Grey Ghost
Best Middle Age Supplements
Disclaimer: I don't have any idea if any of these are the best supplements for middle age. I just recently took a bunch of them and thought I'd share my experiences. Do with it what you'd like.
Ibuprofen- Alright, not technically a supplement, but the way I take them it may as well be. Basically, I drop them like breath mints and it was the pace and volume that I chug them that got me thinking about alternatives in the first place. Actually, I didn't think about alternatives at all until people kept bothering me about how many ibuprofen I took. People would say, "Did you just take 10 ibuprofen??? That's bad for you! That will hurt your insert random organ here." To which I say, "That's fine. As soon as my random organ hurts worse than my hip, knee, back, and marriage, I'll change things up." Until then though, it's legal, it's over the counter, and taken in fistfuls it works well enough to get me to tomorrow. I can't say that about anything else in my life.
But, hey, I'll try anything which led me to...
Viagra- Another disclaimer: I don't need Viagra, but I know what it's supposed to do and I'm fascinated by the possibilities. By possibilities, I mean the possibilities of me taking it in fistfuls like the Ibuprofen. I know what will happen and I don't think it's so bad. You could have worse physical afflictions than walking around with a 24/7 boner. Instead of being the guy with a giant goiter on his neck, you're the guy who walks around with a hard on a-l-l the t-i-m-e. People can call me Bonerman. I don't care anymore. For years, I've used the line, "It won't go down unless you touch it." Now, I just adapt it to, "Seriously, it will not go down unless you touch it."
Disclaimer- The above is an unfinished blog post that's been sitting in Drafts for at least 6 months. I'm just going through Drafts and publishing everything because it at least breaks the near two year spell of not posting and....wait...Who am I explaining this to? No one reads this but me
Training Video
I had occasion this week to endure a requisite training video. I don't want to reveal what I do, but I'm not sure it matters. I think a lot of people in regulated industries or large corporations are forced to endure this crap. At the end of this I always think of the same question. Who is this training for? Morons?
If the training videos are any indication, the necessity of producing and showing training videos could be eliminated by simply not hiring morons. Also, if any morons are currently employed they would need to be fired immediately. The training in training videos is useless to me. There is nothing instructive in watching a moron strap on snowshoes and dance through a minefield.
You know who needs training videos? Human resources, because apparently morons have infiltrated the hiring process and the rest of us have to be warned not to drunk drive a steamroller through a playground. Human resources should have two sets of training videos. First, they should get a training video on how to identify morons in the hiring process. Second, H.R. should have to sit through the training videos I just watched to reinforce the corporate consequences if they fail at screening morons.
I'm tired too of the Training Video Players acting troupe. I'm starting to recognize them and the roles they've played. There are three basic roles to play in these productions. There is Moron, Victim of Moron, and Supervisor of Moron who is frequently also a moron. I'm not sure where moron and victim of moron is in the acting hierarchy, but I've got to think it's below Oscar winner.
Finally, the technology has advanced to the point there is now interactive features with the training videos. We know now the answer to the question, is there anything technology can't improve? Yes, training videos. Do they really need to ask,
"What should the moron have done?"
A) Not wear a meat suit into the lion cage
B) Not bathe in a tub of gasoline near the fireplace
or
C) Not imbed himself in an industry that mandates I sit through this
Quick Hits
The KillingI want however many weeks I put into watching this back. Read the preseason hype, stayed with it when it started to drrrraaaagggg midseason (midseason joke - "The Killing is killing me"), only to get ticked off at that ending. I called Richmond as the killer very early, so you could argue that I'm just mad they hit a hail mary on me in the last five minutes.
Whatever. I'm not watching a minute of season two AMC. If they wanted to do a second season, you know what they needed? Another killing! No more plot holes or implausible police work for me.
One thing I did learn, according to The Killing people in Seattle spend an inordinate amount of their time standing around in drenching rain. The steadiest work in this production had to be either the production assistant assigned to holding a hose over the actors or the costume designer in charge of wet hoodies.
Game of ThronesJust the opposite of The Killing. Something compelling happened every week, and their last five minutes? More nudity and three baby dragons. That's how you wrap things up.
Workaholics
Funniest new show since It's Always Sunny. It's already done so maybe they rerun it in the summer.
Armadillo Hole
Four years ago I posted about a hole in my yard that I assumed was made by an armadillo. Why is that significant today? It's not, except to me. That one post back in July 2007 is the single biggest driver of traffic to this blog. Apparently there is a hole in the internet encyclopedia/universe of knowledge and it has to do with getting rid of armadillos. If you search for "Armadillo eradification", you're coming here. I'm on page 1 of that search. Go figure. There's a couple of ironies in that.
One is, as I've bitched about countless times, if you type the actual address of the blog, including my password, into a search engine, if the blog comes up at all it's on about page 70 of the search results. It's very gratifying. If I had known how this was going to play out, I would have called it "armadilloeradification.blogger.com" to begin with.
