Thought For The Day:

Remember, feeding a cow hamburger isn't sick,
trying to make it understand what it's eating IS.

So yesterday my Mom calls me and asks me if I want to go to Charleston today.

I, having nothing to do and no money to do it with, agreed.

Turns out Mom was invited to Brian’s Grandfather’s funeral and she didn’t want to drive two hours alone to get there.

Neither my Mom nor myself had ever met him, but we’re friends of the family so we went to show our support.

Well we were there in spirit anyways.

I managed to fall asleep at 5:30 AM this morning and was awakened at 8 AM. I didn’t realize when we headed out that our directions were basically "Turn South and look for a church". If I had known, I’d still have gone, but at least I would have had some idea of what I was in for.

More specifically, our directions were "Drive to Charleston, take exit something-or-other, drive 20 miles, turn right, go under an overpass and go ten more miles and turn right again, then turn left."

Serriously. That was it.

To make things worse, this course took us out of the relative civilization of Charleston, the West Virginia state capitol, and into the middle of Boone County, the West Virginia state armpit.

And I mean that with all due respect to the people that live in Boone County (the ones that can read this anyways), but anyplace that can produce and sustain the force of nature that is Jessco White, the Dancin’ Outlaw, is just fucked up beyond all repair.

Yes, it’s really that bad. We’re talking ‘Deliverance’ bad. We’re talking about a place where when people get hard up for money they’ll go start an acres-wide wildfire so they can get paid by the state to put it out.

I’m not making that up.

So it takes us two hours to get there, and after spending another two hours exploring the backroads of Boone County we found ourselves back in Charleston without having seen a single overpass.

By that point the Funeral had already started and we were no closer to finding the place than we had been hours ago.

At this point you may be asking "Well gee-whiz Ford, why didn’t you guys call Brian or his Mom on one of their cellphones?" Any of you asking that have obviously never been to Boone County. Down there a cellphone signal is as rare as a full set of teeth. Mom did have the bright idea of asking a Charleston cop for directions. She didn’t seem to understand why I didn’t think a random city cop would know the location of one small church in another county, especially given that the county in question has a church every 60 feet as a matter of fucking principle.

So what did we do? We went to the mall and had frappachino.

Yes, I feel bad about it, but it was really, REALLY good frappachino.

Once we got home we found out that we should have made the first right three miles after the offramp, not twenty like our directions said.

This, I believe, explains a bit of our difficulty.

So that's how I came to have my first Starbucks coffee (there’s not a Starbucks within 50 miles of Parkersburg) and I’ve got to say it was pretty damn good. I’m not sure if it was worth four bucks for a ‘venti’ but I was on three and a half hours of sleep and I’m still jittery at 3 AM the next day, sooooo…

That is one thing that did annoy me about Starbucks though, the sizes. There are no smalls, mediums or larges. They have 'tall', 'grande' and 'venti'. Rather than bother trying to crack thier fucking code I simply ordered the largest size they were legally allowed to sell without violating narcotics trafficing laws.

And while waiting in line I had a pleasant conversation with a really hot chick. I somehow, despite my extremely low self-esteem, have a knack for being extremely charming around hot chicks. Charming to the point of almost getting laid. The key word there being almost.

"Low self esteem?" You ask? Well, that’s perhaps not the right term. See, I love me and I think there are a great many people in the world that are just plain inferior to me (but not for racial or religious reasons because TV sitcoms have taught me that that’s prejudice and that’s wrong) and they should devote thier lives to being more like me, but at the same time I do have an acute sense of just what a massive loser I am at this point in my life.

It’s a really weird dynamic at work.

Speaking of which, while I was on my short vacation from the blog because there just wasn’t much going on worth writing about, my friend Mike D invited me to a function at the Unitarian church in Marietta Ohio one Saturday night.

Yes, I said church.

They were having a poetry reading.

Yes dammit, a poetry reading.

The main reason I went is because Mike now lives on Columbus Ohio and we don’t get to hang out much anymore. When I went to the last one only one other person showed up besides us, so it was really just three people hanging out.

This time was different.

Yes, there was an actual turnout this time, and lemmietellya there were some damn fine women there. So fine, in fact, that I’m already planning on attending the next function. I am NOT, however, joining the church.

It’s not even really a church. It’s a group of people from all religions and no religion, but since they still describe themselves as a ‘church’ I can’t come to call myself a member even if I have been to more of the functions than a lot of the actual members.

I’m not a group joining guy.

"But Ford," Mike says, "the Unitarians are a group of people that don’t join groups."

I’m deluded enough to know delusions when I see them. I am as the wind, I roam wild and free…

Bur having said all that they seem to be pretty cool people overall, and did I mention there were hot chicks there?

Hot chicks around whom I was extremely charming and didn’t get laid. (See how this all ties together?)

Yeah, I know what you’re asking. No, I didn’t read any poetry. I wanted to read the piece "Ode To The Meat Girl’ from the comic strip a couple of posts below this one, but I have a nasty fucking chest cold right now and my voice was half gone that night.

It actually sounded kinda cool that way, but I couldn’t really speak up and the coughing made it even more difficult.

I’m feeling better now though.

I think though that I’m just not meant to enter a church more than once a year.

Anyways, I’m still broke, the neighbors still suck and the government is still delighting in showing me how much I’m it’s bitch.

See ya in hell.

Dirty ‘Darth Vader’ stuns women
BY R.S.N. MURALI

SEREMBAN: While the widely-hyped movie Star Wars runs in cinemas all over the world, the dark force of Darth Vader struck in Bandar Baru Nilai.

Yesterday, women factory workers in two industrial areas were appalled and screamed when a man in full Darth Vader costume flashed them.

A 33-year-old factory supervisor who identified herself as “Priscilla” said the man got out of his tinted two-door car, strutted about menacingly in his Darth Vader suit before opening it and revealing himself to 15 women workers standing at a bus stop at about 7am.

“At first, I thought he was a die-hard Star Wars fan trying to impress us with his costume. But we were shocked when he showed us his private-parts,” she said.

The women were waiting for buses to take them home after their night shift.

“We were all exhausted after a long day at work and did not see the man’s face as he was wearing a dark mask,” she said.

When some of the women screamed, he jumped into his car and drove off towards the North-South Expressway.

“Next time it will not be “Revenge of the Sith” but revenge on a sick man if we catch him doing his act again,” she added.

The flasher was reported to have displayed himself to another group of workers at a nearby factory.

When contacted, Acting OCPD Supt Mohd Taib Latif said the police need more information such as the flasher's car registration number to track him down.