Ceilings and You

This really needs to be turned into an Internet meme.

This is an image I found on my Mac after I got it from eBay last year. Apparently, its past life was as a graphics machine in the advertising department of a major home improvement chain, one that doesn't really care to wipe their hard drives when they sell an old computer. It's sad that my computers have had better jobs than I have.

What I love about this picture, though, is that somewhere in the warehouse where they shoot these things, there is a crew that had to completely tear down this room, rebuild it with a lower ceiling, and have the photographer take the shot again, just because the person putting together the ad wants a little more ceiling in the picture. You wonder how these companies stay in business.

Oh, wait, it's because they've pushed the mom and pop stores into bankruptcy. Forgot about that part, sorry.

Yeah, thanks for getting flooded, asshole!

What remains of Lonesome Road in Old Forge, after the Lackawanna River made a snack of it during the June 2006 floods.

From the "Why Retail Workers Should be Armed" Dept.

So the Scranton Times-Tribune has an article today about the struggles of the Dollar General store on Lonesome Road in Old Forge, which can be seen in the background of the above photo. Not struggles against rising water, or the road being out, mind you. We're talking struggles by store employees against angry customers. Let's review their plight, shall we?

1. One week ago, the Lackawanna River surged, flooding the store under several feet of water. Much of the merchandise was, obviously, destroyed, and the store needed a major cleanup as a result.
2. In addition, the road in front of the store was washed away by the river current, leaving the store inaccessible for almost a week since.
3. When PennDOT finally built a temporary road around the washed-out portion, it was too narrow for the company's large trucks to navigate, leaving the store unable to replenish its stock, most of which is now waterlogged and unsellable, even if it is a dollar store.

Yet despite all this, there are still pieces of human garbage out there that actually have the gall to complain that the store is closed! From the article:

“Great. Now I have to go all the way out of my way. Thanks a lot,” one man yelled out of his car window before speeding out of the parking lot.

What the fuck do these people expect? "Yeah! Thanks a lot for not miraculously parting the Lackawanna like Moses so I can buy all my dollar store crap right this instant!"

It was much nicer back in the old days, when problem "customers" like that were shown the door and told never to come back, lest they be charged with trespassing. Now, all the retail business is done by large chains that hire managers who are too chicken to tell the terminally ignorant to get the hell out. This, in turn, makes it worse for the rest of us to shop, since we're always trying to get around idiots who:

• Block entire aisles and refuse to move
• Hold up the register for hours on end haggling the cashier over various expensive items that she swears were all marked 3/99¢ on the shelf
• Take the motorized carts simply because they are too fat and lazy to walk a few damn feet to the potato chips, leaving none for those who are genuinely handicapped and need them
• When an employee is assisting you, walk up screaming, demanding that the employee help them instead, despite the fact that you were there first (bonus points if they just need to know the location of an item they just walked by on their way to throw a tantrum)
• Take items out of other people's carts
• Allow their filthy, grossly overweight, lice-ridden children to run around the store completely unattended, tripping people, running into shopping carts, blocking aisles, and generally making enough retarded screaming noises to rival the taping of your average MTV show.
• Are filthy, grossly overweight, and lice-ridden themselves
• And so on, and so on...

I propose that we find the "man" (note the use of quotes) mentioned in this article. When the land along Lonesome Road is rebuilt, have a cheap, one-story house built alongside the river, and force this guy to move into it. Next time the river floods, we all get together and beat him with bricks for every hour that he is not finished cleaning up and rebuilding said house. Afterwards, we all take turns yelling, "Thanks a lot, jerkwad!", and speeding off his lawn.

It'll be the best national holiday ever!

I Wish to Register a Complaint

So last night, a customer walked up to my register to return a tub full of dead fish. That left me with 9 defective slips, which I filled out as follows:

Slip 1: Dead.
Slip 2: Ceased to Be
Slip 3: No More
Slip 4: It's a stiff.
Slip 5: Bereft of life.
Slip 6: It rests in peace.
Slip 7: If it hadn't been nailed to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies.
Slip 8: It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.
Slip 9: THIS IS AN EX-FISH!!!

I fully expect to be called into the office for a talk any time now.

And what would Brian Carpenter say?

Fweeeeeeeeeee!

