SqueegeeVandal: Normally I do a live thing on the weekend, and upload an arranged thing on Wednesday.
     This week I did my live improvised thing (Week 2) mid-week as an attempted continuance of the thing from the weekend (Blind Jump). I’m quite proud of those, actually! Try them out and tell me how they are.
     Since there were, maybe, 4 hits total between the two, I figured it wasn’t necessary to do another one this weekend.
     So instead I give you SqueegeeVandal, a sequenced arrangement in four movements, only the last of which fits the title.

Let me know how you like it! Only you can prevent forest fires.

     If you’ve ever wondered what the most unintentionally ugly object known to man is, then please allow me to introduce you to the Italian Bird Statues. You may remember that I mentioned this item once before, but at the time its history was unknown. Here is the result of my painstaking research onto its background:
     These truly horrible objects were undoubtedly birthed directly from the bowels of hell, and manifested somewhere in the remote mountains of Italy.
     A blind man, searching for truffles with his preternaturally enhanced sence of smell, came upon them one day and sold them to a young Hindu boy who was swimming through the canals of Venice in search of Disney memorabilia. Believing it to be an early draft of Donald duck made prior to Disney’s discovery of his latent heterosexuality (a discovery which led Donald to dump his longtime boyfriend, Frenchy MacDuckerson), he attempted to sell it to an American tourist from Minneapolis for the equivalent of 3 dollars.
     The American, George Protcki, overcome with revulsion and fear, accidentally strangled the boy to death with a garotte wire and inadvertantly hid the body in his luggage along with the repulsive bird-things.
     After selling the body of the Hindu boy to Garrison Keiller for use as a stage prop on his radio show, “Prairy Home Companion,” George wandered East, overdosed on imported peanut brittle, and was buried in a mass grave outside of Sausalito. The birds resurfaced in the hands of an art collector in the Detroit area. Driven mad by their cold, dead gaze, the collector committed suicide by methodically dismantling and eating an over-stuffed Victorian settee. His heirs, anxious to rid themselves of the curse of the sculptures, attempted to sell the item through my Auction-ItTODAY franchise.

     I have reproduced for you the original ad, if you would like to see it here.

Great and powerful Essbeesee, responding to my sanctimonious genital blood-letting, dispatched his holy emmissaries, Miniature Cow and Miniature Tiger.
This terrible and magnificent pair immediately corrected That Which Afflicted Us.

First, they took turns gently power cycling and loopback testing until the SmartJack was all the way up. Then they began to work together; the link was up, then down, and then up again. Tiger was worried that things were getting too intense, but Cow relaxed and told Tiger, “just let it happen.”
Faster now, the two worked their magic, building the tcp route almost to completion just to let it fade away before it passed a single packet, faster and faster, faster and faster, until the route built… up… enough… and -YES!- our router let loose its white hot torrents of data packets all across the face of the internet!

*pant – pant – pant*
You may now enjoy my blogs as God(s?) intended you to.

My office is experiencing technical difficulties.
Because I host most of my own images and all of my audio, much of my blogs are busted.
Tune in later for an update.
Even now I am engaging in genital blood-letting in an attempt to appease the angry god, Essbeesee.

We chanced upon this poor fellow during our excursion into the wilds of Pontiac. He’d apparently wandered off, too sick to hunt or forage on his own, and died here in this thicket of wild lawn grass and free growing street signs.
To you and I, such a death seems lonely, and pointless. But nature operates by rules of her own, and the Shopping Cart, when it grows old and weak, typically separates itself from the pack and wanders off to die.
Occasionally one will form a bond with a member of the UBM.
These touching, mutually beneficial relationships provide them both with companionship, bags of trash, empty bottles of liquor and soft drinks, and occasionally flags and balloons.

It is obvious that this fellow, a Great American FoodMart from his bright red plumage, never found a UBM, and is left here to decay in peace.

I salute you, proud trolly.

Almost unlistenable, and not because of mistakes. Week 2
Also, this weekend’s piece was a bit dark as well. Blind Jump

No one paints a sky gray like Detroit does. I understand that London frequently hides its sky behind a wall of fog, and we occasionally get that as well.
But our speciality is gray. Gray like a dead thing, or like a mushroom, or like my palid zombie-finger.
So today I drive upon glossy pavement, watching rivulets race down my windshield at every stop along the way to my office. Windshield wipers, overdue for their annual replacement by four years, chatter like a pissed off squirrel as they drag their shaggy asses across the window.

Heather is on her way to her job interview. I am more nervous than she.
Her previous position was a promotion from within, so she has never gone through a professional level interview.
She is rough in manner sometimes, and explaining the loss of her previous job may prove tricky…

I carefully packed a smoke grenade and three tablets of cyanide in her briefcase.
If the interview is going bad, she is to use the smoke grenade as an obscurant, and then place the cyanide tablets into the interviewer(s) hot cocoa. After beating a hasty retreat, she should then call and reschedule the job interview with whomever is replacing the interviewer(s). The only weak point in my plan is that she only has three tablets, so if there are more witnesses she’ll need to be prepared to kill them with her bare hands. Heather seemed a bit uncertain on that point, so I really hope it doesn’t come down to that.

