Apparently the last time I bought airline tickets I must’ve mistakenly signed up for a newsletter because I’ve been getting spammed from the site I used.

Like anyone else, I’m annoyed by spam but these emails really irk me. Why? Well because they include domestic flights that don’t involve the city in which I live… so they are totally effing useless.

Sweet! A bunch of flights from places I don’t live to places I don’t want to travel.

Let’s say that I wanted to take advantage of the ‘cheap’ flight from Philadelphia to Boston. Well, since I live in Milwaukee that means I’d have to first get to Philly. So I’ll either need to drive 309 miles or fly for $188 (which was the cheapest flight I found) just so I could hop on the ‘cheap’ flight to Boston for another $188. This means that I’d either have to drive twice as far as my ‘cheap’ flight or spend a total of $376 to get to Boston instead of a direct flight for only $163. Awesome.

Often underappreciated,
or at the least,
not talked about very often at all,
are the Scots.
But, they’ve given us such things as
golf
and Scotch
and that crazy Plaid pattern,
which I actually thought was a color when I was a kid,
until my mother called me a
retarded little Barbie doll,
even though I’m a boy,
and tickled me senseless
until I was crying.

The Scottish also gave us
Braveheart,
but no one really associates
the movie with the culture.
We mostly associate the movie with Mel Gibson.
And we mostly associate
Gibson with
drunken,
anti-Semitic behavior.
So, really, Scots hate Jews.

And… let’s see…
What else comes from Scotland?
Oh yeah, haggis.
Want to hear something
pretty fucking gross?
Something that makes a
pile of shit
sound like a mound of Technicolor happiness
and wonderment that smells like strawberries
and heals wounds
when you rub it on?

Haggis is –
literally –
a bunch of filling stuffed into a
SHEEP’S STOMACH
and then boiled.

It’s their national dish.

Christ on a cross.

Stay hot, Scots.

I learned something when I awoke this morning.  In fact, I learned at least three things.

And, ironically, they were probably the most important things I learned at the two-day An Event Apart web development conference I attended…yet none of them have anything to do with web development.

1. Making a joke that requires a somewhat intimate knowledge of local geography and tensions between the people in two different cities (and states)–a joke that most it applies to can barely chuckle at–won’t get any laughs.  Especially if it needs to be explained afterward.  Explained twice no less.
2. When discussing culture and entertainment don’t respond with X Country “has original TV shows?”  And, in the same vein, don’t immediately respond “I have no idea who that is” when the foreigners are discussing their most famous film director ever.
3. After a 12-hour struggle with a hangover powerful enough to put down an elephant, I learned to never, ever drink with Europeans.  Especially if you’re at a conference and one of the sponsors is holding an open-bar party after the first night.

I hope I’m not the only one laughing hard at this children’s book. Because if I am, it tells me a lot more about myself than I want to know.

Please note that I’m quite used to receiving hate mail, but if you want to hit me with some on this one, I hope your messages can fight their way through the 2,000+ spam comments sitting in my inbox right now.

Cheers,

Nate

I was talking to my brother a little while ago when he told me about something that happened earlier in the day. He was taking a shower and received a call on his cell from “Ben.” My brother’s name is “Dan,” so I’ll give his roommate (for sake of anonymity and ease, he’ll be referred to as Roommate) roommate a pass, I guess, for glancing at the ringing phone and thinking it said “Dan.”

But then I want to revoke that pass.  Because Roommate didn’t think it was another Dan calling my brother, he thought my brother was somehow calling himself.

Since my brother wasn’t in the room, but his phone was and he was calling it, Roommate thought Dan must be in trouble.

But Dan was fine. He was showering. Not calling himself.

This situation really shed a lot of light on a lot of things. For starters, Roommate either thought Dan had a second phone for no other purpose than to call his primary phone in the event of an emergency, or that Roommate thought Dan programmed his own number into his primary phone so that he could somehow call himself from his one-and-only phone without being on it or near it.

…telepathically?

Anyway. It got me thinking. As I’m currently in downtown Chicago attending a web design conference, what if, on my way to the wicked awesome after-party, I was being followed down some dark alley by a guy who pulled a knife and wanted to mug me? Would I call another friend or, better yet, 911 for assistance?

FUCK NO!

I’d call myself.

Here’s how I’d imagine the situation…Me:

*running down a dark alley away from knife-wielding maniac*

*gasping*

*pull out phone*

*dial my phone’s number*

*put phone to my ear as I’m running, gasping and desperate for someone–ANYONE–to pick up*

*no ring…straight to voicemail*

“GOD DAMN IT! WHY AREN’T I ANSWERING?!”

*in my distracted and agitated state, I miss a passed out hobo and trip over his outstretched legs*

*stabbed and wallet stolen by knife-wielding maniac as my voicemail beeps expecting me to leave myself a distress message*