Well, that was quite possibly the single most funnest semester that I've had ever! It was, in fact, so great that I haven't even had the energy to write anything about it until now. That's how wonderful it was. Tremendous! Fabulous! Spectacular even! Please hold on while I go over here and shoot myself.

*BLAM!*

Okay, that aside, let me just sum up my entire spring semester in one word: "Whuh?". That's pretty much how it went. I ended up stuck with an instructor who graded her course pretty much entirely on a single project, that had to be accompanied by many, many "short" pieces which were then changed to 5-page papers at the last minute. Did I forget to mention that she gave us absolutely no clue whatsoever as to what these papers were supposed to be about? Nope, no explanation at all. She just gave us a vague title for each paper and we had to guess from there what she meant by it. Also, I never got a single one of them back, so I never even knew whether or not I was writing these things correctly. This, of course, kept me from ever being able to do any decent work on my actual project, which ended up being a steaming pile of crap. Despite all this, I managed to get by with a B. I don't know how, since I don't think I handed in several of the things on her list, but again, I can't be sure, since that list seemed to change with every class. Yes, folks, this is why I'm only going to school part-time. If I had to deal with four or five of these people at once, I probably would have shot myself by now. Or at least died of sleep depravation.

Anyway, now that that's over, I can finally turn my attention to that horrendous pile of DVD's and CD's that I've been gathering over the past several months but haven't had time to watch/listen to. At least in theory, anyway. So far, it doesn't seem to be working out that well.

"Carrot Top's Last Stand"
(Image taken from amusing.org)

Latest Update from Retail Hell

So last week, a woman waddled on over to the electronics department and racked up an order of over $500. When she got to my register, she proceded to pay this down with gift cards until it was under the limit at which I would have had to automatically call for a check approval. She then handed me the most blatantly obvious counterfeit check that I have ever seen in my life. I mean, this thing was just horrible. It was like she wasn't even trying. There were no security features whatsoever, most of the numbers were missing, the box for the dollar amount was just a very tiny line, and to top it all off, the whole thing had that "inkjet printer running low on ink" blur to it.

So I call the supervisor over, show her the check, she tries not to burst into laughter in front of the "customer". When she informs the worthless crook that we're not going to take her check, she, as expected, starts throwing a fit. So she calls somebody from the accounting office over to look at the check. At this point, the woman realizes that the gig is up, and tries to get her gift cards back and hightail it out of there. She eventually made off with a $250 item on the gift cards, which we later found out were purchased only minutes earlier. That's right, three of our illustrious front-register cashiers actually accepted those pathetically bad fake checks.

I really need to find a job where I won't be associated with these people.

Sakura Kinomoto and a small contingent of Mokonas are confronted on their travels by the nefarious Sw!ms footsoldier.

And now, a play-by-play recap of CLAMP No Kiseki Volume 1

• Cover: Good Lord, this has to be the single pinkest thing that I have ever had the courage to walk into a store and buy. Somehow, I don't think their target audience for this is 25-year-old ponytailed dorks. Just a hunch there. I also bought an Atom & His Package CD along with this, so if you can picture the contrast of those two sitting on the register counter together, you can imagine that I'm probably on every mental health watch list in America right now.
• Page 1: You know, one of these days the Blue's Clues people are going to send a platoon of lawyers into Tsubaki Nekoi's place and banish her off to wherever it is they exiled Steve to. Although it would be fun if Nickelodeon replaced Blue with Ioryogi for an episode or two. You just know those kids are gonna have problems.
  
  Also, Mokona is drawn with a very serene appearance here, which is probably a boon for all those people who believe the "Mokona Is Dead" rumors, but I'm still not buying it. And yes, I have listened to Raison D'être backwards. Several times. I don't hear it. Besides, I don't think William Campbell would be that great of a manga artist, anyway.
• Pages 2-3: I am thoroughly convinced that there was never, at any time, tea spilled on this illustration, and that CLAMP wrote this just to trick their fans into poring over it for hours in a vain attempt to locate the stain. Well, I, for one, won't fall for it!
  
