c. May 12, 2010 Anno Domini
Two days ago I received a powerpoint presentation regarding a small southern municipality's plans to provide wireless internet access to its residents in an e-mail intended for a different J. D. Roberts. Normally I ignore e-mails from people who send things to the wrong address but this one looked like someone might need it for work so as a courtesy I informed the parties involved of the error. The J. D. Roberts who the e-mail was supposed to go to jokingly replied, "Hey Jonathan, so you're that bastard that got to jdroberts@gmail.com before I did," and made a less joking offer to purchase jdroberts@gmail.com from me if I were interested in selling. I considered telling him the tale the coincidence of being in the right place at the right time and the non-coincidence of being in the right place and being awesome that made me the b-st-rd who beat him to it, but I ultimately decided he might not be able to handle so much vexation. Nevertheless, the tale of how I got my e-mail address is one for the ages so, without further adieu, here it is:
Back when Gmail was new, you couldn't just sign up for a Gmail account. You had to first get a "Gmail Invite" from a current Gmail user and users only got "Gmail Invites" to send out approximately once per turn of the Mayan calendar. Combined with the fact that Gmail was the only free e-mail to offer A WHOLE FREAKING GIGABYTE of storage at the time, this led to anyone who was known to have a "Gmail Invite" to be bombarded with messages such as "OMG joo h4v3 4 6M41L 1N\/173? joo R 1337 h4xx0r! c4n 1 h45 6M41L?"* As it were, I was in the habit of perusing the message board at weezer.com back then and some girl on there posted something like, "I have a gmail invite. Send me a message about why I should give it to you and I'll give it to whoever deserves it most." Seeing as the address I was using at the time, jdr5@duke.edu, was about to be repossessed, I sent her the following message, verbatim:
To: (name withheld)
From: Dread Pirate Roberts**
Subject: Why you should give me your gmail invite
Because I'm a bloody pirate.
Obviously, that was the best reason to give someone a "Gmail Invite" ever so she chose me out of the hundreds of applicants. She didn't publicize all the supplications that were inferior to mine, but I assume the rest of them were stupid things like, "Because I'm a bloody ninja," or "Because I'm bloody Rivers Cuomo but don't tell anyone because I don't want people bothering me on here." Anyway, because I got into Gmail so early before it was open to the general population, I was able to stake my claim to the simple, elegant cachet of jdroberts@gmail.com before any of my numerous brethren who share my initials and last name instead of getting stuck with something asinine such as xjdroberts69x@gmail.com and the rest, as they say, was history.
*These pleas were not superimposed over pictures of cats because the internet was not as sophisticated a place back then as it was in later years such as, for example, 2006 Anno Domini.
**Yes, my name on the Weezer message board was Dread Pirate Roberts and I'm proud of it. I could have had dreadpirateroberts@gmail.com but I wanted something professional I could use to apply for jobs and since "Gmail Invites" were so rare you had to get it right on the first try.
c. May 19, 2010 Anno Domini
67 Pa. Code 443 provision 7 prohibits "discharging or shooting of firearms or bows and arrows," in rest areas but does not appear to prohibit the discharging of trebuchets as long as said trebuchets are not used for, "hunting or fishing," (also provision 7), "defacing or damaging buildings or other facilities," (provision 3), "depositing or disposing of refuse or waste," (provision 5), "picking, breaking, damaging or abuse of plants or vegetation or parts thereof," (provision 10) or "sale of a product or conduct of other commercial activity, except in emergencies," (provision 12). While the use of trebuchets as a shipping method to facilitate commerce intrigues me, I can't image what sort of "emergency" would necessitate the sale of a product or other commercial activity. Perhaps a worldwide economic recession? I can see the headlines now... "Economy Dragged Out of Epic Recession by Unexpected Surge in Commercial Activity at Penn. Rest Areas!" Somehow, I don't think that was ever part of President Obama's plans for his stimulus package, but maybe it should have been.
