I WAS going to entitle this instalment as “Flame-Proofing Your Cat. After further consideration and intense deep thought, I decided against it. Not for a minute am I suggesting that flame-proofing your cat would not be a good idea, but

1) I do not have a cat.

2) I know nothing about flame proofing a cat.

Intelligent readers of this page will note that I frequently will ramble on and on about things that I know nothing about. However, I suggest that I am especially ill equipped to handle the grandiose task of instruction upon this topic.

So lets move on to the ACTUAL topic of todays discourse: The Healing Power of Licking. Yes, thats right. Licking. I read an article about surgery on dogs (this all seems to have a sort of animal theme doesn’t it?) that said that dogs tend to lick themselves after surgery. Naturally, as you MUST be thinking, this is in the shaved area where the surgery took place, not in any… uhm … other area. The article said that the hair on this shaved (and licked) portion of the dog grows much faster than the rate normal for dog hair.

So lets follow this to its inevitable conclusion. Would this not make a good baldness cure? So buy a dog – and gain a friend in the process. Imagine how many people would have no baldness if they just had to have a dog lick their head? This is obviously a much better solution than Rogaine or Propecia, which in the latter case will cause birth defect in the babies of pregnant women if they even get within 250 yards of the stuff. Will dogs cause this? NO.

So do yourself a favour. If you are bald – buy a dog. Sure maybe some people don’t like dogs, and maybe they are “cat-people”. If you MUST own a cat, be sure to flame-proof it. 8 out of 10 veterinarians recommend flame-proofing your cat. The other 2 vets think that these 8 are wrong.

The seemingly limitless range of human stupidity never ceases to amaze me. Perhaps stupidity is not the right way to say this. The phrase “dumb as a post” comes to mind. I have both heard this phrase (or variations thereof) used to describe both individuals or the human species in general. Take Americans for example… no, Id better not say that. However, Americans seem to solve their problems using either firearms, or some momentous explosion of pyrotechnics. They like their solutions loud and noisy. I realize I am generalizing here.

But this is not the sort of discussion I had hoped for (my fingers have a mind of their own. Don’t go there. The real things that get on my nerves are the amount of people who don’t really seem to understand how things really work. I must remind you (as if I really need to SAY this…) that I am not pretending to know how things work. However, I would like to believe that I would have a more common sense approach to removing a dead whale than the Oregon State Highway Division. WHAT ?? A dead whale? I can hear you saying this now. Also, perhaps a better approach than that taken by the Vancouver Aquarium. Remember the whale Hyak? A fan favourite at the Aquarium for years. When he died, they towed his carcass out to sea. The next week it washed up on shore. So they cut up the publics beloved whale into little bits, and flushed those out to sea. Sure to be a public relations disaster eh?

At least this did not happen in the United States. Oh… but it did. While this was not an aquarium whale, it was a whale nonetheless. I think that the entire situation was best summed up by Dave Barry in the following article which brout my attention to this world stopping matter in the first place:

In my current state of non-inebriated writers block, I am having trouble cranking out the kind of creative, humorous, and morally reprehensible daily updates that I am famous for. So what does one do when confronted by a lack of ideas? While I always have a lack of GOOD ideas, usually other sort of ideas are in abundant supply. You need only scroll down or click on links at the side to really understand this. The idea that I once came up with, concerning writers block was to write about it. Yeah, to actually write about writers block. So this is what I am doing now. I had hoped to leave this card up my sleeve for many many more weeks, but alas, it is flowing out now. I shudder to think about what I might come up with when I have a lack of ideas in the future. I could write about the exciting time I fixed my toilet by making replacement parts out of speaker wire and massacred coat hangers (this really happened, but for ONCE, I will spare the details). So as you see, I tend to ramble on, until and idea (ANY sort of idea) pops into my head, or out my fingers. This will be all to painfully apparent to those who have had verbal conversations with me. NOT only do I have extreme symptoms of writers block (and usually spelling block), but in conversations I have speakers block. This means, like I am doing now with written words, that I talk about anything. Just keep talking Mike, you’ll stumble upon a good idea eventually. This is why such persons as Fiona and Jason have had to suffer through innumerable stories about wild an wacky interac transactions, and other bank card follies that are all to common in life. And finally, my only other option is to pilfer good ideas from someone else. And that, my friends, is what I have ultimately chosen to do today.