  Okay, okay, I fell for it. DAMN YOU, CLAMP! DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN YOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUU!!!
• Page 4: I wish I had a bathroom that looked like that. Although it leaves me wondering what the rest of the fixtures would look like. Would the toilet have wings, too? Because it would be kind of weird doing one's business while sitting on a physical manifestation of a screensaver from the waning days of the After Dark era.
• Page 5: So in case you haven't guessed yet, this volume happens to be entirely about Cardcaptor Sakura, which is a bit strange. It's sort of like making a Beatles retrospective, and starting it off with an in-depth look at Sgt. Pepper's. Sure, it's probably more well-known than the earlier stuff, but it pretty much kills all sense of context when they arrange it like this.
• Page 6: I do not, however, wish I had an outfit that looked like that. Poor Li looks as though he had a run-in with an irreputable lederhosen dealer. Granted, he's practically guaranteed not to have a "wardrobe malfunction" with all those straps, but I don't think that's really a concern of his.
  
  Also, I never would have pegged Sakura as a Grateful Dead fan. But there you go. I'll be willing to accept this so long as we never see Watanuki in posession of a Phish T-shirt.
• Page 7: And by "atypical", they mean that CCS actually doesn't consist primarily of long, drawn-out transformation sequences and gratuitious upskirt shots. It's amazing the level of quality that you can achieve when you leave those out.
• Pages 8-13 And now, for those of you tuning in late, a recap of Cardcaptor Sakura, complete with all of your favorite moments!
  • The awakening of Sakura's powers!
  • The appearance of Syaoran!
  • Rika and Terada: Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot?
  • Sakura is kidnapped by the Empire!
  • Syaoran finds out that Darth Vader is his father!
  • Tomoyo is frozen in carbonite and taken prisoner by Boba Fett!
  • Ewoks! Ewoks! Ewoks!
• Pages 14-15: I am astonished that the character pages contain no mention whatsoever of those two girls in the top panel of the eleventh page of chapter 10. This is clearly a glaring omission, and I will be demanding a refund.
  
  ...
  
  Yeah, yeah. I know it's a dumb joke. But I just spent a half hour scouring through my copies of CCS trying to find some suitable nameless extras (there aren't that many, amazingly), and I'll be damned if I let that time go to waste.
• Page 16: Ah, it's good to see a reminder of what a great company Piffle Princess was before they were acquired by an American big-box retailer a few years ago. Now there are always fat people blocking the aisles in smelly motorized carts, the register lines are about three hours long, you need to take out an extra life insurance policy just to venture into the parking lot, and don't even think of entering an angel you bought there into a tournament, unless you want to be laughed clear out of Tokyo when it inexplicably falls apart right in the middle of fall-in. It's a crying shame, really.
• Page 17: The essay manages to do a perfect job of describing what appears to be a favorite CLAMP storytelling strategy: Lull the readers into thinking that it's just a mindless fluff story, and then when they're least expecting it, sneak up behind them and whack them across the head with a very large cinderblock. It's like a top-40 station that suddently cuts into an entire Captain Beefheart album accompanied by an old, scratchy LP of Tuvan throat singers played at 45. Jarring at first, but way more addictive than it should be. Miyuki-chan In Wonderland is actually listed as a controlled substance in many European countries because of this effect.
• Pages 18-19: This outfit is a lot better than the strap polka motif, although I probably would have gone with an off-whie sport coat and a grey shirt with those pants. Then again, everybody knows that striped pants are a violation of the Geneva convention, anyway, so it's all a moot point.
• Pages 20-21: So here we have a look at all of the original Japanese cover art for pretty much every CCS-related thing that ever existed in Japan, most of which we never even got to see because we're stuck having to get these things through &#@%ing Tokyopop. And now that I've seen the original DVD artwork, I'm just a bit peeved about that, too. But only a little bit. It could be worse. We could still be stuck with nothing but the dub.
• Pages 22-23: Something I noticed in all these illustrations is that they're all covered in these little white dots, as though they've been lightly sprinkled with bleach or white-out or whatnot. I'm waiting to see how long it takes until Pete starts using a technique like this with his photos. He'll probably work it in somewhere between "burning the negative" and "soaking the print in Kool-Aid and letting it sit under a rock in the neighbor's backyard for six weeks".
• Pages 24-25: Yoshiki Tanaka is a man who has a fedora, and knows how to wear it. 'Nuff said.
• Pages 26-31: See, this is what I meant by that cinderblock comment earlier. Just when you thought you were reading a nice, sane retrospective: *WHAM!* Six pages of fighting cat-fairy-things. You will now be left wondering where the hell that came from for several weeks. That, I think, is the sadistic beauty of Kiseki thus far. You pick this up, thinking that you might finally get some answers as to where some of these f**ked up ideas came from, and not only do you not get any of these answers, but you end up being left even more confused than you were before!
  