c. May 23, 2010 Anno Domini
In honor of Pac-Man's 30th Anniversary (which Pac-Man will never hear the end of from Ms. Pac-Man and her big mouth if he forgot), here is the Pac-Man Diet: Eat nothing but pills, ghosts and occasionally fruit. When you're not eating the ghosts, let them chase you around. It's good exercise. When you are eating the ghosts, they have no caloric content because they are ethereal. Ingesting a ghost is kind of like ingesting a tapeworm except instead of commandeering everything that comes down your esophagus and making you eat twice as much it makes you projectile vomit ungodly amounts of pea soup. In the supernaturally-aided weight loss community this phenomenon is known as "phantasmagorical bulimia."
The Super Mario Bros. Diet: Eat a mushroom. It will make you grow to double your original size. Actually, some people may consider this an undesirable outcome. Forget I mentioned it.
The Gauntlet/Duke Nukem/Too Many Games to List Here Diet: I'm not sure this will actually result in significant weight loss, but it is my personal favourite. Eat as much as possible. What kind of food you eat doesn't matter as long as you KEEP EATING! The more you eat the better your health gets.
The Morrowind Diet: There isn't much to eat in Morrowind except rat meat, hound meat and a variety of disgusting plants. Surround yourself with unpalatable foods like that and you'll lose weight very quickly. Then again, I recently ingested five 10-pound pieces of raw ebony (valued at 200 septim each) on Morrowind by accidentally pressing the wrong button while trying to stow it away in a chest of drawers and got a message which stated, "Raw ebony has no effect on you." I don't quite know what to make of that, but any game which allows you to swallow 50 pounds of wood (regardless of what effect it has) can't have a very scientific metabolism simulation engine.
The World of Warcraft (WoW) Diet: This consists of sitting in front of your computer playing WoW for days at a time and forgetting to eat until you wither away into near-nothingness. If I were more artistically inclined I would include a color-coded graph of character level vs. time and real-life weight (in pounds) vs. time superimposed over each other based on what WoW race the player was the size of in real-life, e.g. if you start out as a tauren-sized human in real-life you would probably max out your level and still have a long time to go before your level vs. time curve intersected with your weight vs. time curve but if you started out as a gnome-sized human the curves would probably intersect half an hour after you completed the character generation process.
c. May 23, 2010 Anno Domini
Iron Chef: Morrowind Update
Further consumption of non-edible items yielded the following results:
Scrap metal (10 pounds) had no effect on you
Crab meat (0.1 pounds) had no effect on you
c. May 29, 2010 Anno Domini
I once wrote a short story about Gary Coleman, entitled "A Short Story About Gary Coleman (No Pun Intended)" merely as an excuse to use that title. It was as follows:
A Short Story About Gary Coleman (No Pun Intended)
by Jonathan Roberts
Once upon a time, I wrote and recorded an album of songs about Gary Coleman. Not long thereafter, Mr. Coleman called me and said I was a punk for using his image on the album cover without his consent. I told him he should thank his lucky star for anyone using his image because he hadn't done anything worthy of tribute in quite some time and I didn't see anyone else singing his praises. He admitted I kind of had a point there.
THE END
c. June 5, 2010 Anno Domini
I find it extremely difficult to bring myself to kill random non-player characters (NPCs) in video games. Not because I have a generally non-violent personality and have difficulty distinguishing between games and real life, but because I'm paranoid about it coming back to bite me later in the game. I have to play good in Fable because I just know that whatever random townsperson I decapitate will end up being the starting point for a really good side quest or, even worse, somehow figure into the main plot. The more open-ended and non-linear the game is, the worse I am about it. In Morrowind, when the mages' guild sends me to "take care of" someone who is a member of the thieves' guild I look for ways to complete the quest without actually killing the target because you never know what will get you kicked out of the thieves' guild or even start a guild war, and then how am I going to infiltrate House Hlaalu and prevent the Commona Tong from enslaving all the Khajits and Argonians? Aaaaaaah!