So without further adieu – an article by Dave Barry :

Ms. Schuler is concerned about the issue of How Guys Do Laundry. She relates the following anecdote:

“My husband announced one morning that he had discovered the previous night, on the eve of a two-day business trip, that he was out of underwear. Why he told me, I do not know. I never tell HIM when I’M out of underwear. Anyway, he decided to remedy the situation in true guy fashion, by washing exactly three sets of underwear, thus disregarding the bulging hamper full of the rest of his underwear, which, presumably, would wash itself during his absence.”

Ms. Schuler’s letter serves to remind us of the importance of not engaging in sexist stereotyping. We must never make blanket gender-based statements such as: “Men always hog the blanket.” Just because Ms. Schuler’s husband doesn’t do the laundry, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t millions upon millions of males who DO do the laundry, then hang it out to dry under the three suns of the Planet Xoomar, where they live. Most males here on Earth, however, do not do any more laundry than they absolutely have to. A single-sock load would not be out of the question, for a guy. A guy might well choose to wash ONLY THE REALLY DIRTY PART OF THE SOCK.

At first glance, this behaviour might seem to be reprehensible, but in fact there’s a simple, logical explanation for it: Men are worthless scum.

No, seriously, the explanation is that many men are AFRAID to do laundry, especially laundry belonging to people of other genders, because they (the males) might get into Big Trouble. I know I would. In our household we have a lot of sensitive garments with laundering- instruction tags full of strict instructions. I’m intimidated by these instructions. I developed my laundering skills in college, where I used what laundry scientists call the Pile System, wherein you put your dirty undershorts on the floor until they form a waist-high pile, thus subjecting the bottom shorts to intense heat and pressure that causes them to become, over several months, clean enough to wear if you’re desperate and spray them with Right Guard brand deodorant.

As a married person, I use the Hamper System, which is similar to the Pile System except that the clothes really do get clean, thanks to magical hamper rays.

No, I of course realize that hamperized clothes are cleaned by a person such as my wife, Beth, or Alison Schuler of Albuquerque, N.M. But I also know that Beth follows a complex procedure involving sorting and pre-soaking and 27 different combinations of water temperatures and chemical compounds such as fabric softener, stain remover, fabric hardener, cream rinse, plutonium, etc. Beth wouldn’t LET me do her laundry unless I underwent years of training, because she assumes I’d screw it up and cause our garments to shrink down to cute little Tinkerbell clothes, or transmaterialize in the dryer, similar to what happened to that unfortunate man in the movie “The Fly,” so we’d wind up with, for example, a brassiere that had pant legs.

Beth’s reluctance to let me near the laundry is typical of the vast majority of American women, according to a nationwide survey of several other women I know. A typical reaction came from my research department, Judi Smith, who gave the following statement regarding her husband, Tim, a Ph.D. college professor:

“I don’t trust him to do my laundry at ALL, unless I’ve sorted it first and given him strict instructions before each and every load, because otherwise everything we own would be mauve or gray. … He puts his clothes away damp. He can’t put away anyone else’s clothes, because he can’t fold. I mean, the man can’t fold a TOWEL for God’s sake. Somehow, he can’t get the corners to match up. A HAND towel, even.”

I repeated Judi’s statement to Beth, who emitted the bitter humourless laugh of a woman who has more than once watched her husband turn a basic shirt into a prizewinning origami project.

I’m not defending men here. I’m just saying that a lot of us view ourselves as laundry-impaired, and we’ll probably continue to do so as long as women roll their eyes and shove us away from the washing machine when we’re about to, for example, wash our delicate silks in the same load as our boat cover. So I’m saying to women: Teach us to launder. We are willing to learn, really, just as soon as the playoffs are over. Give us a chance to show what we are capable of. And definitely buy stock in whatever company makes Right Guard.

Hello, its Mike again. Forgive me, I’ll try and withhold my cut and paste mood today. Do we agree with this? Are men complete idiots when doing laundry. I don’t know any singe men who I have ever seen with laundry mangled clothing, or things which were supposed to be white, but somehow made a colour transformation by dark colors having sudsy laundry sex with the light colors, producing hybrids that reek of incompetence. Of course, I don’t know any singe guys either. All I can say is, that I have never personally screwed up clothing in the laundry. I DO, however, have stories of female friends of mine screwing up laundry. Of course, they would never do anything as cliche as to put that one dark red sock in with all those white T-shirts, but there are mishap that Do happen. For example, take a load of all black laundry, consisted of all types of clothing. Add a couple of Kleenexes and Voila – you’ve got some mayhem happening. The fact that I saw this person do this TWICE was even more amusing. Of course, I would never show such amusement visible, for fear of violent repercussions I have seen even worse happenings in the laundry room, but I probably should not discuss them here. The repercussions of that persons vibrant transgression are still, sadly, walking the streets to this this day.

