If you use the term "To be sure," you are a complete idiot

(note: after re-reading this entry, i don't think it is very entertaining. I'll probably leave it here for a while only because I love to talk about "chumming for sharks", but after I get tired of that I'll pull it.)

This phrase has been surfacing more and more in articles recently, which I personally find quite disturbing. It is both unnecessary and wastes the readers time. I think the author is trying to convince you that the statement following "to be sure" is A MILLION PERCENT ACCURATE AND SURE. Well, it is either a fact or speculation, and facts have no variance so there is no need to shore it up any further. If it is speculation, you simply need to state that it is speculation. I think these authors are trying to be cute and act like they are better than they really are.
Let me give you an example:
Let's say you make the statement "To be sure, sharks are able to eat 80 buckets of chum".  If you actually went out on a boat, threw in 80 buckets and they seemed full and content, then you need only say "Sharks can eat 80 buckets of chum".  BUT, let's say that you only went out with 60 buckets, threw them out and the sharks were still banging against the boat wanting more.  If you were convinced that they could eat at least 20 more buckets, you could only speculate and say "Sharks are capable of eating 60 buckets of chum and I speculate that they can eat at least 20 more buckets before being content".  Typing "To be sure" before either of these statements does nothing to change the validity of either statement.

While on a literary rant, annother stupid thing that many people say is "irregardless, ....".
From Wiki...
The origin of irregardless is not known for certain, but the speculation among references is that it may be a blend of irrespective and regardless, both of which are commonly accepted standard English words. By blending these words, an illogical word is created.

You need only say "regardless", so don't waste my time with illogical prefixes.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I personally make no claim to be a good writer as I am a product of the Louisiana school system. I make all sorts of pathetic mistakes in both grammar and spelling, so that tired phrase "Don't talk bad about other people unless you can do better yourself" does not apply. It never really applies since you are totally ok to insult other people for doing stupid things "regardless" of whether you can do better or not. The fact still remains that that person is doing stupid things.   If you see a quarterback throw 10 interceptions in a row, you totally can say "that quarterback sucks" regardless if you can play football or not.

I LOVE to paint!!!!

This is the phrase emitted from your friends when they find out you are moving to a new place.  “I’ll come over and work on painting for you!”

What this translates to is “I want to come over and do the easy part and get instant gratification with minimal outlay of effort”.

Rolling paint on a wall is as hard as walking, and is by far, the most trivial and easiest part of “painting”.

Now, these people mean well, and totally sincere in their offers;  they just don’t understand the process of painting.  For those of you who are not aware of this process, I shall outline it now.

Figure out color.

Go to store, get a quart of your color.

Paint a little on wall, don’t like it, return to store for another quart.

Repeat five times, each time in heavy traffic.

Buy gallons according the spread rate on the can.

Spend a half a day on the floor taping plastic to cover the floor and other things.

Tape all trim in house.

Remove all outlet plates and light switch plates.

Tape up around or remove ceiling fans

Caulk all trim joints in entire house.

Repair problems, holes, etc.

Friends call, “can we come paint now?”

Purchase and arrange several pans, rollers, and brushes for the crew.

Gather 100 dollars to order pizza for the crew for their “work”.

Friends start painting walls since ceiling is boring white and offers no gratification.

They very rapidly finish all walls (for 3 people, probably  2 hours total).

“Oh just look at that new color!”.

Feed crew.

Crew goes home.

Begin process of 2^nd coat.

Clean all brushes, rollers, pans and such, a lengthy process, trust me.

Paint ceiling.

Get trim brush and start cutting in the color at the ceiling.

Paint with brush around every piece of trim.

Do 2^nd coat of trim paint.

Fix all drips.

Clean tools.

Color all light spots on wall missed by crew.

Remove and dispose of all plastic drop cloths

Re-install all wall plates and outlet plates.

Remove tape from all trim.

Final coat of wall paint to cut in where tape got on wall.

I'd say that the task of rolling paint on the walls represents about 5% of the total task of painting.