It all started with a game called Ultima Underworld. Ultima Underworld was one of the first role-playing games (RPGs) that allowed you to attack, and kill, any NPC in the game. There was a bandit named Bragit near the starting point of the game who gave you some advice about surviving in the Stygian Abyss and gives you directions to an enclave of bandits who might take you in. He was a friendly enough chap, but the first time I played I decided to stab him to death with the badly worn dagger you start off with in the hopes of looting a merely "worn" dagger or even a badly worn shortsword off of him. From that point, I decided it would be interesting to slay everyone I encountered and become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the game world. I naively massacred every last green goblin, grey goblin, mountain man and lizardman in the first three levels of the abyss. Mind you, this game was released in 1992, before the internet became the glorious thing it is today, so if you needed an item called the Wine of Compassion to beat the game the only way to find out which random floor tile in which random room in which level of the abyss the Wine of Compassion was hidden beneath was to talk to Dr. Owl, and Dr. Owl wouldn't tell you unless you rescued his manservant Murgo, and the only way to free Murgo from his cell was to bribe the lizardman guarding him then you were totally screwed if you had murdered that lizardman because, although he could somehow open the portcullis to Murgo's cell... if you killed him his loot did not include the key to the cell. At that point your options were pretty much limited to the following:
1. Systematically click on every floor tile in the entire game
2. Save up your allowance for a month, purchase the strategy guide from the Waldenbooks at the mall (if a strategy guide existed) and hope the information you so desperately needed was in there
3. Hope you had a brother or friend who played through the game in a less maniacally genocidal manner who could tell you where to find the bloody Wine of Compassion
4. Start the game over from the beginning, spare the lizardman, get the Wine of Compassion and then realize you shouldn't have used the recipe for rotworm stew you got from the green goblin chef and eaten the stew because for some reason you could only use the recipe once and you needed the stew to coax something out of a random troll.
Don't get me wrong, Ultima Underworld is an amazing game and even now I would highly recommend it but after that experience, you can't really blame me for how I am today. It's enough to make a fellow afraid to stomp a goomba in the original Super Mario Bros. because you never know which goomba is the only one who can give you the Magical Mace of Bowser-Bludgeoning or tell you which castle the princess is actually in so you don't have to rescue that smug ingrate peasant Toad 7,000,000,000 times before you get to her.
c. June 9, 2010 Anno Domini
Facebook is depressing. I don't know what is worse... that the "Recommended Pages" feature suggests that I should like Lady Gaga, or that apparently six of my friends already do.
c. June 24, 2010 Anno Domini
Whenever I use my debit card at a merchant with a debit card machine you have to swipe your own card through and it takes longer than normal it gives me a mental image of a group of clerks sitting around a conference table in a Wachovia office debating the relative merits of approving or declining the transaction while the screen on the machine says "authorization pending." It has nothing to do with being concerned that my account has insufficient funds. I could be holding an up to the minute account statement saying I have one billion dollars in one hand and have just finished typing in my PIN with the other and I would still envision something like this:
Junior Clerk 1: A Mister Jonathan D Roberts has a pending transaction in the amount of $8.73. Should we approve it or decline?
Junior Clerk 2: Well, Mister Roberts appears to have sufficient funds in his account...
Junior Clerk 3: But Mister Roberts seems to be having a swell day. Why don't we "misplace" a few decimal points here and there and "mistakenly" decline the transaction?
JC1: Pish-posh, don't be a bore. Have some imagination! We've already pulled that caper sixty-eight times today.
JC3: We could tell him the fraud department thought it looked suspicious...
JC2: Oh, that's a capital idea! Do continue!
JC3: We declined the transaction and cancelled your debit card to protect you, Mister Roberts. More than half of all fraudulent transactions occur at Target stores within 0.7 miles of the cardholder's home and involve purchases of less than ten dollars, you know.
