When I'm bored, I ramble

*****People are fucking crazy*****

One day this week, I ventured out on my lunch break to get some water and one other thing from the Food Lion around the corner... It was (naturally) raining, and on my way back in the building, some chick says "man, I wish I'da known you were going out for lunch, I would have had you bring me something.
In response to her statement, I simply smiled, forced an audible chuckle and kept kicking to get my ass in out of the rain.
Keep in mind that this woman does not work in my department.
Hiding behind the smile and faked laugh was my biting my lip to refrain from saying "Oh word? Well tell me... What is my name?"

*****Obnoxious people*****

Look, I know and very much display that I am an asshole...
Perusal of the pages of this blog will tell you that.
Has anyone noticed that there is this thing of the past few years, though, that obnoxiousness is often tied to the wireless device that an individual carries with them?

It started, in my opinion with T-Mobile Sidekick users. They were almost like a damned community of jackassery. You refer to their phone as a phone, and you had an argument on your hands. "It's a hiptop!" or "It's a sidekick!" and it seems that even picking up your phone and calling them on their phone -- you know a regular PHONE call? -- would do nothing to stop the shit.
Make shit worse, they would proactively identify OTHER Sidekick users, usually after having done some stupid shit that got all their information spilled to the internets.

Next would be when BlackBerry knocked down those restrictions and made it more affordable for commonfolks to own their devices without having to pay for all kinds of licensing agreements and what have you.
Put a pin in that, we're coming back to it.

Next came Apple -- a company whose users usually fit an aesthetic that would sooner have you choke them the fuck out on Christmas in the hospital next to their grandmothers' deathbed -- releases the iPhone and new levels of pretense were realized. Not only snobbish in the realm of personal computation, now we have phone snobs playing the one-upmanship game.

T-Mobile apparently tired of the Sidekick users about as much as the rest of the world had collectively become with them, and partnered with HTC and Google to release their co-branded smart phones and while the pretense was still there, it was much quieter when compared to the continued iPhone users...


It is no so much to the point where you can't do things as simple as send an email, post on a web forum or SEND A FUCKING TEXT/PICTURE message to someone without getting the pat answer "I'm posting from my [device]" or "I will have to look at this later, I am on the BB" or "Can't see picture messages, I got an iPhone."
It reaches a point that I KNOW what device you have and I am aware of the shortfalls of said device. I know you will have to look at my email which will have you chasing links when you get home. I promise you that time was sometime before your 50th reminder to me that you have a blackberry/iPhone/penis enlarger pump. Cut the shit, these things are just as much status symbols and showoff items as they are necessary communications devices.
This is not EVERY user, not in the least, but it is a disturbingly increasingly frequent number.

*****Came the fuck up****

Most of you have seen me in my hats, specifically the Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch ones...
Anyway, yesterday The Katie and I were out shopping for living room furniture and found ourselves in Garden Ridge. Passing back up through the store, we came across a table piled to the hilt with Mens' shirts and outerwear, and a sign on top of the table indicated that they would be $9.99.
Oh word?
Because what even got my attention from over 100 feet away was this one:

... I am to understand that my face lit up like an enormous child as I am known to do when I see something that piques my interest in that manner.
I told that story out of order, I saw the shirt, THEN we saw the table and what was on it... Once on/into the table, we dug through and found that they had not only those, but Ernie, Snuffy, and Elmo.
Unfortunately, they did not have my size in Ernie or Snuffy (not to mention my extreme distaste for the color red -- no Elmo), so I was forced to leave them there.
This is what I ultimately came home with.

Noteworthy is that The Katie made the Cookie Monster one happen.

*****You know it is a recession...*****

When they start selling shit like this in stores.

*****LeBron James is wrong... Again*****

According to Princess James, the entire league should retire Michael Jordan's #23.
For those keeping score at home, the only leagues to retire an entire number leaguewide was baseball, with Jackie Robinson's #42 -- and even then every year on April 15th, the day he entered the league, EVERYONE around the league wears his number to commemorate what he did -- and the NHL with Wayne Gretzky's #99. Even then, I think that retiring Gretzky's number was overkill.
Guess what?
While Michael is arguably the greatest of all time so far, there were no barriers broken down for him to make it through, no history made on his way through and out of the league. He does not have the most championships, does not have the most points and it seems that his greatest accomplishment was changing the way the game was marketed and sold, with expensive ass shoes.
Retiring his number opens the door for a slippery slope. If we're retiring Jordan's number, then we should retire Bill Russell, Oscar Robinson, Magic and Kareem, Larry Bird and Wilt Chamberlain with it. The most we could hope for is for the number to be retired by individual teams at the behest of the owners/higher-ups, like the Miami heat did just last week. Players can agree to give it up, fine, but a league-wide freeze on it is terrible overkill. I mean, I am already waiting on the day that David Stern makes him the league logo.
There are 13 players wearing #23 in the league right now, the only one other than LeBron to even make an all star game is Marcus Camby, whom I am pretty sure only has a couple years left in the tank anyway and will soon be out of the jersey. Sure, a show of solidarity on the part of the players in leaving it would be nice, but honestly serves as a slap in the face to hall-of-famers before him.

*****I've gone on long enough*****

I'll bring this thing to an end... See you folks on the other side.