Sunday, August 31, 2008

Getting the Goods on Gustov

Just in case you’ve been spending this holiday weekend under a rock you know that it’s once again that wonderful magical time of season. That’s right, it’s...

...Hurricane Season!

It’s baaaaaaaaack.

This time the latest weather threat comes from Hurricane Gustov who was poised to slam into the Gulf Coast states on this fine Labor Day long weekend. Gustov has been tracked from day one on its path across the Gulf of Mexico and is currently ranked as a Category 3 hurricane by meteorologists and storm enthusiasts alike with the possibility of turning into a Category 4 or 5 hurricane later.

Oh yeah, baby!

What’s a Labor Day weekend without your 24 hour levee watch?

So it’s going to be nothing but swirling meteorological diagrams and wind swept beach lines on the boob tube for the next few days at ‘ol Chez Tigerrabbit. It’s become somewhat of a Labor Day tradition around my place over the last few years since Hurricane Katrina. There’s been Hurricane Ernesto, Dean, Felix, Humberto, Bertha, Dolly and most recently Charley. And of course there’s Hurricane Hanna and Ike still on the way yet.

I just loves me my late-breaking Labor Day hurricane updates

Yep. Labor Day without regular CNN hurricane updates is like Christmas without presents, Easter without colored eggs, or Halloween without tooth decay. Next to white socks and picnics, hurricanes are the very essence of Labor Day. In fact, Hurricane Reports have replaced the Jerry Lewis Telethon as the primary television broadcast of the holiday long weekend*.

And where’s Anderson Cooper you ask?

Why “Mr. 360” has already situated himself at ground zero in downtown New Orleans fighting the winds and the rain on the corner of Bourbon Street in order to bring his viewers an actual first hand experience of what it’s like to get blown around in 110 mph winds and soaked with torrential downpour.

Thanks for keeping it real, Anderson.

So with two days to go until landfall one has to wonder: has the good State of Louisiana done something specific to piss off Mother Nature? Did she get served a funky order of crawdad’s or something because she sure seems to have a serious hate on for these New Orleans folk like God has a hate on for the Boy Scouts.

The difference is that Hurricane Gustov, after all the hype it received from Thursday onward, came and went with all the fury of a wet fart. As far as hurricanes go – Gustov was a complete flop. Only the odd leaky levee and battered tree branch resulted after the storm hit landfall - hardly the stuff that decent disasters are made from.

But that didn’t stop FEMA from taking serious preemptive action in saving the good people of New Orleans from possible harm. It seems that FEMA has learned its lesson after Katrina in 2005.

PROTECT THE LEVIS AND DIAPERS AT ALL COST!

That’s right! Where New Orleans mayor Ray Nagrin encouraged people to flee the city last time, he all but kicked their asses out this time. Furthermore, he made it clear – to the people of the St. Bernard Parish in particular – that anyone caught looting in the streets this time would be automatically shipped to Angola State Penitentiary for immediate processing.

"You will not get a pass this time...you will go directly to Angola Prison and God bless you if you go there", Nagrin said matter-of-factly.

So the message that unless you like the idea of becoming the prison bitch for some guy named ‘Bubba’ in Cell Block D you’ll get your butt on one of those evacuation buses out of town.

Atta boy, Ray! Way to get in there, lay it down and kick some ass.

A world without Levi’s and Pampers is not a world worth living in.

But honestly, who is their right mind would ever be intimidated by anyone or anything named Gustov? Is this the best name they could come up with? If they really wanted to motivate people to leave the city and heed the danger warnings seriously they would have called it something like Hurricane Adolph, or Hurricane Bin Laden or something a little more mellow dramatic and threatening.

As it is, Hurricane Gustov sounds like some harmless migrant worker whose come to visit for the weekend.

* Although it is debatable over who blows more – Jerry Lewis or Hurricane Gustov.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Random Ponderisms

It’s been a rather boring day today and so I have been passing the time browsing the Internet in search of some of the weirder, more bizarre factoids about life in general. After all, you never know when you might need to drop one of these informational tidbits at your next poker game gathering or around the water cooler at work.

Here is a selection of some of the more interesting ones I discovered.

1) A pig’s orgasm can last up to 30 minutes.

Wow, lucky swine! So apart from being extremely tasty with a honey-glaze and served with a side-order of home fries, pigs just may be the luckiest animal on the planet. I know if you give me half hour orgasms I would totally accept the risk of ending up as someone’s Easter feast.