- later that day -
Actually, she did well at the interview, and now we have to wait to see if she made it to round 2. They said the position needs to be filled by Aug 15, so we should know pretty soon.

Truly, this is an auspicious occasion. There are now EXACTLY 300 items in my email trash.
I’m TOTALLY into numerology, so such a nice, round, arbitrarily arrived at number must mean something.

I was ill this morning in an anal way, so perhaps I’ve shed 300 protozoic parasites in the restroom. But, that still seems a bit trivial for it to have mandated such a bold harbinger.
It may be that I must combine the number 300 with another number from today in order to clear up the omen.

Hmm, lets see. I printed 2000 circulars for a mailing later today. 300 completely fails to become a denominator for 2000 unless fractions are used. 7 and 2/3? Hardly numerologically interesting. WAIT! Seven, two and three are all prime numbers.
In fact, with the exception of 5, they are all the prime numbers below 10!

The missing 5 must mean something. There is only one real possibility. Against all odds and the best interests of my marriage, five people will have sex with me three hundred times today using seven body parts in two different positions.
It’s already….3:00 PM. I’d better get a move on, or I’ll be up kinda late tonight.
…I’m not entirely sure I have enough water soluble lubricant.

This is going to be complicated by the fact that there are only two women in my office, both of which find me physically repulsive–nay, repugnant!–and what are the odds that they both have condoms? I’m a bit short on prophylactics due to this whole monogamy kick I’ve been on for the last ten years or so, and that means they better be packing. Maybe my wife could wear five wigs?

Maybe sex isn’t involved.
It may be that the fates are mandating that I drive home on two wheels, Dukes of Hazzard style, at three hundred miles an hour, listening to three different radio stations by changing the station every seven minutes. This scenario is completely workable, since I’ve borrowed my wife’s 4 cylinder Saturn VUE for the day.
The only weakness in this theory is that it would require me to be driving for at least 21 minutes to accommodate all the requisite radio station changes. At that rate I will have traveled 105 miles, and will have overshot my home by about 90 miles. Scratch the special travel plans.

Wait! That math didn’t take into account the accelleration time for the Saturn VUE to reach 300 miles per hour. Given the inadequate storage methods I’ve employed with my old solid fuel rocket boosters, I’m not willing to risk using them, so the acceleration time would be…infinite. Which, when given the finite number of radio station changes and distance travelled should all wash out. Sounds like a plan!

Whew! That’s so much more palatable than all that sex with inadequate lubrication.

All done.
Oh, wait. I just deleted another spam. 301… 301…

At first I didn’t actually think I was going to do a recording this week, what with the finger and all.
But I played anyway, and while I started off by dancing around the wounded finger, I ended up trashing it.
Still hurts…

Anyway, this is a long one, and its completely improvised. I have decided to call it Blind Jump.

In a terrible turn of events, my right hand insult finger has been damaged. I’ll have to go back to mooning people for not using their turn signals. And I was SO happy when I first realized I didn’t need to use my ass every time.

As much as I’d like to say this blackened fingernail is the spot where an alien impregnated me, and where a group of little black horrors will erupt forth, claim refugee status, and star in a reality show which follows the entertaining exploits of each of them as they try to start a family run gas station called “Black Scab Petrol,” I can’t. Even though that means we’ll all miss the heart-warming episode in which the adolescent daughter, Scab Flake, finally realizes she really does love her father, Scabbers…romantically. (It isn’t really all that sick, if you are already starting with the premise that the incestuous pair are members of a family made entirely of anthropomorphic bits of coagulated blood. Everything is relative, even the lines which I Must Not Cross.)

The reality is that it was caught in the hinge of a large metal door. My reaction was quite long-winded, so I’ll have to paraphrase:
“My, that stings just a bit, doesn’t it? This is really quite painful. No, don’t make a fuss, I’ll just go and soak it in cold water. You know, I thought it was already painful enough, but against all odds its becoming even more astonishingly painful. Yes, yes, now its visibly throbbing. See? It’s pushing the ice around the cup in time to my heartbeat. I’m sorry if it seems rude, but I’m having a hard time paying attention to the conversation when there’s all this screaming going on. Yes, I know that it’s me screaming, don’t you think I’d recognize my own voice? What am I saying? Sounds like something about shrimp scampi, doesn’t it. Now, I’m going to have to excuse myself, I’d like to go tend to this excruciating wound. Don’t get up, I’ll be back.”
The unabridged version was even longer, and was made even worse by the fake British accent I always revert to in moments of severe stress. I imagine this happens to Christian Bale all the time, right?

As for Christian “Bat Man” Bale, did you know that blighter is so patronizing that he uses his fake American accent whenever he gives interviews to American journalists? Refuses to turn it off! He even spoke in his faux East-Coast patois to Terry Gross, the intellectual host of NPR’s Fresh Air. What would the English media think if, say, Harrison Ford adopted a Cockney accent whenever he spoke to a BBC interviewer? Or Carrie Fischer? Or Mark Hammel? Or Sir Alec Guinness?