Friday, December 31, 2010

Zoo Sign.

**Credit where credit is due: my pal Rosenrosen made a sign similar to this one, and hung it up in her cube at work in an attempt to prevent people from bothering her. I stole her idea and modified it to suit me.

The North American Boden (praecantrix misellus)


Native to the wilds of Hummelstown, the North American Boden is easily startled once you get its attention, and has been known to react violently to stupidity and the threat of taxation. Selectively deaf, it is only able to be safely approached by people whom it does not dislike. The Boden has been known to slay its victims with a barbed tongue and rapier wit; its mean-spirited sarcasm is often mistaken for humor.

The Boden responds well to "Top Gear**,"70's arena rock, British comedy, and subtitled films. It also enjoys McVities Milk Chocolate Digestive biscuits, icy-cold cans of dietCoke, and dark beer. If you don’t have any of these to offer, then please observe from a distance, and quietly back away.
**BBC "Top Gear," not the shitty American version.

Happy Christmas from the Douchebag Family

  I have been thinking about Christmas newsletters. You know, those long-winded and boring letters that some people tuck in to their Christmas cards where they tell you all about what they've been up to during the past year.
  It seems to me that if I cared enough to know about your husband's promotion or your son's hockey league or the family trip to Mexico, I might have called you up at some point during the year to chat. But I don't...so I didn't.  There seems to be a new twist to the Christmas newsletter: the Year End E-mail. Maybe this is not a new thing, but this is the first year I received one. This one involved each member of the family listing the top five things that happened during the year, and came with a PowerPoint photo slide show of the year's best photos attached.
  It seems that you send this out to everyone in your address book, with no regard to whether or not they might actually give a shit about what happened to you this year. I would think that one would want to be at least a little selective, a little considerate, when sending out something like this. I have email addresses of businesses in my address book, and I'm reasonably certain that Bank of America, LTD Commodities, and eBay aren't terribly interested in my family's lists of of the top five occurrences from the past year.
  I would enjoy receiving Christmas newsletters, in traditional paper or electronic format, if EVERYTHING that happened during the year were discussed. Like how the Mexico trip resulted in dysentery and your daughter's very first dose of the clap on account of that terrible business with the Mexican border guards, or how your husband's hemorrhoids got so bad during tax season that you had to spend hours on the Internet tracking down those special ice trays that make ice cubes shaped for rectal insertion. Your struggle to rid your home of bedbugs would be an interesting topic, as would the day you lit the gas grill with the lid closed and burned off your eyebrows. The zenith would be the newsletter in which you announce your impending divorce and/or sex change, although you could only do that once. That's a PowerPoint slide show I'd be interested to see.