JC1: It's decided then. Decline it, give 'em the old twenty-two skiddoo... wait.. what the deuce? An electronic mailing from the customer service manager! *prints a hard copy of the "electronic mailing" and tears the strips with the printer sprocket holes off*
JC2: Read it! Read it!
JC1: *reading in an exaggerated, mock-conceited tone* It has come to my attention that the customer service department received sixty-eight calls today in reference to erroneously declined debit card purchases. This increase in call volume has resulted in an average wait time of one hour and thirty-eight minutes for our callers. As you should know, we strive to keep each and every customer on hold for exactly one hour and thirty-six minutes. I demand you cease your shenanigans at once!
JC2: Dash it all! Those nit-witted customer service prigs!
JC3: Always ruining our japes!
c. June 23, 2010 Anno Domini
I know 10 is a special number in soccer, but if Landon Donovan changed his number to 50 he could call himself LD-50 like Andrei Kirilenko of the Utah Jazz is known as AK-47. It would signify how much of a lethal scorer he is and make him sound like a lot more of a "bad mother (shut your mouth) I'm just talking 'bout Landon Donovan."
c. June 24, 2010 Anno Domini
There is an ice cream truck that drives down my street around the time when I get up for work and plays music from Super Mario Bros. 1 and 3. The truck's repertoire includes the song from Toad's House and the background music from when the princess sends you a letter after you defeat one of Bowser's foul spawn in Super Mario Bros. 3 and the classic Super Mario Theme, the underwater theme and the Bowser castle theme from the first Super Mario Bros. I don't know that the target demographic group for ice cream trucks really knows anything about games from the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), but I suspect lots of children would be outraged if they ran up to the ice cream truck when it was playing the Bowser theme only to find the driver dressed in a Toad costume telling them, "Sorry kids. Your ice cream is on another truck," or maybe instead of an ice cream truck it is a mushroom truck. That could be an epic disappointment.
Two days ago I received a powerpoint presentation regarding a small southern municipality's plans to provide wireless internet access to its residents in an e-mail intended for a different J. D. Roberts. Normally I ignore e-mails from people who send things to the wrong address but this one looked like someone might need it for work so as a courtesy I informed the parties involved of the error. The J. D. Roberts who the e-mail was supposed to go to jokingly replied, "Hey Jonathan, so you're that bastard that got to jdroberts@gmail.com before I did," and made a less joking offer to purchase jdroberts@gmail.com from me if I were interested in selling. I considered telling him the tale the coincidence of being in the right place at the right time and the non-coincidence of being in the right place and being awesome that made me the b-st-rd who beat him to it, but I ultimately decided he might not be able to handle so much vexation. Nevertheless, the tale of how I got my e-mail address is one for the ages so, without further adieu, here it is:
Back when Gmail was new, you couldn't just sign up for a Gmail account. You had to first get a "Gmail Invite" from a current Gmail user and users only got "Gmail Invites" to send out approximately once per turn of the Mayan calendar. Combined with the fact that Gmail was the only free e-mail to offer A WHOLE FREAKING GIGABYTE of storage at the time, this led to anyone who was known to have a "Gmail Invite" to be bombarded with messages such as "OMG joo h4v3 4 6M41L 1N\/173? joo R 1337 h4xx0r! c4n 1 h45 6M41L?"* As it were, I was in the habit of perusing the message board at weezer.com back then and some girl on there posted something like, "I have a gmail invite. Send me a message about why I should give it to you and I'll give it to whoever deserves it most." Seeing as the address I was using at the time, jdr5@duke.edu, was about to be repossessed, I sent her the following message, verbatim:
To: (name withheld)
From: Dread Pirate Roberts**
Subject: Why you should give me your gmail invite
Because I'm a bloody pirate.