Well, it seems like naming this thing “The Daily Rant” was a bit of a mistake. The rants have not been daily. In fact, nothing about this page has been daily. What HAS been included, has not always been a rant. My sincerest condolences on what must be your immense disappointment at this hypocrisy.

The reasons for the lack of updates in the fact that I have spirited myself away to a secret location (a remote cabin in Montana). The backwoods of Montana have rather sparse computing facilities, so it is in this way that I attempt to rationalize my recent absence from the computing world. I originally came out here to figure out the “Caramilk secret”. I imagined deep thought and intense meditation to be necessary to crack this, the oldest of mysteries. What I discovered is that the now distant advertising campaign misled me and the other members of the public at large. It seems that there is no secret at all! IMAGINE MY SURPRISE!!!

So my mind turned to even more devious secrets…

Remember the curiosity that killed the cat? My current quest is to figure out (in EVERY DETAIL) exactly what the cat was so damn curious about in the first place! If this killed a cat, and we all know that cats have NINE lives, this must be a pretty powerful secret. Inquiring minds want to know.

Don’t think toooo hard, Michael.

Sorry, while I may not actually be in a cabin in Montana, I HAVE been away from the computer for a while. Sad to report that I haven’t been doing ANYTHING interesting, but hopefully things will pick up soon. For instance, today, the highlight was picking up another few litres of milk. YEEEEHHAAAAAAA!

I don’t know how many of you out there have had the problem, but one of the most difficult parts of writing a research paper, or doing research yourself, is coming up with a topic. This is often the most arduous, horrible, and anxiety ridden portion, after that it sort of flows nicely into a terrible paper which nobody else understands. At least the stressful part is then over. So how do I come up with a topic when I write a paper. Well, most of the time, lacking any original ideas of my own, I steal ideas from my friends, or simply plagarize ideas in already published literature. No, I am kidding. I would never do that. Or, I should stipulate, I have never been that desperate. Sometimes the topic is given to you, then that part is out of your hands. This does not usually happen. So, when racking my brains and cruising the current literature proves fruitless, I turn to the age old topic of sex. Yes folks, that’s right. I have written at least 2 sizable papers all about sex. And, since I know that you are all itching to read more on the topic, I though I’d include them on my website. The first one was for a UCFV biology class (Biol 416) about evolution (the evolution of sex…. just think, the topics are endless…) and the second was for an ecology class at SFU (BISC 304) which centered more on animal behaviour (wow!).

So what did I do for my research project in Psychology 201 this semester? The one where we had to actually do real experimentation? Gasp, shudder. The one where there are only 5 guys in the class (as opposed to 75 women)? Naturally, I did my experiment, and wrote the paper on: DEPRESSION. Although, my first ideas were MUCH more interesting ; )

I have recurring dreams (while I am asleep too, I might ad). I am not afraid to admit to this, even though those less educated of my prior acquaintances might label this as a form of frenetic mental activity (though not in the same words). Imagine that you have the dream that all of your life itself was a dream, and you have just woken up. You are a middle aged, single, white male. You remember your “dream” vividly, and you know who you really are too. You are sleeping in a run down apartment complex that likely should have been demolished to build expensive condominiums (leaky ones at that…). The phone rings. Its your boss, and since you overslept for the last time, you are no longer required in the “stun” line at the slaughterhouse. It look like things are bad. Suddenly the fear you had about the Biochemistry final exam tomorrow (the dream… remember?) becomes a little more distant, and a little more desirable. There are three courses of action apparent to your rapidly shrinking brain (it happens after you turn 20, believe me, I know). A). You can start your new and exciting career as one of those guys pushing pilfered shopping carts filled with pop cans. B). You can sell all of your possessions, go to Las Vegas, and ultimately die, cognitively spent and monetarily worthless, in a gutter somewhere. C). You could find a job starring in infomercials where you peddle knives and other household items that only seem extra special while on TV, and seem just like anything else once they are shipped and out of the protective wrapping. Or, finally D) You can go back to sleep, and hope like hell your dream returns.