You might be sentencing middle aged men to death and not even know it

I've always tried to do the right thing by returning shopping carts to the front of the store, or at least to one of those paddock style gathing areas. But one day I noticed a couple of 50ish guys out gathering the carts up and bringing them back to the store (home depot, they hire lots of middle aged folks which i think is great). All of the sudden I started my unstoppable thought train about this. If everone brought back their carts, these guys would have much less to do. Then it is just a matter of time before the store starts laying off a couple of guys because there are just too many employees. So let's take "Jim" as an example. He's been out of work and finally got a job at HD. Then he gets laid off. He can no longer make payments on his truck, so it gets repo'd. His wife gets really pissed and yells at him all the time about not being able to get to a job. He now is unable to buy the GI-Joe with the "Kung Fu Grip" for his boy or a Hanna Montana pencil set for his daughter, and they start crying and no longer fit in with the hip crowds at school, so they start associating with "da gangsta's", which are ruffians that wear extraordinarily baggy pants and flat brim baseball caps turned sideways. It's just a matter of time before they start smoking grass, learning the art of "marking" (graffiti that indicates your gang has been there), stealing, etc. Jim gets more and more depressed and figures it's a good time to start popping pills.  Jim's a big fan of Dr. House, so he knows already that Vicodin is a good choice to start with.  Jim has a 3am chat with his son and by sunup, he's scored a bottle for him.  Well, the Vicodin ran out so he starts hanging out at the bus stop and drinking booze from paper sacks. One day he passes out and drops his bottle of generic gin, sending broken shards of glass all over the other people waiting. An old lady cuts her foot all up and calls 911. The cops show up and take Jim downtown and throw him in jail. The other guys in the cell beat him up while the old lady is filling out forms to press charges. Now Jim is unemployed, drunk, and looks like crap. The wife comes down and has to bail him out using money borrowed from her uncle, a bookee. She puts Jim in a rehab center where he stays for a long time. The wife has to sell the house and move in with the bookee. She starts playing the ponies trying to buy a new house and loses everything, winding up down at the Salvation Army. Jim figures out how to loosen his bed straps and proceeds to cut his wrists with a piece of glass off the bathroom mirror. The medics find him and patch him all up, but now they keep a pretty darned good eye on him.

So now as you can see, you really need to leave those carts scattered among the minivans.

Update: Jim began improving and is doing very well. He is now working with other ex-cart-gatherers in group therapy.

Falling asleep in the living room can be dangerous

While in college, I shared a house with my brother and ricky (from "The story of Ricky" blog entry ed.), and usually several other of our bum friends were over.  After tons of booze, you better be able to get up and wander down the hall to bed, because if you pass out in the living room, you will get decorated.  

One night this happened to me.  I went out cold after a night of feverish Dixie beer consumption and slept for quite a while.  As i started to wake, I kept smelling this really stinky smell.  I opened my eyes and saw blu cheese piled up by my nose.  I tried to get up but my head was stuck.  I was now wearing a motorcycle helmet which was strapped on tight and duct taped to the coffee table.  I couldn't get up without dragging the table around.  My entire body was surrounded by empty beer cans so as I moved all the cans were getting crushed and what not.

Well, that's it.  I guess this entry was not as exciting as I hoped it would be.  oh well...

William's expert opinion on the current Economy

I'm qualified to discuss the economy because I have been working since I was 11 years old and have had all sorts of jobs. Before i start explaining how we got into this mess, I guess I should go over my qualifications (i.e. "job history")

Mowing grass for my Dad - 9 years old
Twenty five cents for the front, fifty cents for the back. We had an electric lawnmower and I used to cut the cord everytime I mowed. After a while, the cord was nothing but one big long wrap of black electrical tape.

Paper Route - 11 yrs. I rode my bike about 3 miles down to the paper office every afternoon, folded my papers ,put rubber bands on them, then rode 3 miles back to my route area, threw the papers on the driveway except for the turds that had to have special treatment (in their carport). Once a month I had to go to every single house and beg these people for money. Some of them never wanted to pay me, they just said to come back later. Folks, let's keep in mind that the bill was like 2 dollars or something. I wish I could go back in time and tell those people "Sure, I'll come back later, and in the meantime, why don't you shove this paper right up your ass".
I made about 27 cents a week i think at this job. Seemed ok to me.

Folding newspapers at night - 12 yrs
My dad got me and my brother Robert jobs folding newspapers two nights a week. The boss was this huge guy with big arms and he had a smoke in the corner of his mouth all night. He was really nice and usually gave us a quarter or so extra. We worked from like 7pm to 10 pm. We didn't have a lot of money back then so cash was more important than homework. One night we were loading the papers in the back of a big semi truck, I jumped up and grabbed the strap on the back roll up door, my friend grabbed my legs and pulled me down as a joke. Would have been funny if my finger would have not got smashed under the door when it hit the deck. Broke a bunch of bones in one finger. My friend was terribly upset but I thought it was cool to be able to ride to the hospital and stuff.

Bussboy 13 yrs
Disgusting work for a dollar an hour. There was this old black guy that worked in the kitchen. His hands were like leather, and for good reason; for a dollar he would stick his hand in the hot frying grease.

Kitchen work at Pizza Inn - 14 yrs
Lots of fun because friends worked there and Pizza Inn is the best pizza in the world. We used to go up in the attic and peek through the vent in the woman's bathroom. Did we know how to have fun or what! I was never allowed to work up front making pizza's by the window because i was too ugly. I had bad complexion and an atrocious haircut. no kidding, this was the real reason. I always felt depressed about that.