2) The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket

This particular discovery eventually later led to the ever popular opening line: “Hey, is that a melted chocolate bar in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

3) The first known contraceptive was crocodile dung, used by the early Egyptians in 2000 B.C.

Well, duh? Who’d ever want to jump in the sack with someone with crocodile crap smeared on their schwantz? Very effect indeed, I’d say.

4) 5% of Canadians don’t know the first seven words of the Canadian national anthem, but know the first nine words of the American national anthem.

Why is this a statistic and why hasn’t anybody done anything about this yet? Deport these unpatriotic dipshits! If they love the American national anthem so much why don’t they go live there? Forbid them to eat back bacon or drink Molson products or something as some sort of punishment. At the very least, to take advantage of our free health care, a person should be made to recite the entire Canadian national anthem before receiving any medical treatment whatsoever.

5) A Saudi Arabian woman can divorce her husband if he doesn’t give her coffee.

How does that make any sense? Just imagine the repercussion here in North America if we ever bestowed our women the same kind of privilege. Men would practically become professional baristas upon marriage. Never mind marriage counseling, we’d instead be enrolled in night classes at Starbucks. First it’d be coffee; then maybe a Danish; eventually we’d be turned into subservient errand boys for our dominant females. Now I’ll do just about anything for sex but fetching coffee for the rest of my life doesn’t sound very enticing either.

6) Honeybees have hair on their eyes.

Just imagine how long it takes the female honeybee to get out of the bathroom before going out?

7) “Kemo Sabe” means “soggy shrub” in Navajo.

Makes you rethink what kind of relationship the Lone Ranger had with Tonto, doesn’t it?

8) The Sanskrit word for “war” means “desire for more cows”.

That also means then that Black Sabbath’s infamous rock anthem roughly translates to “Desire for More Cow Pigs”…not nearly as hardcore if you ask me.

9) When you’re born you you’re born with 300 bones, but when you get to be an adult, you only have 206.

Where do they go exactly? Is this another example of alien abductions or something? Very creepy!

10) Ambergris is the most expensive substance traded on the world market and is commonly used in the production of most expensive brands of perfume.

Just for the record: ambergris is the biliary secretion of a sperm whale. Consider that next time you drop a fortune on a bottle of ‘Eud d’ Whale Puke’ for your sweetheart next Valentine’s Day.

11) In Texas, it's against the law for anyone to have a pair of pliers in his or her possession.

Why? That’s pretty funny considering it’s perfectly legal for someone to carry a firearm instead. Personally, the pliers sound like the lesser of two evils. After all, what cashier is going to be intimidated by being held up with a pair of pliers? What’s the robber going to do – threaten to loosen all the bolts holding the counter together if they don’t immediately turn over all the money?

12) Sherlock Holmes NEVER said, "Elementary, my dear Watson."

More than likely, bing the A type personality he was, Holmes would have said something more along the lines of “get your head out of your ass, dipshit!” Conversely, Watson ever reply with, “No shit, Sherlock!”

13) Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.

Ah, damages the suits or the astronauts? Because I can’t imagine spending a few days or a week enclosed in any air-tight zero gravity compartment with another gassy astronaut. How torturous would that be? Then again, given my current over-active metabolism I wouldn’t be able to eat – period! Just a single serving of broccoli would be enough o launch myself into orbit without the aid of a rocket. So I guess those childhood dreams of blasting off into outer space have been dashed once and for all.

14) It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month, which we know today as the "honeymoon".

How awesome is that? Marriage would suddenly become a whole lot more inviting to me if the father-in-law were required to keep me drunk for a month afterwards. Of course, there would be no guarantee of what kind of performance I would give on my wedding night.

15) To "testify" was based on men in the Roman court swearing to a statement made by swearing on their testicles.

Imagine that. Here’s a practice we need to get back to! I’d say we’d have a better time trying hardened criminals if they knew they were liable to have their bollocks lopped off should they ever be found to be lying.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Phelp This!

In the wake of Michael Phelps 8 gold medals in Beijing, the world public is now engaged in debate regarding the validity of this young swimming phenom’s recent Olympic success. How exactly does a 23-year-old man adapt himself so efficiently to the water and single-handedly smash so many world records? Does he have a legitimate gift for swimming or is he just some sort of genetic freak?

Either way, I’m just plum sick of hearing about it. I’d rather stick my dick into an angry beehive than deal with it anymore.

