being software engineer I may try to better myself and work towards the job title Supreme Leader I wonder what sort of career track one would have to follow to get to that point. Not the point, so a fatwa right is basically when someone proclaims something about the Islamic faith usually in relation to clearing up some grey areas or issuing some laws or if you are feeling up to it declaring death sentences as was the case with Rushdie. "Fatawa" say it like Barbara Walters, actually it sounds like something that she would mispronounce.


Side Note: Before I get to far into this explosion of thought realize that I am by no means a scholar of any sorts just someone that reads books and looks up stuff on Wikipedia. I don't claim that what I say is correct this is just me blogging.


Have you ever wondered what it would take for someone to issue a death sentence for a specific person to an entire religious body? I mean that goes way beyond taking your best friends girlfriend or killing someone's beloved pet accidentally. I picked up the book in part because I really liked "The Moors Last Sigh" (another Rushdie book) and in part because I was curious about what could be so blasphemous about it. I could go into the book but then you could go read the book and then I wouldn't have to tell you about it. I will throw out that the book covers two Indian men who survived an airplane blowing up at 30,000 feet. After the crash both men attempt to deal with their life after death experiences. The book goes back and forth between the main characters trying to put their lives back together and dream sequences where Rushdie embellishes early historical Islamic events. It wasn't until I was about three fourths of the way through the book that I hit one of the dream sequences that made me realize where all the anger came from. The dream sequence focused on Mahound (Muhammad) and his return to Jahalia (Mecca) after having left Jahalia many years earlier after uttering the "Satanic Verses". That "Satanic Verses" was that Mahound had a sort of lapse where he agreed that three other goddesses could stand next to Allah. He declared this to all at a market in Jahalia and later regretted it and claimed that instead of being told by this after wrestling with the Angel Gabriel he was instead tricked by Satan. I dunno if that really is THE big deal but I figured I'd explain where the "Satanic Verses" came from.

A little later in Rushdie's fabricated history after Mahound leaves Jahalia Mahound becomes a great prophet and ends up spreading Islam all over the region. It was after all of this that he decided to come back to Jahalia and cleanse it's "Black House" of all of it's deities. However before Mahound made it to Jahalia one of his first former disciples made his way into Jahalia before Mahound came and ran into one of the towns people and started talking about his growing doubts that the prophet Mahound was actually a prophet. It was the point where Salman (one of the first disciples) started explaining how he noticed Mahound would always get instruction from the Angel Gabriel on one particular thing or another always at the right time. The instruction I most remember is when the people asked him why it was ok for Mahound to have 12 wives when they could only have one. A day later Mahound came back and said that the Angel Gabriel told him that he could have 12 wives as he was a special case. Salman goes on to say that when he took down the instructions said by Mahound he first started modifying them only slightly to see if Mahound would notice. As time went on he would modify them more and more hoping that he would notice. When he realized that Mahound wasn't infallible he became terrified and left hoping that he could get away before anyone noticed.

When I read all that I think I put the book down and said "Damn", I mean damn. That's pretty gutsy just up and saying that even if what you are writing is a work of fiction. SG and I have both had this conversation about how reading "Satanic Verses" has made us really want to learn more about Islam and it's history not because we think that what Rushdie wrote is true but because the cultural history is so alien to ours. Reading it also gave me a glimpse of where fantasy writers may get their ideas and names from. Example: Of the fantasy books I read the "Wheel of Time" series which regardless of what it has become lately still impresses me with it's overall concepts, story telling and character development. I don't know how many times I've wondered where Robert Jordan got the names for his characters or where he got the basis for different concepts. In reading "Satanic Verses" I found out that in Islam the devil is called Shaitan (Shaytan) while in the Wheel of Time series the name for the devil like force is called Shai'tan. None of this really matters I just found it interesting to actually find a concrete example of where an author pulled an idea from another foreign culture to use in their book to create something that feels alien or exotic.


IRAQ, AND IT'S SHIITES.
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A couple of days ago I was cardio'ng to my little hearts content reading a two year old article in National Geographic about the Shiites in Iraq. Two year old article? Yes. I don't have a subscription to National Geographic I just borrow the old ones my grandmother has and read them and why not I don't think I've found a National Geographic article yet that was so dated that it was pointless to read. The really strange thing that always happens is that that I read a national geographic article on something and then the next day or so I read about it again in another magazine/webzine/T.V. The last time this happened I had just seen a show about ancient Egypt where archaeologists excavated a dozen or so funeral barges all lined up around a dock waiting for the Pharaoh's to use in their after lives. This time it was the article about the Shiites in Iraq that just so happened to go into some history about Islam and why the split between Shiites and Sunnis occurred. Get this in 632 when the Prophet Muhammad died there were those who believed that his son-in-law should be the first caliph (spiritual leader). I'm not sure if they felt that the caliph should always come from one descended from Muhammad or if it was that they wanted the first Caliph to be descended from him. It didn't turn out to matter as it was the other group who felt that the caliph should be chosen by tribal consensus that won the argument. A couple of decades later the son-in-law of Muhammad became the fourth caliph however he was only caliph for five years before a group of tribal Arabs killed him. It was apparently this killing of the son-in-law which lead the schism between Shiites and Sunnis. Shiites were the ones who wanted a descendent of Muhammad as a caliph and Sunnis wanted it decided by tribal consensus. Interestingly after Ali's (son-in-law, fourth caliph) death his followers/disciples granted his dying wish by tying him to a camel and burying him wherever the camel stopped and where the camel stopped happened to be Najaf, Najaf in the news lately religious site, Najaf.

The article went on to talk about other interesting things like the Iran-Iraq war which being so young I only have a vague memory. The interesting thing? Oh yes the interesting thing was that during the Iran-Iraq war Iraq was worried about it's Shiites helping Iran which led to Iraq rounding up Shiites by the thousands. Apparently the Baath party while secular were still made up of Sunni Arabs which distrusted Shiites portraying them as Arab-hating Persians. Persians = Iranians and mostly Shiites, oh and according to Wiki Iran is still called Persia. While doing this whole skipping across the pond of middle eastern history I got the question of "What is an Arab?" If Persians are generally Shiites where the Iran is the general geographic location for them then what is an Arab? I can't help but think about that Cure song "Killing an Arab" every time I say Arab. To be an Arab doesn't mean that you live in a certain geographical region, are of a certain ethnicity or even worship Islam. All that it means is that you speak Arabic... at least I hope I got that right. Granted the vast majority of Arabs worship Islam but there are Arab Jews and Arab Christians (found in Egypt mostly) called Coptic Christians or something.