Obviously, that was the best reason to give someone a "Gmail Invite" ever so she chose me out of the hundreds of applicants. She didn't publicize all the supplications that were inferior to mine, but I assume the rest of them were stupid things like, "Because I'm a bloody ninja," or "Because I'm bloody Rivers Cuomo but don't tell anyone because I don't want people bothering me on here." Anyway, because I got into Gmail so early before it was open to the general population, I was able to stake my claim to the simple, elegant cachet of jdroberts@gmail.com before any of my numerous brethren who share my initials and last name instead of getting stuck with something asinine such as xjdroberts69x@gmail.com and the rest, as they say, was history.
*These pleas were not superimposed over pictures of cats because the internet was not as sophisticated a place back then as it was in later years such as, for example, 2006 Anno Domini.
**Yes, my name on the Weezer message board was Dread Pirate Roberts and I'm proud of it. I could have had dreadpirateroberts@gmail.com but I wanted something professional I could use to apply for jobs and since "Gmail Invites" were so rare you had to get it right on the first try.
c. May 19, 2010 Anno Domini
67 Pa. Code 443 provision 7 prohibits "discharging or shooting of firearms or bows and arrows," in rest areas but does not appear to prohibit the discharging of trebuchets as long as said trebuchets are not used for, "hunting or fishing," (also provision 7), "defacing or damaging buildings or other facilities," (provision 3), "depositing or disposing of refuse or waste," (provision 5), "picking, breaking, damaging or abuse of plants or vegetation or parts thereof," (provision 10) or "sale of a product or conduct of other commercial activity, except in emergencies," (provision 12). While the use of trebuchets as a shipping method to facilitate commerce intrigues me, I can't image what sort of "emergency" would necessitate the sale of a product or other commercial activity. Perhaps a worldwide economic recession? I can see the headlines now... "Economy Dragged Out of Epic Recession by Unexpected Surge in Commercial Activity at Penn. Rest Areas!" Somehow, I don't think that was ever part of President Obama's plans for his stimulus package, but maybe it should have been.
c. May 23, 2010 Anno Domini
In honor of Pac-Man's 30th Anniversary (which Pac-Man will never hear the end of from Ms. Pac-Man and her big mouth if he forgot), here is the Pac-Man Diet: Eat nothing but pills, ghosts and occasionally fruit. When you're not eating the ghosts, let them chase you around. It's good exercise. When you are eating the ghosts, they have no caloric content because they are ethereal. Ingesting a ghost is kind of like ingesting a tapeworm except instead of commandeering everything that comes down your esophagus and making you eat twice as much it makes you projectile vomit ungodly amounts of pea soup. In the supernaturally-aided weight loss community this phenomenon is known as "phantasmagorical bulimia."
The Super Mario Bros. Diet: Eat a mushroom. It will make you grow to double your original size. Actually, some people may consider this an undesirable outcome. Forget I mentioned it.
The Gauntlet/Duke Nukem/Too Many Games to List Here Diet: I'm not sure this will actually result in significant weight loss, but it is my personal favourite. Eat as much as possible. What kind of food you eat doesn't matter as long as you KEEP EATING! The more you eat the better your health gets.
The Morrowind Diet: There isn't much to eat in Morrowind except rat meat, hound meat and a variety of disgusting plants. Surround yourself with unpalatable foods like that and you'll lose weight very quickly. Then again, I recently ingested five 10-pound pieces of raw ebony (valued at 200 septim each) on Morrowind by accidentally pressing the wrong button while trying to stow it away in a chest of drawers and got a message which stated, "Raw ebony has no effect on you." I don't quite know what to make of that, but any game which allows you to swallow 50 pounds of wood (regardless of what effect it has) can't have a very scientific metabolism simulation engine.