Two is I never actually drove the armadillo away, or I don't know that I did. One day, like most of my pets when I was a kid, it just never came back. About a week after it left, I did notice a dead armadillo on a street 2 blocks away. I suppose it could have been my armadillo and I could have been the cause. My arma-nemesis-dillo may have been disoriented from all the dog poop and moth balls I marinated it with and staggered blindly into traffic. That did lead to 2 months straight of me suggesting that any problem could be solved by, "taking it 2 blocks over and running over it with a car". The wife put that line in her ever growing catalogue of things I say that she does not find wildly hilarious.
Finally, I don't even know if an armadillo was making the hole. My hole could have been the suburban crop sign of unexplained phenomena. All I know is, I had a hole. I put dog poop down it. I covered it up. The hole didn't come back. That also led to the problem solving wise crack, "Put dog poop down it. Cover it up." Another un-hilarious vote from the wife.
None of that matters. What does matter is soon Google will be forced to send me a check for all the traffic I've gotten from people who mistakenly think I can help them with their armadillo. Beyond that we are considering two different revenue drivers from this. One is to develop and market the Grey Ghost Aramadillo Eradication kit. Basically, it's a bag of dog poop and moth balls. It's not going over well in test markets. More promising is the plan to flood the world with armadillos. See, the answer sometimes in business isn't to solve the problem. The answer is to create more problems.
There are worse ideas.
Quick Hits
Brett FavreI love when he comments that he is "singularly focused" or that the allegations against him are "not a distraction". Bullshit.
Number one, his wife his killing him...daily. I see today that she is quoted saying, "faith will see her through this". That is wife code for "Every time he walks in the room I smack him in the head with a bible".
Number two, when somebody asks you, as an adult, if this is a text photo of your penis, you are distracted. That's a question a 9th grader might get asked. I'm sorry Brett, but in the arena of public opinion you're guilty. You don't ignore an allegation like that if it's not true. You don't ignore it if it is true. Ask Bill Clinton. If you walk around and pretend that you can't talk about it that is tacit admission that, "Yep, that's my penis".
Side Note - Everyone is assuming that he's killed his endorsement deals, in particular Wrangler jeans. I don't know about that. He might sell more Wrangler jeans. I'm sorry Wrangler jean wearers. I've got you pegged as a demographic that has the
penis text photo as a significant part of the pick up arsenal.
When a man's out of ideas on how to approach a woman, Wrangler.Maria SharapovaSasha Vujacic is Lyle Lovett to Sharapova's Julia Roberts. I'm sorry that's an insult to Lyle Lovett. I never wanted to hard foul Lyle Lovett into the third row.
Amazing Blogger Upgrades
On a day when I've done all the work I can or am willing to do, on a day when for lack of anything better to do my gaze drifts towards this blog, on a day when I plan to post another set of pithy observations because that's what I do here, Blogger changes everything.
Admittedly, I don't get on here enough. This upgrade could have been here for months, even years. I had not seen it till today. Blogger now gives you stats on where your traffic is coming from. I guess it's not so amazing from a technological standpoint. It's amazing to me because I have it and it was free. Thank you Blogger.
More amazing is the primary driver of traffic for this sorry little blog. I've bitched before that it is nearly impossible to find this blog by just entering it's title into search. If I come up at all, it's about a hundred pages into the search. (I've only done the hundred page search once by the way. I do, in fact, have a life.) Not for one topic, though. For one topic I'm page one in search. Ok, maybe not page one, but not page one hundred either. Look up "Armadillo Eradification" and there I am. On the basis of one post, made 3 years ago, I get most of my hits or so says Google.
I should qualify this right now that I am no authority on armadillos. I am no authority either on the things I plan to right about next. Search engines apparently cannot distinguish between authority and pithy observations. That's not my problem. I just want the traffic. If people who search for answers are directed to this blog, who is hurt by that? I hope the answer to that isn't me. We' ll find out.
Monetize
Got to give to Blogger. That new button gets right to the point. And if it's not new, it's new to me because I just noticed it. You can say you have a blog because you love to share cute pictures of cats, cupcake recipes or horrifying pictures of cats baked into cupcakes, but you're really here for one thing. Money.
Take me for example. I don't have a cat, and I've never made a cupcake. I do however have this crappy blog, so there's hope. I started it because over the years enough people have said to me, "You should write a book" or "You should do a movie" or "Thank you for the obscene homemade birthday card. It was really funny, but please don't send them to the house anymore because sometimes the kids open the mail." So I, like Blogger, thought that there's a market for just about anything and decided to "monetize".
Actually, the decision to "monetize" didn't come till well after the blog had started. The blog was merely intended to be a writing exercise prior to publishing the book or selling the screenplay. Google Blogger took the initiative on monetization. By initiative, I mean Google created a system so easy to integrate that a cupcake baked cat could do it. It was the business proposal equivalent of saying, "Just click the 'yes' button three times and maybe we'll both get lucky, fool". Four years later the scoreboard reads 1,600 hits and a whopping $2.73 earned. I did the math. It's about 1.1 hits a day. I don't feel lucky.
Not any more though. I'm now spectacularly motivated to monetize the crap out of this thing. In the days ahead I'll outline the changes in store for the
Grey Ghost blog.
(Note first official tease of new and improved blog product)So count your cats, cause I'm coming.
