Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2006

Mini-Rants


I'm attributing my mountainous amounts of crankypants-ness (yes, that is a word around our house, shaddup) to a couple of things, one of which is me tailing off of this nasty creeping crud I'm finally starting to get over. But, I'm not *quite* over it, hence all the crankypants. Ness. And the fact that I capitalized that makes me weird, I know.

Anyhow, there were any number of little things that just rattled my teeth today. A few of these things are as follows:

1) Cold! It has been in the high 20s-low 30s here in the mornings, and "warming" (heh) up to the mid 40s during the day. This is actually pretty typical for this part of California, this time of year, but I've been cold all day long, and that's while wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a long gray belted cardigan indoors. (And pants. And shoes and socks. Because even I know that if you're wearing a shirt and a sweater, and letting everything else flap in the breeze, that won't help the temperature issue much.)

Now, I realize that 30 degrees is not AS COLD as the temperature is in some spots. It's not AS COLD as North Dakota. It's not AS COLD as Alaska. It's not AS COLD as Neptune. But it is still COLD. Don't give me that, "30? Pft! That's summer weather! You should go put on your shorts!" Because I will thwap you upside your hollow head with my ice scraper. Which I have been using because there has been ice on my car every morning. Not frost. ICE. Because it's COLD.

Geddit? Okay.

2) I realize that workplace bathroom issues are a touchy subject for some folks, and the use, judicious or otherwise, of flowery air deodorizer is a popular hot button.

But for the love of little apples and baby zebras, STOP spraying that stuff around the damn bathroom. It is a bathroom, not a rose garden, not a tea room, and not a high class sitting room. There are toilets present. As the saying goes, everybody poops. If anyone walks into the lavatory expecting bunnies and sunshine and the aroma of home-baked cookies, that person is delusional and should be filed away somewhere for appraisal.

That floral stuff (or citrus stuff, or cinnamon stuff, or any other kind of spray stuff) does not hide the fact that the bathroom will sometimes smell like ass. Ideally, when I walk into the bathroom, I should smell nothing. However, I am a realist. I'm in a bathroom. Ass happens. It's expected, and while not exactly pleasant, you're supposed to do whatever you needed to do when you went in there, leave, and go on about your day. Polluting the air with canned posies just makes everything smell like posie-scented ass, which is about 3 trillion times worse than just plain old ass.

So put the can of lilac foofy spray down and back away slowly. Thank you.

3) Around our house, when something someone says makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, we quote Sandy the Squirrel from Spongebob. There was an episode ("No Weenies Allowed", I believe. Yes, I know the episode names, shaddup.) where Sandy was waiting for Spongebob to change into his swim trunks. Spongebob was acting kind of jumpy because he was actually planning to come out of the changing booth and ambush Sandy with his karate moves. She picks up his weirdness from his voice and says, to the "camera", "Spongebob's acting jumpier than a rattlesnake in a pickle barrel. Wait, what?" Even she realized that what she said was completely ridiculous. It's actually pretty funny.

So, I was watching one of the many random poker tournaments on tv with Dad, this evening. It happened to be focused on an all-women table, and they basically made a whole show around it, all, "Ooh, look at the girls play cards! Girls can play cards, too!" Which, right there is irritating, but whatever, I can get past that one.

What I had a harder time getting past was the ridiculous commentator who kept spouting off these "clever" lines, and by "clever", I mean, "so stupid that his microphone lost brain cells". At one point, two women were playing a hand against each other, and one woman called, and the other woman was unpleasantly surprised that her opponent had a better hand. The commentator said, "Ooh, here we go! The lipstick's coming off now!"

Wait, what?

I asked Dad, "What the Hell does that mean?"

"I don't know. Nothing. It's like a rattlesnake in a pickle barrel."

"No shit."

So the same dumbass says, a moment later, about the same situation, "Wow, the makeup's really coming off now!"

"What is WRONG with this guy?" I ask no one in particular. Dad's just laughing, because the commentator sounds so excited, so pleased with himself that he's so damn witty, when really, he's just Sandy the Squirrel.

Again, same dude at the end of the match, after one of the women was eliminated from the table: "Well, we've broken the first fingernail here. So-and-so has been eliminated..." Can you be any more sexist, jackass? I mean, come on. Broken fingernail jokes? That stereotype is so old and tired that it should just be buried and let rest.

Though, to take that thought and run in a different direction with it, I will ask... does Jennifer Tilly own any *normal* shirts? Ones that aren't cut to her navel? Doesn't she get cold? I swear, every time the camera panned to her, one of the dudes on mic said, "And Tilly, as usual, has a great hand. Really nice." And by "hand", you know he meant "rack", because day-um, girl.

Anyway, I suppose that's enough snark for now. I have about eleventy quadrillion presents to wrap still...

saturncat at 9:44 p.m.

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