Ever notice how it's the little things in life that amuse us so much? More to the point, ever notice how it's the silly little idiocies in life that amuse us more than anything else? Well, this is not as much ''the little blog that could'' as it is ''the blog that enjoys going up the down escalator in your local mall.'' Will it have anything of real importance? No, probably not. But enjoy the ride never the less!

 


This question has been nettling me recently.

Koodo Mobile has a new CG mascot: a 4-inch tall luchador called El Tabador. You've probably seen the commercials on TV or heard the radio bytes.

Now, if we were to set El Tabador against the Geiko gecko, who would win that fight? I mean, El Tabador has that double-back-flying-monkey-suplex, and the name of that attack alone sounds impressive if not possibly life-threatening. By all accounts, all the Geiko gecko has is his quaint English accent. What's he going to do, hurl dash-cunning insults at El Tabador?

Then again, my money is still on the gecko. You never know, he might have been created in a lab by InGen and has wild Velociraptor DNA lurking in his genetic make-up. And that, my friends, makes all the difference. El Tabador would have the Geiko gecko on the ropes, when all of a sudden he'd be ambushed...by the two hidden geckos he didn't even know were there.


Today's Lesson: nothing gets your frightened Shih-tzu crawling onto your wife's pillow (and subsequently, her head too) faster than a bunny doing laps around her pen in the living room. This lesson, however, did not need to be learned at 2am.

Labels: Geiko gecko vs Koodo's El Tabador (or, I have way too much time on my hands some days)

posted by Phillip at 7:22 AM

 


As this slightly paraphrased bit from Denis Leary’s “Traditional Irish Folk Song” not-so-subtly implies, yesterday was St. Paddy’s Day. Did you wear green? I know this blog did. It was somewhere in the coding, I’m sure. Look in the underwear part. No one ever bothers to check…or even cares…if you claim your green attire is in your pants. Unless you’ve got gangrene.

That’s not a good kind of green, incidentally. You’ll find that auspiciously missing from Kermit the Frog’s song about cool, green things. (Then again, leprechauns are left off the list too, but I think that’s just because Muppets don’t believe in leprechauns.)

But if St. Patrick’s Day means anything in KW, it’s this: witnessing hordes of university students clad in randomly green attire and being utterly blottoed at four in the afternoon. You may think this is an exaggeration, and that is correct. Most of them were actually smashed by about two in the afternoon. As a matter of point, one of my staffers was jolted awake at 10am as revellers in her residence tried to get her to join them for an early morning round of beer pong.

Not that I can blame everyone else for wanting spend such a beautiful sunny Wednesday (with a high of 16 degrees, to boot!) out on a patio with some cold drinks. I’d as soon have been out there myself as opposed to being cooped up in a store with no windows…and being told by every third customer about how nice the weather was outside.

This should really be Today’s Lesson: that sort of thing will trigger a genocidal rage in most retail employees. I’d advise against it, in case you end up being said trigger and thusly the first one to die. I at least indulged in a bit of retaliatory antagonism: for every customer who felt compelled to inform me about the glorious sunshine, I reminded them the forecast was for snow next week.

Ha ha! Mine is a petty vengeance, but vengeance never the less!

But at least I was working the day shift for St. Patrick’s, so I got to enjoy the sunshine for a few hours in the early evening—and also witness the “out the door and around the corner” line-ups at every pub and bar & grill along my bus route home.

All of which brings us to today: March 18, a day I hereby christen as Hair of the Dog Day, because you know half the city’s population just called out sick from work. Fortuitously, my store’s crew isn’t into heavy drinking, so no “I can’t come in because of my *cough cough* hang—er, I mean cold” calls for me. Which is just as well, since on a day like today, I’d rather be merciless and demand they at least show up & barf up a lung on command in front of me before I’d let them off a hook.

Ha ha! To reiterate, mine is a petty vengeance!


In other news, the hotly-anticipated H&M store opened in our mall today at precisely noon. I showed up for my shift at 9am, and there were already a dozen people line up outside the store. Yes, that’s right: there were people willing to wait for 4 solid hours just to get into a clothing store…that they could just as readily access at another mall that’s on the damned city bus route. (Hell, I could have hopped on the bus, gone to said other mall, shopped there at that H&M, hopped back on the bus and returned to my mall with easily an hour to spare.)

I wish I had nothing better to do with my mornings. Now maybe if Neil Gaiman was there helping me find a pair of pants, I’d line up early for that. But poor Mel wouldn’t hear the end of it:


Mel: “So how was your day?”

Me: “I went pants shopping with Neil Gaiman! They’re still warm from his genius’ touch! Wanna feel them?”

Mel: “NO!!! And on an unrelated note, I’m going to get the ‘Baka Appreciation Bat’ out from the closet and test it out on your melon. Hold still for a second….”

Labels: We drink and we die and continue to drink, we drink and we sing and we fuck up our tabs

posted by Phillip at 4:45 PM

 


It’s at times like this I wish I had a small digital camera handy. Or at least a cell phone with a camera...but then that would imply I was actually socially active enough to warrant the expenses of such a phone. (And last I checked, Mel’s not exactly keen on me taking pictures of my elbow and forwarding them to her Email account.)

I was in the mall’s Winners store the other day, and stumbled across a large container of bran muffin mix. Now this unto itself isn’t incriminating in the slightest. Hardly even worth commenting about, let alone posting on Failblog. However...the name on the packaging was, and I kid you not: Bowel Buddy.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’d be rather hesitant to walk up to a cashier and plunk down a large bag with a label that sounds like something you’d find in the gay porn section of an adult video store. As it is, we’re just one zucchini and a bottle of KY jelly away from the most awkward cash desk transaction ever.


In related news, I think my "all work and little play" schedule has finally caught up with me. I’m starting to fall asleep on the couch with alarming frequency, and usually before 11pm (which says something since I used to have no problems with crashing at 1am and still getting up for work a year ago). This has also managed to effectively kill my writing abilities for, oh, the last 6 months; it’s rather difficult to focus in the evenings when you’re on the verge of passing out at your keyboard, a fact that has me particularly frustrated.

My hopes are that this can be rectified soon, as I’m apparently going to get a raise at the start of April, but as there are some particular bills that need to be whittled down first before I can start pulling back on my hours. Not to mention our Inventory is happening mid-April too. For now I’ll have to rely on Red Bull…glorious, gag-inducing Red Bull.

Wish me luck.

Labels: Bowel Buddies and Red Bull (which in retrospect sounds like some scary new kink)

posted by Phillip at 7:27 AM