Archive for October, 2007
Medicated Cheese and No-Fault Insurance
Posted on October 26, 2007
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 Kraft is marketing medicated cheese now. Employing the same strategy that countless veterinarians have used to drug your dogs and vaguely promising that its “probiotic” cultures will help you lead an active lifestyle, the cheesemonger of all cheesemongers has aired commercials showing stylishly dressed professional women grabbing small sacks of cheese on their way out the door to work…or wherever stylishly dressed active people go whilst toting dairy products with dubious medical benefits. This is all assuming that a lump of squishy, nauseating, processed cheese is going to do anything for you other than acting as the rectal caulk you and I already know it to be. |
 My brother, Gerald (shown here with a rented floor-sander), has agreed to sell me his 1999 Pontiac Grand Am SE, which has 129,000 miles on its odometer but looks nearly new due to the tender loving care that my anal retentive brother has showered it throughout the long eight years its been rolling around on our little world. I thank him profusely in advance, as a zero-coverage car insurance policy is all I will be able to afford until October of next year due to my frighteningly careless driving record.I’m actually a little excited, as I’ve not “owned” a car in a long while, having been a lessee for the last ten years. |
 In other exciting news, I recently heard a contemporary recording of an Andrew “Dice” Clay stand-up routine on Sirius Satellite Radio’s uncensored “Raw Dog” comedy channel. Filled with all the same crude, misogynistic crap you remember being funny in 1991, only delivered with the desperation that only a middle-aged lecher on parole could muster.Aside from Dice’s material, the recording sported only a smattering of uncomfortable snickers as Andy Clay failed over and over again to win over the crowd. After awhile he started trying to get some audience participation by asking them if they were married, or gay, or anything else he might have a canned response for. Apparently he never found what he was looking for. Near the end, as I was marveling to myself that anyone would have released this recording to the public–especially since the material didn’t even work for the people who were actually there to begin with–Andrew actually said something slightly amusing to me. Here it is:
Sure, Bette isn’t exactly current events anymore, but the absurdity and relative cleanliness of this joke struck me. If Dice had just abandoned his anachronistic and increasingly unbelievable gutter-Lothario persona and had gone down this road, maybe he wouldn’t be exuding flop sweat so strong that it can be smelled over the radio. But I think the world has already passed you by, Dice. |
The Wrecked Safe-T-Mobile
Posted on October 21, 2007
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My poor, poor autocar.
State Farm Insurance company’s claims adjuster did one quick lap around the corpse and pronounced it “99.9%” totaled. Which is wierd, because the seats seemed fine and they account for more than 0.1%, right? Splitting hairs, I suppose, and I take his point.
My brother-in-law, Scott, is the manager of the auto shop where the little yellow car spent its last days in repose and he retrieved my personal affects from the poor thing. In so doing he tells me that he found the dashboard was split down the middle and even the back doors are now crooked. This means the entire structure of the car is twisted, and not feasibly repairable. State Farm and Ford Motor Credit had a little talk and, subsequently, my lease agreement–and the underlying vehicle leased thereby–have both now evaporated into the ether from which all credit comes and goes.
So now I have no car. And, according to my insurance company, I’m darn-near uninsurable because of two tickets I already had on my record prior to the accident. I’m a menace, apparently, and for once I’m not talking about my seditious perversity. In Michigan you are not allowed to drive without car insurance, so I’m not quite sure what to do next. I’ll keep you posted as I figure it out.
Here’s some more pictures of the Focus. Click them to go visit Flickr, where you can see them enlarged if you should so desire.
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Here’s one last picture, and its my favorite. Look closely; can you see the car battery? How about the driver’s side windshield wiper?
Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny, too.
* A “beater” denotes a very inexpensive car, normally aged and with high mileage, which usually would represent no great loss if destroyed. Typically you would put minimal insurance on such a thing, making it affordable for dangerous people like me to continue terrorizing the public grid.
** The saddest part of this accident is that I’d always assumed my car would last a long while. My lease was only two years, but I had some solace in knowing it would be sold to someone else and continue its life without me. By wrecking the thing in its prime I not only lose its use to me, but I also lose it for all the people who would’ve owned it after me. Plus I put several thousand pounds of metal and plastic into a junk yard, which is not ecologically the best place for it.
SafeT Bar Anti-Joke
Posted on October 17, 2007
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Here’s a bar joke you can tell the next time such things become conversationally appropriate in your life-style:
A one legged man walks into a bar and sits down. The bartender approaches him, and the one-legged man asks him to serve him a double-shot of whiskey.
The bartender ignores him in favor of an attractive young lady sitting next to him who orders a “Bay Breese”.
The one legged man waits a while and then leaves. A few minutes later the young lady excuses herself to go to the bathroom. A third fellow of no importance then sits down on her recently vacated stool and fidgets nervously.