The World of Warcraft (WoW) Diet: This consists of sitting in front of your computer playing WoW for days at a time and forgetting to eat until you wither away into near-nothingness. If I were more artistically inclined I would include a color-coded graph of character level vs. time and real-life weight (in pounds) vs. time superimposed over each other based on what WoW race the player was the size of in real-life, e.g. if you start out as a tauren-sized human in real-life you would probably max out your level and still have a long time to go before your level vs. time curve intersected with your weight vs. time curve but if you started out as a gnome-sized human the curves would probably intersect half an hour after you completed the character generation process.
c. May 23, 2010 Anno Domini
Iron Chef: Morrowind Update
Further consumption of non-edible items yielded the following results:
Scrap metal (10 pounds) had no effect on you
Crab meat (0.1 pounds) had no effect on you
c. May 29, 2010 Anno Domini
I once wrote a short story about Gary Coleman, entitled "A Short Story About Gary Coleman (No Pun Intended)" merely as an excuse to use that title. It was as follows:
A Short Story About Gary Coleman (No Pun Intended)
by Jonathan Roberts
Once upon a time, I wrote and recorded an album of songs about Gary Coleman. Not long thereafter, Mr. Coleman called me and said I was a punk for using his image on the album cover without his consent. I told him he should thank his lucky star for anyone using his image because he hadn't done anything worthy of tribute in quite some time and I didn't see anyone else singing his praises. He admitted I kind of had a point there.
THE END
c. June 5, 2010 Anno Domini
I find it extremely difficult to bring myself to kill random non-player characters (NPCs) in video games. Not because I have a generally non-violent personality and have difficulty distinguishing between games and real life, but because I'm paranoid about it coming back to bite me later in the game. I have to play good in Fable because I just know that whatever random townsperson I decapitate will end up being the starting point for a really good side quest or, even worse, somehow figure into the main plot. The more open-ended and non-linear the game is, the worse I am about it. In Morrowind, when the mages' guild sends me to "take care of" someone who is a member of the thieves' guild I look for ways to complete the quest without actually killing the target because you never know what will get you kicked out of the thieves' guild or even start a guild war, and then how am I going to infiltrate House Hlaalu and prevent the Commona Tong from enslaving all the Khajits and Argonians? Aaaaaaah!
It all started with a game called Ultima Underworld. Ultima Underworld was one of the first role-playing games (RPGs) that allowed you to attack, and kill, any NPC in the game. There was a bandit named Bragit near the starting point of the game who gave you some advice about surviving in the Stygian Abyss and gives you directions to an enclave of bandits who might take you in. He was a friendly enough chap, but the first time I played I decided to stab him to death with the badly worn dagger you start off with in the hopes of looting a merely "worn" dagger or even a badly worn shortsword off of him. From that point, I decided it would be interesting to slay everyone I encountered and become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the game world. I naively massacred every last green goblin, grey goblin, mountain man and lizardman in the first three levels of the abyss. Mind you, this game was released in 1992, before the internet became the glorious thing it is today, so if you needed an item called the Wine of Compassion to beat the game the only way to find out which random floor tile in which random room in which level of the abyss the Wine of Compassion was hidden beneath was to talk to Dr. Owl, and Dr. Owl wouldn't tell you unless you rescued his manservant Murgo, and the only way to free Murgo from his cell was to bribe the lizardman guarding him then you were totally screwed if you had murdered that lizardman because, although he could somehow open the portcullis to Murgo's cell... if you killed him his loot did not include the key to the cell. At that point your options were pretty much limited to the following:
1. Systematically click on every floor tile in the entire game
2. Save up your allowance for a month, purchase the strategy guide from the Waldenbooks at the mall (if a strategy guide existed) and hope the information you so desperately needed was in there
3. Hope you had a brother or friend who played through the game in a less maniacally genocidal manner who could tell you where to find the bloody Wine of Compassion
4. Start the game over from the beginning, spare the lizardman, get the Wine of Compassion and then realize you shouldn't have used the recipe for rotworm stew you got from the green goblin chef and eaten the stew because for some reason you could only use the recipe once and you needed the stew to coax something out of a random troll.