The media accounts goes on forever about his abnormally long torso, which, like the hull of a boat allows him to ride high on the water propelled by abnormally long, flexible arms and shoulders. Then there are his short, double-jointed knees and pliable ankles attached to monster size 14 feet which help him undulate like a marine mammal. And don’t even get me started on about his freakish wingspan which is about 3 inches longer than his 6-4 height.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but can he balance a ball on his nose or jump through a hoop?

Honestly, are we talking about an Olympic caliber athlete here or some mutant half-man, half-fish hybrid for fuck sakes? Geez, throw in webbed toes and gills and you have yourself a prime candidate for someone you’d expect to find behind the red curtain at any carnival freak show. After watching all the ESPN bio coverage of the Olympic pool events in the Beijing Water Cube complex, it’s enough to make your head spin*.

Okay, so it’s a given that Michael Phelps may just be the love child between Aquaman and a bottlenose dolphin in a cooler, more streamlined swimsuit, but what really irks me is that people are also now attributing his success to the fact that he was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 9-years-old, and so, has more energy to burn than other average athletes.

What sense does that make?

Since when did being hyper disqualify someone from winning a gold medal? Even still, the whole “turning a potential tragedy into victory” is just too much to stomach.

It’s Lance’s balls all over again.

Shit, if Lance Armstrong is a super human then Michael Phelps must be a direct descendent of Atlantis or something. But at least Phelps hasn’t started any new rubber bracelet trends – yet.

But anyway, to his defense, the fact that little Michael couldn’t focus his attention long enough to last an entire episode of Scooby Doo without tossing the family cat into the microwave is kind of irrelevant now isn’t it? I say ‘Bravo!’ for his mother Deborah for getting him involved in something constructive in order to help focus his attention, but do we have to continually hear about it?

If I were given the choice of spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid in my lap or weathering another report about Michael Phelps athletic anomalies I’d take the hydrochloric acid as that would be less painful.

Shit, I was a bit hyper as a child too but it didn’t automatically qualify me as an Olympic champion. Then again, the true physical prowess and extreme athleticism of chronic masturbating was never fully appreciated by the Olympic Committee.

Oh well, “C’est la vie!”

I could’ve been a contender too!

But this is only where the whole Michael Phelps ball of wax begins. There is also the whole business aspect to consider as well. Fish Boy is now on target to being the biggest and most popular Olympic athlete ever as far as advertisement and endorsement deals go. He stands to rival America’s leotard-clad sweetheart Mary Lou Retton for future celebrity status. And ‘ol Mary Lou only won one Olympic gold medal in her 1984 Olympic outing – not eight!

Big businesses are already lined up to literally hand over the cash – and pizza - to America’s new superstar. Phelps has received top endorsements from companies like Visa, Speedo, Omega, Hilton, and AT&T. On Facebook, more than 795,000 people have officially declared themselves fans of Michael Phelps – that’s nearly a cult status if you ask me. From there, he’s only a short dolphin kick away from being the next idiot to jump up and down on Oprah’s couch and oh, by the way, don’t forget to have some of the purple Kool-Aid.

There are entire websites dedicated to debating over whether Michael Phelps has a girlfriend or not. Huh? Who cares? Well even if he doesn’t, after the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games he’ll inevitably have more girlfriends than MacDonald’s will serve customers.

In fact, Phelps’ business agent Peter Carlisle estimates that Michael could expect to make anywhere between $3 million and $5 million this year and then doubling with each subsequent gold medal. All in all he be worth as much as 100 million dollars over the course of his lifetime in product endorsements alone.

Not bad for a hyperactive aquatic mutant from Baltimore.

Kellogg’s is also planning on putting Michael onto there boxes of Frosted Flakes and Corn Flakes. I wonder how Tony the Tiger feels about this development. Suddenly Tony isn’t good enough for the legions of young American Olympic hopefuls? Who decided exactly that a long-armed, simian-fish mutant of a man is going to sell breakfast cereal?

That’d turn me onto oatmeal faster than you could say “There’re great!”

Yep, Michael can do no wrong these days. He could create an alternative fuel out of puppies and the world would line-up into 2012 for a chance to purchase some.

Well, not this guy! I’m too busy perving over the women’s beach volleyball to give a second consideration to the whole Phelps juggernaut. He can take his free pizza and shove it up his ass for all I care.


* Except of course, that fish can’t turn their heads - take that Fish Boy!