Slave at an Apartment complex.
Cleaning out the pool, weeding in the broiling sun, mowing, and cleaning out disgusting apartments after people moved out. The bathrooms were sometimes so vile that we had to wear masks to keep from puking. no kidding. Once ,the leadman ("buddy") and I were way out in a field sawing up big limbs and hauling off in the broiling sun of course. This is very miserable work, we were soaking from sweat, so buddy instructed me to go get two cokes. I walked a long way and found that the only drinks in the machine were "tab", a foul diet drink. I returned. "Where are the cokes?" "All they had was Tab". "YOU IDIOT, I'D A DRANK A DAMNED TAB!!!". I was really pathetic back then. The bitchy-ass lady that ran the place hated me because I was "always wasting time fooling with the lawnmower.

Catching Chickens
Similar to the scene in Napoleon Dynamite. We would go inside a chicken house where thousands of chickens were running around loose in random fashion. We had to lean over and pick up 5 or 6 at a time by their legs, bring them to a table where a guy would vaccinate them and then toss them to the other side of the table. Feathers everywhere and chickshit and all that. I think we made about 2 dollars an hour. For lunch we would go to a convience store and buy potted meat and crackers to eat.

Grocery Store Clerk
I had to wear an orange vest and a brown clip-on tie. This job provided good exercise; I had to sweep and mop 100,000 square feet every night. One night I was straightening shelves and found a cantaloupe in the tupperware plastic bowl section. I did not feel like walking all the way to the produce end of the store so i just put it inside a plastic bowl and snapped on the lid.
I forgot all about it until a couple of weeks later so I went to get it. I popped the lid off and saw the most frightening site you can imagine. The canteloupe was now a moving ball of a million bugs. It had completely been replaced by maggots. I yelled and threw it back on the shelf. I have no idea what ever became of it.

Deckhand on an offshore diving boat. - 16 yrs
This was my most pathetic attempt to earn money in my entire life. I thought i could be all big and tough like the roughneck guys in my hometown so I got a friend to get me on as a deckhand.
The first night I got so seasick that I could not get out of bed until about noon. What a great start. After two weeks at sea I headed home and never went back.

Picking up trash on the ground on construction sites
Self explanatory

T.V. Repairman
This was a great job, lots of electronics and such. On my first day my boss was showing me around the inside of a TV so I could get used to how it worked. I saw this cool looking round disk looking thing, pointed to it and said "what's th...AHHH!!!!!". My boss with his ever-present pipe in his mouth, simply uttered a muffled chuckle "hmmff ff ff". "That's a tripler, it takes eight thousand volts in and turns it into twenty four thousand volts". All I know is that it pulled an arc about 2 inches long to my finger and my arm was numb for a week. A really upsetting thing happened one day while me and the other tech were doing a house call (yes, house calls). Robert was behind the TV working and all of the sudden I heard him thump to the floor. I jumped back there and saw him shaking violently. He was foaming at the mouth and his eyes were white and fluttering. I called my boss in a panic. "He's having a seizure, it will last about 5 minutes and then he will calm down, but he will be in a fog, not know who you are, and will not talk". It happened exactly that way. Back at the shop Robert continued to work, but did not know who we were until a few hours later and then he was fine.

TK Valve - sweeping and then building things
I was in college majoring in Industrial Technology and wanted to get a job in the field so I went to this valve manufacturing plant to try to get some work. They said they did not have any openings. I said I would take anything they had. "All I have is a third shift floor sweeper". I took it. Never be afraid to work your way up I was taught. Well, after a week they let me start moving pallets of big metal valves around and stacking them on these big tall racks. I picked up the first pallet, pushed some levers and raised it up about 12 feet and started to slid it into the rack. Well, they don't teach forklift driving in school so I was not highly proficient. I rammed the pallet into the edge of the rack and the whole thing came crashing down. Five hundred pounds of metal parts hitting concrete. The shop foreman was standing right there and just walked away with a disgusted look on his face. He never liked me because I was a "college boy". After a few more weeks i was put in the testing department designing and building fluid test systems. And they never let me drive a forklift again, haha.


So, here is my opinion of the economy:
It's your fault. There is a very simple rule that nobody has been following for a couple of decades now...
"Spend less than you make"
If we had all followed this rule, banks would not have been making toxic loans, detroit would have scaled back 20 years ago and be small and healthy now, our trade deficit would be ok, a few thousand strip malls would have never been built (and thus have no need to close), and we would live in reasonably sized houses that we can make payments on.

that's it. simple, huh?