As promised, here's more of the entries that I've made in the journal I've been keeping since the beginning of May:
5/12/2004
THEY PUBLISHED MY CURRENT EVENTS SUBMISSION! WOO-HOO!
I subscribe to ClubTopFive, a shameless e-mail based rip-off of The Top Ten Lists on the Letterman show. Yes, I pay money for this. Be quiet.
Anyway, one of the features of every list is the “Current Events” section. People take recent news stories they’ve heard and add humorous twists to them a la Argus Hamilton. I submitted a story on the recent Women’s March on Washington, saying something to the effect that the White House response to the march was to build a big new wing on the prison in Guantanamo Bay.
I guess you had to be there.
ANYWAY, it was included on a recent TopFive list.
No, I didn’t get paid for it.
No, I will receive no recognition for it. They only printed my name, and think how many Eric Johnsons there are in the world.
No, I derive no material benefit from it at all
OK, shut up already! It just makes me feel good, OK?! Pinhead!
5/13/2004
The gullibility of some people amazes me.
That famous quote erroneously attributed to P.T. Barnum was WRONG. There are THOUSANDS of suckers born every minute.
I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve received that e-mail telling me to “forward this to as many people as possible and you’ll get lots of money” or some variation. Or the one calling for a one-day gas boycott. Or the one from my “special friend from the Nigerian government-in-exile”. Or any of a BAJILLION others.
Seriously. What goes through these peoples’ heads?
It seems to me that no matter how smart a person may be, as soon as he or she signs on to their e-mail service, they seem to lose half their I.Q. points. People seem willing to believe just about anything they get from e-mail or the internet. And they are also just as willing to forward it to as many of their friends as possible. I’m guessing that a lot of these people have lost a lot of those very same friends just by doing this.
I’ve got to go now. I’m expecting that shipment of cut-rate Viagra I’m about to receive.
Should be here any day now…
5/14/2004
My dad’s out of town. He’s gone down to Southern Illinois to join in the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Sometimes I have to wonder about those guys.
I mean, think about it for a minute. Picture Merriweather Lewis sitting in the local tavern drinking a mug of warm beer (it was close to summertime then—200 years ago—no refrigeration) suddenly saying to himself, “Hey, I know what I can do. I’ll get my good friend Clark and we’ll gather together a bunch of men and supplies, board a rickety raft on the edge of a HUGE river, pole AGAINST the current upstream, and then spend the next few years trekking across a vast uncharted wilderness with no certainty of being able to find anything to eat and with the strong possibility of being maimed and/or killed by hostile savages or wild animals or both. And I’ll get the President to give us a bunch of money to do it!”
If it had been me, I then would’ve said, “Nah, that’s WAY too much work. I’ll just drink some more warm beer and try to fondle the barmaid.” Then I would’ve proceeded to do just that.
Of course, that’s probably not what REALLY happened, but I gotta believe it takes balls of steel to do what they did. Not to mention a few loose screws in your head!
Can you imagine anyone in our country today doing the same thing?
Hoist a beer today in their honor. I plan to.
5/15/2004
DAMMIT!
I was pulling into my garage this afternoon. I looked at my watch. The date is 5/15/2004. Suddenly, I remembered I forgot to make my mortgage payment. DAMN! Now I have to pay a penalty for being late.
SHIT, SHIT, SHIT!
Please excuse the language. I’m just royally pissed about that. It’s bad enough that I have to give the bank almost my entire take-home pay from one check every month. Now I have to give them even more.
I better stop writing before I lapse into more profanity…
5/16/2004
The weather finally turned nice. All the neighborhood kids were outside playing. They were running, rollerblading, laughing, jumping, screaming, biking, and just generally being kids. My dog, out in the backyard, was going nuts. So I let her out to run around a little.
All the neighborhood kids started running from her and asking me if she would bite them.
Let me explain. My dog is a small female. She is a a mix of a few unknown breeds. She weighs 20 pounds soaking wet. She is, in other words, an All-American mutt! (She was a stray that I rescued). Alas, I haven't figured out how to post pictures on this blog yet--maybe later. But she looks about as menacing as a My Little Pony doll. She never bites, she rarely barks, and a stranger is just a friend she hasn’t met yet. She loves human company. She will sit peacefully on my lap for hours. And yet, children run from her like she’s a hound from hell.
Children will run eagerly towards a Golden retriever that is four times the size of my dog and could rip both of their arms off with one bite, and yet my dog, a good-old all-American mutt, is feared and avoided.
Where is the justice in this world?
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