The bartender accidentally breaks a bottle of expensive vodka.
You Know What Sells
Posted on October 15, 2007
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I half-heard the radio tell me,
“Fertility and Agility: Pontiac”
There’s a transparency to this sort of advertising campaign; I find it refreshing.
I know, all of the car companies like to imply that my automobile purchase/lease will have a direct and pronounced effect on my sex life. They never stop to consider the contents of the glove-box when making these bold and hasty claims.
One gander at my collection of Unspeakable Decay, auto maintenance schedule booklet and tire-pressure gauge is enough to throw my potential mate into rabid, frenzied fury as she tramples the crowd in a mad rush towards my waiting and rubbery arms–slick as they are with both wet sweat and dry sweat in my fertile and agile car. Both she and I are augmented agilitudinally and that’s what Pontiac intended.
Do you think it would work on my wife as well, or is a divorce necessary? If the latter, I’ll stick with Fords. Staid reliability and endurance is more useful in a monogomists bedroom after all.
SafeTinspector Car Wreck: Not So Safe After All
Posted on October 14, 2007
SafeTinspector has completely wrecked his 2007 Ford Focus hatch-back and, apparently, sprained his sternum.
Driving home from a friend’s house on Thursday evening, I came upon a mid-nineties model Pontiac Sundance stalled out at the corner of 18 Mile Road and Mound Road in the right-most northbound lane of Mound Road.
As this sort of Pontiac is wont to do, it had been spewing thick clouds of black smoke prior to expiring, so the tail-lights were preternaturally dim and unviewable even with the hazard lights activated. A nice lady in a mini-van therefore didn’t notice the stalled car until it was almost too late for her to stop.
She did, however, stop in time. The four cars behind her, mine included, didn’t do so well. I actually had no idea there was ANY stoppage in traffic and piled into the last car while driving about 45mph (about 70kmph). As the car I struck was not the car I remembered driving behind, I suspect the car in front of me swerved at the last moment, leaving me to my fate. I’m not ABSOLUTELY certain, as it happened very fast and I was in a slightly confused state after the accident.
One second I was driving along, moving with traffic, and the next cacophonous second I was looking at the back windows of a Jeep Cherokee which was somehow WAY too close to my smashed windshield. Did I scream in terror? Did I wag my head? No. As the stinky airbag slowly deflated in my lap, burping sulfurously, I yelled–in anger!–to the world at large:
”OH! I HAVE BEEN IN A TERRIBLE ACCIDENT!!”
After making this declaration I pried my door open and staggered out, taking stock of my physical integrity (mental and/or social integrity not withstanding) and determined that I probably had no broken bones. I also noted the number of cars involved in the accident (four!) and the weather (dark, damp, chilly and windy). No one was seriously hurt, although one girl claimed that her shoulder was hurting and had a friend drive her to a doctors office, eschewing the offers of the attending paramedics to ride in their pretty, flashing ambulance.
I received a citation from the responding police officer (failure to stop within assured clear distance) which can put two points on my driving record and may ruin the current relative affordability of my automobile insurance.
My brother-in-law, Scott, manages the paint line at a local automobile body shop so I had my wreck taken there where insurance adjusters will examine it on Monday or Tuesday. Chances are that the little Focus will be consigned to the ghoulish predations of a scrap yard attendant and I will be left with no car. No car payment either, but that is a temporary condition as I must have a car for work purposes.
In the day since the accident I’ve discovered that I have some very colorful bruises upon the upper left side of my chest and on both hips. These are most likely the result of my seat-belt handling me roughly in its single-minded determination to keep me from exiting the car via the windshield–a task it performed quite well. The patch of bruises on my upper chest is lumpy and by this morning had become peppered with little pimples, most of which broke in an tiny orgy of pustulation as I toweled myself off after my shower. As I gazed into the bathroom mirror I noted that the slanted, eye-shaped welts on my hips make it look like my naked pelvis is a large cat with a worm hanging from its furry nose*.
The bruises are nothing. A little tender, but I’m used to bruising. My sternum, however, is more disquieting. If I sneeze, sniffle, cough or blow my nose I get a painful reminder of the accident. Through judicious probing of my ribs and surrounding musculature I know there is nothing broken, so I assume my sternum is merely sprained or slightly torn. There really is nothing to be done, so I’ve not gone to see a doctor yet.
I mean, if I went to the doctor’s office the most that would happen is that he’d give me Motrin, which I already have. There’s no medical intervention that can help with this sort of thing, just time and careful restraint. I don’t need to pay for an office visit and a chest X-ray just to be told to do what I’m already doing.
I’ve asked Scott to take pictures of the wrecked Ford for me, and as soon as I have them, I’ll post them here. In the meantime, rest assured that regardless of the dismal fate of the SafeTmobile the SafeTinspector is still Safe.
* insert “eww!” here