Don't get me wrong, Ultima Underworld is an amazing game and even now I would highly recommend it but after that experience, you can't really blame me for how I am today. It's enough to make a fellow afraid to stomp a goomba in the original Super Mario Bros. because you never know which goomba is the only one who can give you the Magical Mace of Bowser-Bludgeoning or tell you which castle the princess is actually in so you don't have to rescue that smug ingrate peasant Toad 7,000,000,000 times before you get to her.
c. June 9, 2010 Anno Domini
Facebook is depressing. I don't know what is worse... that the "Recommended Pages" feature suggests that I should like Lady Gaga, or that apparently six of my friends already do.
c. June 24, 2010 Anno Domini
Whenever I use my debit card at a merchant with a debit card machine you have to swipe your own card through and it takes longer than normal it gives me a mental image of a group of clerks sitting around a conference table in a Wachovia office debating the relative merits of approving or declining the transaction while the screen on the machine says "authorization pending." It has nothing to do with being concerned that my account has insufficient funds. I could be holding an up to the minute account statement saying I have one billion dollars in one hand and have just finished typing in my PIN with the other and I would still envision something like this:
Junior Clerk 1: A Mister Jonathan D Roberts has a pending transaction in the amount of $8.73. Should we approve it or decline?
Junior Clerk 2: Well, Mister Roberts appears to have sufficient funds in his account...
Junior Clerk 3: But Mister Roberts seems to be having a swell day. Why don't we "misplace" a few decimal points here and there and "mistakenly" decline the transaction?
JC1: Pish-posh, don't be a bore. Have some imagination! We've already pulled that caper sixty-eight times today.
JC3: We could tell him the fraud department thought it looked suspicious...
JC2: Oh, that's a capital idea! Do continue!
JC3: We declined the transaction and cancelled your debit card to protect you, Mister Roberts. More than half of all fraudulent transactions occur at Target stores within 0.7 miles of the cardholder's home and involve purchases of less than ten dollars, you know.
JC1: It's decided then. Decline it, give 'em the old twenty-two skiddoo... wait.. what the deuce? An electronic mailing from the customer service manager! *prints a hard copy of the "electronic mailing" and tears the strips with the printer sprocket holes off*
JC2: Read it! Read it!
JC1: *reading in an exaggerated, mock-conceited tone* It has come to my attention that the customer service department received sixty-eight calls today in reference to erroneously declined debit card purchases. This increase in call volume has resulted in an average wait time of one hour and thirty-eight minutes for our callers. As you should know, we strive to keep each and every customer on hold for exactly one hour and thirty-six minutes. I demand you cease your shenanigans at once!
JC2: Dash it all! Those nit-witted customer service prigs!
JC3: Always ruining our japes!
c. June 23, 2010 Anno Domini
I know 10 is a special number in soccer, but if Landon Donovan changed his number to 50 he could call himself LD-50 like Andrei Kirilenko of the Utah Jazz is known as AK-47. It would signify how much of a lethal scorer he is and make him sound like a lot more of a "bad mother (shut your mouth) I'm just talking 'bout Landon Donovan."
c. June 24, 2010 Anno Domini
There is an ice cream truck that drives down my street around the time when I get up for work and plays music from Super Mario Bros. 1 and 3. The truck's repertoire includes the song from Toad's House and the background music from when the princess sends you a letter after you defeat one of Bowser's foul spawn in Super Mario Bros. 3 and the classic Super Mario Theme, the underwater theme and the Bowser castle theme from the first Super Mario Bros. I don't know that the target demographic group for ice cream trucks really knows anything about games from the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), but I suspect lots of children would be outraged if they ran up to the ice cream truck when it was playing the Bowser theme only to find the driver dressed in a Toad costume telling them, "Sorry kids. Your ice cream is on another truck," or maybe instead of an ice cream truck it is a mushroom truck. That could be an epic disappointment.
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