  Poor Kakyo. She's so misunderstood. *sniff*
• And finally, the chess pieces: I'm kind of torn over this. On one hand, there's the coolness factor of having a full CLAMP chess set. On the other hand, everybody knows that it can't be a true novelty chess set unless it's made out of pewter at the Franklin Mint. Not only are these things made in China, but they've also committed the blasphemous act of making them out of plastic! And not even the good kind of plastic, either! I'm talking the really weak, bendy stuff here. Where's the fun in it if you can't throw a pawn at your opponent in an angry rage and leave a nice Mokona-shaped bruise on his/her forehead for the next several weeks? Feh! Feh, I say!

Anyway, that's it for this edition. Be sure to tune in next time, when we'll have with us special guest Roger Moltewicz. We don't know who he is yet, but we're sure it will be interesting. Goodnight, everybody!

Relive the magic of Cardcaptor Will

Non-triumphant return to the web

Well, after almost three years of not doing anything whatsoever with the website I had, I've decided to take the whole thing down and try doing just the blog thing for a while. I'm sorry to disappoint the thousands upon thousands of you who I'm sure are just biting your nails to the quick waiting for the Ashlee Simpson update to "Where Are They Now: 2010", but I'm sure you'll manage. (My prediction: she'll hack Jessica up in a jealous rage; then take her own life by bashing her face in with a brick. Her face won't look any different afterwards.) I think that when you get to the point where you don't even remember writing half of your site, it's time to let go. Although I'll definately have to bring back ScrantonCam eventually. Maybe I can turn the Mokona dress-up thing into a running gag? There's Mokona as Homsar, Mokona as Shaft, Mokona as Kurt Cobain, the list goes on. Eventually a small army of Kodansha lawyers will storm into my house and sieze everything I own, allowing me to not have to worry about a website anymore. Problem solved!

Anyway, I don't really get much time to walk around downtown Scranton randomly anymore, like I did a few years ago. So if you're perusing the archives and see those entries where I found strange things on such walks, you must be really bored. Err... I mean, there probably won't be too much of that anymore, as I am now a member of the Nation's Elite! That's right, folks, I'm one of the few, the proud, the retail workers! Expect a lot of griping about dumb customers in the future, as that's just what we do. Well, besides trying to deal with said customers without slamming them repeatedly into the endcap and screaming something like "FOR! *slam* THE! *slam* LAST! *slam* TIME! *slam* THE! *slam* VIDEO! *slam* NOW! *slam* PLAYERS! *slam* ARE! *slam* IN! *slam* TOYS! *slam* THIS! *slam* IS! *slam* ELECTRONICS! *slam* THEY! *slam* ARE! *slam* NOT! *throws customer out of dept* HERE!". This is, of course, after the customer insists for twenty minutes that they are in electronics and refuses to take no for an answer, somehow thinking that he/she knows the store better than you do, even though they needed to ask you for directions. Sometimes you wonder how these people manage to dress themselves, although many of them can't even manage that properly.

Also, I've been doing a show called "Chaos: Live!" on WUSR for the last three years. If you want to check that out, you must be really, just totally mind-numbingly bored. Err.. I mean, you can hear it on Saturdays, from 4 to 8 PM Eastern, either on 99.5 FM in the Scranton area, or via WUSR's Real or Windows Media streams. If you're so bored that you're almost suicidal, you can see my past playlists here. Mostly I play a lot of the Hipster standards, mixed in with various obscure or downright strange things that I find online or through listening to WFMU. It's college radio at its worst!

So anyway, that's pretty much it for the re-re-re-reintroduction thing. You may now safely proceed to a blog that's actually somewhat interesting. Assuming that you've actually bothered to read this far, in which case: Congratulations, you are indeed extremely bored!