What do YOU do?

I wish someone would change the way HTML works because I seem to have a lot of issues with capitalization!

I have also been told that I use too many (brackets).

If you are reading this, and my page does not give you access elsewhere, forgive me, for I know not what I do.

Had a little bit of excitement! I created all of these nifty Folders to properly organize everything on this page, rather than let them run amok and rampant in just one directory. Little did I know that I locked everyone out of seeing almaost anything on my page. OOOPS. Live and learn (that being said, i’ll probably do it again). Compounding all of this was that my maternal parental unit decided to cut me of the internet for a litle while. You see, we each have seperate accounts, but we share the time. Seems shes decided to actually use a little more time than usual recently, and I got cut off for using too much time earlier today.

It seems that Tony saved the day. Hopefully everything is back to “normal”

So while we are on the topic of the unreality of television (and radio) commercials, lets explore this further. I realize none of you were involved in the aforementioned (EXPAND your vocabulary Tony!) conversation, but it might be interesting to explore it anyway. We were discussion why University life is not really like everyone says it is going to be. The typical misinformation put out there is that life is a general blast. There are parties everywhere, people are drinking, making lots of friends, half naked bodies dancing everywhere, and this fun of a rampant social life never stops. Where, WHERE I ask, is this brand of University life found? During my long discussion yesterday, while both of us were making every attempt possible to NOT study, we were in general agreement that this particular lifestyle does not seem to exist. However, it should be mentioned that it likely DOES exist, only with very few numbers of students participating, students who will likely bomb every exam they set their pencils to and will disappear from the scene soon after anyway. The University animal is pushed out by the system and relegated to finding social lives and fun times elsewhere. This seems especially true at SFU. I mean, sure there is a pub on campus, and it is a pretty good pub, but drinking a round of beers and driving home, or riding the bus (and some of you have already heard THAT story) is not really a part of my days plan. Students, or so it was generally agreed, seem to have this (in retrospect, irrational) belief that University, in spite of all the study required, is all fun and games. Ha! SFU seems to largely be a transient student population, that is, people come and go, and nobody ever seems to stay on campus all that long after class is over (I should know, I practically live there…. searching for known faces). A commuter campus. And, I ask you, what would you expect? The place, packed with all the ambience of a cement farm, is built on top of MOUNTAIN, with not much but trees and cliffs surrounding it. And that cement! When it rains, and we all know it NEVER rains in the greater Vancouver area, the cement goes even darker! Arthur Erickson, the creator of this concrete forest, won many AWARDS for his ‘achievements’ in architecture. Achievements be damned, even the WATER runs down the hill as soon as it gets a chance.

But I am straying from yesterdays main discussion topic of the unreality of commercials. Take the beer ad for example. Half-naked (there it is… AGAIN), beautiful, young people, scampering all around some sort of fresh looking wilderness area or backyard, apparently having the time of their lives. Blah Blah Blah. Life is no beer commercial. IF they wanted to accurately portray the average beer drinker, how about the pot bellied couch potato (look – Dan Q – I SPELLED it right!) just laying there like some sort of large marine mammal washed up in its own living room.

Does anyone know the anti-drinking and driving commercial that has the view of someone driving down city streets and every time a new glass of liquor (now empty) is placed in front of them, the road gets a little more blurry? Effective, I think, at least to a point. Perhaps not as poignant as seeing mutilated bodies and the like on TV, as a deterrent. But this sobering issue (sorry, I should makes jokes in this section but….) is not what I wanted to talk about today. I think there should also be a different slant taken on this commercial. I propose that we place a pretty ugly individual in the centre of the screen, perhaps situated in a bar or a certain household room. An ugly man or women. Repeatedly place already emptied glasses of liquor in front of their face, and not only do they change their looks, but you (depending upon who you are) get more attracted to them. They eventually turn out looking like a goddess, or some sort of good looking man. It is a danger of excessive alcohol abuse, coupled with other sorts of problems that I will not discuss, but… you get the picture. Amusing, no?

While yesterday had its ups and downs, besides the exams, something did happen that was an ‘up’. Anytime I can beat the class average by 30%, it seems to be a good day. Anyway, if anyone is interested, here is the main text of my Psyc 201 Paper.

Warning : the formatting of this page is not exceptionally well done, time being what it is. This may be offensive to some of the more sensitive viewers.

