You need a myface page (like you need another hole in your head)

I finally got on facebook this weekend and I can’t believe it.  I can’t believe I’ve waited this long to find such a colossal way to dispose of time. 

I really had no idea.  I had no idea that  stumbling instructionless through cyberspace could turn-up so many lost friends and relatives.  Here is where they’ve all been and why none of them will ever return an email or pick up their phones.  

Why bother with obsolete one-on-one communications when you can just as easily “share” it on your wall and enjoy the group mind at work?  Nevermind that not everyone on the planet is on myface.  Some are on spacebook.  And some aren’t even on that, although this is hard for some people to believe.

 And oh the shame, the shame of my late entrance to the party.  Not to mention the irritation.  Couldn’t those who had arrived earlier have left a little crumb trail or provided any warning?  

They could have warned, for example, that maybe signing up all your friends before trying out the software isn’t the smartest.  But that’s exactly what fb has you do: get’s you linked in to your entire network without so much as a single instruction as to who is receiving what.   Then you get to publically fumble around trying to learn the inane ways of their crabby little website.  Since helpful explanations aren’t exactly jumping off the page to bite you on the ass, it’s a hit or miss prospect - with an audience.  That is so messed up.

The good news is, starting facebook inspired me to come post a Bad Apple for the first time in way too long.  Apparently, one colossal “use” of cybertime can lead to another.

Pecked to Death by the Cannibal Chickens

Well I’ll be dipped in the colonel’s secret sauce!  I just learned something ground splattering: Chicken cannibalism isn’t the new, che-che underground cult I thought it was. 

That’s right.  It turns out chicken cannibalism has been known about and written about for years, at least since 2002, when Jay Rossier wrote in Living with Chickens that:   “…grown chickens will sometimes peck on their coopmates under certain circumstances, and the results can be bloodily disastrous in a very short time.”

Jay devotes more than one disturbing page to describing the age-old practice of chicken cannibalism.  Why those cannibal chickens don’t even wait till their meal dies to start a’dining!  Just get too close under “certain circumstances” and that chicken’s liable to take a’pecking on you (if you’re a chicken, that is).  That’s taking this whole ”living food” thing just way too far. 

When I was a small child, I had a chicken that liked to peck on me.  We named it “Pecky.”  And now I know that mean little pecker was really trying to filler-up on Me meat!  No thank you, I’ll take chickens who eat chicken over chickens who eat me any day of the year.

Of course, letting your chickens out to smoke and drink at the local cannibal chicken saloon is the quickest and surest way to stop this bloody disaster of live feeding.

Steve Gets Fed

“Burp–mmm–yum. Mmm.  Good,” muttered Steve.  A quick jump into the Lucky Creation restaurant had shut my bionic tooth up — for the moment.

“Yum–mmm–foood!  Mmm- Wait!  Where’s it going?  Where’d it go!  Where it go!!!???” Steve demanded.

“I swallowed it.”

“Why’d you DO that?”

“Listen, Steve.  We have to come to some kind of understanding.”

“Food! Food! I want want food!”

“Steve, Do I have your attention?”

“Foo-oood!”

“Steve, I didn’t get a bionic tooth so I can have some whiny six million dollar baby on my hands.”

“Oh.  So why did you get a six million dollar tooth, then?”

“As far as I can tell, Steve, this is a secret government experiment to find out if the Six Million Dollar Tooth program is worthwhile or not.”

“Well, it it? Is it worthwhile?”

“I have no idea, Steve. That’s what we are going to find out. You and me.”

“So what is the govenment secret and why are you part of it and what do you expect from me and does it involve something a little more exciting than this interminable dialogue???”

That’s when I shoved another fork full of Lucky Creation Chow Mein in my mouth and shut that freaken tooth up. Man, does that tooth ever sleep?

A Chip in the Six Million Dollar Tooth

Yesterday, the dentist got to drilling and cementing my six million dollar tooth, and before I knew it she was making an announcement.

“We’ve placed a chip in your tooth…”

“What??!” I said, confused.  ”Wait, don’t you mean you removed a chip.”

“No! We added a chip,” she said again, and I blinked.

“You chipped my tooth?” I asked, incredulous.

“NO!  Can’t you listen?” she hissed.  ”I said, ‘We placed a chip in your tooth.’  A silicon chip.”

“Oh!” I said, trying to determine if this was good news.

“Yes, and now your tooth is really smart.  Smarter, faster, farther,” she said.  She was looking out the view of her big San Francisco window.  The lobby of her building looks like an Aztec tomb covered in silver and gold, and I’d always wondered why that shouldn’t make me awfully uncomfortable.

“Gee, thanks.” I said.  “This is going to cost me, isn’t it?”

“That’s not all,” the Dentist smiled.  And then I heard it, the baby cries of a newborn tooth wailing and wailing in the back of mouth.

“It talks!” She said, and her eyes glowed with a strange light over the surgeon’s mask. 

“Waaaaaaaaaa,” cried my new talking tooth.  “Me hungry!!!”

To be continued…

Tune in later for the next episode of The Bionic Tooth.

The Six Million Dollar Tooth

“We can rebuild it, we have the technology.” That’s what the dentist said.  What she didn’t say was how many times the tooth in question would need to be built and rebuilt, but what do you expect from a bionic tooth?  It’s going to need some upkeep.  What do you think, you just throw six mill at the tooth and it’s over?  The maintanance IS the real cost.

“It will be stronger, tougher, and chew faster than any tooth in history,” she promised.

Cut to the Bionic Man music.  My generation can attest to the power Steve Austin had over our young minds.  That’s why I have named my tooth Steve.  Any tooth willing to undergo that many procedures for his country is my kind of tooth!

Extraordinary Cannibal Chickens

Things had been surprisingly quiet around here since a certain brown paper package arrived in the mail last month.  Seeing how the cannibal chickens took a major hit in their 401k of late, they seemed to be taking it far too well.  Except for the dark bags and circles around their cocks combs, they seemed about as content and at peace as any chicken who eats chicken can hope to be or should expect. 

What was the secret behind the gentle satisfaction that had crept into their clucks?  What was in that paper package, and could I have some?

Got BARF? Blogger Afflicted by Realworld Facts Syndrome

Has the real world afflicted your Bloggerness?  I myself have a raging case of BARF, aka Blogger Afflicted by Realworld Facts.  My blogger equilibrium has been ruined for months now, and I’m so sorry.   It really sucks to have to try to get a blogger groove going again after all my previous BARFing around earlier this fiscal year. 

Bloody hell, it’s like three steps forward three miles back, have you noticed?  And it’s all the fault of those greedy gas executives.  Okay, maybe I can’t claim a direct line between my inability to post with the price of gasoline, but it does explain my obsession with attempting to level my transportation spending by genetically manipulating old Hank over there. 

Not that I have the time to feed self and horsecraft anymore, or the money.  I for one find it exceedingly exorbitant to house body, soul and Hank/horse-hybrid in a Left Coast locale.  Why, life has become downright untenable out here Cal-lee-for-niy-aye Way.  

That’s why I plan to freeze myself and Hank-horse over there, here and now, in the prime of life (for me anyway – Hank’s another story).  Imagine the wonder when we awake un-aged, woman and centaur, in a kinder, more evolved future. What do you think? Want to make it a group date?

I’ll try to keep posting more before my date with The Big Freeze (just in time for the holidays!). Because BARF must be conquered one post at a time.

An Extraordinary Flow of Sass

This site ain’t perfect, but it has its moments.  Here are a few of bad apple’s own personal favorites.

I can’t help it, I like Tomatofornia.  What is not to like about a tomato-fixated paradise on Earth?

Okay, I get a lot of cannibal hits — it’s wierd, but it works. The real stars here are the cannibal chickens.  They eat other chickens.  And go camping and stuff.

What, too stange for you? 

Maybe you really hate passwords, or maybe your democracy was secretly replaced with Folgers Crystal coffee, Tee Em.

And not to be missed…

…History: “How the Irish Invented the Potato Smoothie”

…Culture: “Snakes are People, Too, St. Patrick!”

…How To: “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Hitlers”

…and Health! “The Bug Diet”

Don’t let the buzzards get you down

One day we’re all going to be old, if we aren’t dead already.  And then we are all going to look back at our lives, if we can remember them.  Finally, we’re going to have the time to sort out what we should have done, only it will be way too late.  So the only thing to do is to get in touch with your inner old person, now, while you still have a chance to make a change.

Every person has an old geezer living inside of them, some crotchety old jerk who’s gonna give their opinion whether you ask for it or not. You may have stuffed him, or her, into an interior mental hamper to shut them up.  But if you really want to be happy, you have to let them out so they can freely bitch and complain about the crap you’ve made of your life so far.   

Here’s what you do: Imagine yourself on your death bed for a while, and think about what you would have liked to do with your one sweet life, if you could take it all back now and live it over again.  Remember, you are about to die, which really sucks, so you must be super pissed-off about the things you didn’t get to do — I mean, I for one am probably going to be so mad by that point, I’m going to be ready kill someone, only, I’m going to be too weak to even kill a fly by then. 

Fortunately, I’m still plenty young and strong enough to kill an entire freight-load of flies if I wanted. That’s why this exercise is so amazingly worthwhile to do, if you don’t wait until too late.

Now, come back to the present.  Wow, you are so happy not to be nearly dead!  You are alive and actually years and years away from croaking of old age!  You can do stuff!  You can make changes.  The bed you’ve made of your life so far does not have to be the one you sleep in.   Do you see how that you can turn things around now?  In fact, your inner geezer demands it!!

After your inner geezer has had this chance to share this valuable lesson, it’s probably time to stuff them back down the ol’ hamper again.  You don’t need any more people in your head criticizing you.  There’s enough people outside your head ready to do that.  Remember where you stuff the old person you, though, because you always want to keep in mind where you’re really headed.  How does the saying go, live life like you get to live forever but every day’s your last chance. Something like that.   

And when other people start to mess with you, you can always bring out the old-person-you to give um an earful.  It’s good to have an old person on your side like that, because old people have a lot of experience, and when they’re right they’re so right.

The way I figure, when I’m older I’m either going to be wiser or more bitter — one or the other.  I like the wiser option.  Bitter doesn’t wear well on most people.

Are You a Crappy Boss?

Do you suck as a boss?  Inc.com has created a list of signs to help you discover if your employees can’t stand the sight of you and run in the other direction when they see you coming — in case you live in a cloud of blissful, mean ignorance, totally unaware what a giant jerk and bully you are to your workers.  

My personal favorite from the list: Too many ex-employees:

“If your staff falls away like linty Post-it notes, ask yourself: Is high turnover the problem? Or am I?”

Of course, if you are a crappy boss, this kind of wussy self-questioning probably isn’t your style anyway.  In that case, you might prefer the kind of advice found in the soon-to-be-published best-seller The Seven Habits of Highly-Effective Hitlers. 

Finally, I’d like to present a word of encouragement to crappy bosses and their poor victim-workers everywhere.  It’s a little motto that I live by, even had one of those trendy band bracelots made up special to always remind me of these wise, wise words:

 

Never Give Up…

 

Your Liver.