So lets just say that you have the wild and crazy idea to go to the grocery store. You gather all of your groceries, and you proceed to the checkout/interrogation counter. This is what I did yesterday. I went to the checkout, and decided that I needed another item. When I got back, there were about 9 extra (as opposed to before) people in the lineup. I thought that these was and ‘express lane’. Apparently this unofficial lane title was misinterpreted by the person in front of me. She continued to ‘express’ her resentment towards the people in front of us for going slowly. As it turned out, the 8 people in the front of the line were all related family members (apparently) and all left when the one item they were purchasing (1 litre of whipping cream…. FYI) was paid for. This was not good enough for the old grouch ahead of me, she continued to complain about how slow the ‘Trainee’ checkout person was. I think they should just write ‘Yell at me’ or ‘I am clearly incompetent’ instead of trainee on the name tags because this seems to be the way the human brain interprets these things anyway. I always wonder at the level of anger and such that people direct towards trainee lineup people. But I digress (and get use to that… because I have the attention span of a distracted walnut). Anyway, when the ‘Incredible Complaining Woman (ICW)’ in front of me tried to pay for her groceries, she was COMPLETELY INCOMPETENTLY SLOW!. I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but first she could not find her Safeway» card, then : ‘where IS my Air Miles» card’? And last, but not least, Hmmm, I’ll pay with interac. Ohhh… where is THAT card? Does anyone know what irony is? Does anyone know what her PIN number is? – because she DOESN’T. For someone so good at complaining, you would think that she would have some brain power left to remember FOUR STINKIN NUMBERS!!!!

But, alas, this was not the main event in my trip to the grocery store. The usual course of action that I take is to pay with interac. This is usually convenient, but can often lead to interesting problems. Yesterday, when I FINALLY managed to get through the line and attempt to pay, my interac card did not work. At all. Swipe. Swipe again. TRAINEE: ‘Maybe its dirteee’? Wipe it off. Swipe again. No dice. So, since there was nobody behind me, I went to the bank machine. You see, my interac card seems possessed by some evil force by the other side, it knows when I do not have cash with me and therefore picks those times to not work. However, whenever I go to the bank in order to get a new card, it works perfectly fine and they look at me like: why are you wasting our time sir? (You have to imagine the saccharine sweet ingratiating politeness with which this message is delivered). Back at Safeway, their bank machine will NOT take my card either. Bummer. What to do, what to do. The only course of action was to abandon my groceries and flee the store trailing behind me my shame and guilt.

So I went to the bank to get a replacement card. It worked at the bank. It worked and the ATM. No replacement. So today, I went to a different branch, and sorrowfully held up my broken (through some sort of bizarre ‘Accident’) and battered interac card, and GOT A REPLACEMENT!!! YEEEHAAA

I think the banks have a picture of me behind their counter that says : ‘Make his life a little more difficult’. Just because I am not paranoid, doesn’t mean that they are not out to get me.

All the good ones are taken. I am, of course, referring to donuts. All the good donuts have been eaten by other people and the ones that are left, are usually stale because they have been avoided by the general populace. This started out as an analogy, but now I am not so sure what this means, except that perhaps I am overly cynical.

It has come to my attention that there are those out there, in the surrounding community, that need a constant diet of ever changing web garble to satiate their addictions. The question I ask myself is whether I should give way to the pressure tactics being forced upon me and change my web page from the classic, if perhaps boring, phrase : This page left intentionally black.

Doing this might circumvent the strategies I have in place to keep life somewhat uniform and degrade this existence into incessant rants about the weather, the continuing dispute with the cat that sleeps under my car, the hamsters from hell that cohabitate with me in the basement, the reasons for keeping lit candles away from drapes, or that in fact, the statement : THIS end up, is really important information when playing the game of cribbage. Or maybe this disruption would be about circumventing ethical agreements in psychology 201 experiments, to gain knowledge of those of interest (hypothetically of course…), or why not rewinding a VCR tape from blockbuster video should instigate a return of capital punishment, why the plastic wrapping of CD cases is really meant to drum up the sales of replacement CD cases, or that fact that anchovies on pizza has become a joke when, upon further enlightening examination, is not really funny at all. Or, we could get personal, recounting the time when an romantically approached girlfriend turned out to be a look alike girl with a real attitude problem and a vehement left hook, the now infamous drinking tale of that fateful trip to UBC where I gained an intimate resentment against those who designed the back windows of the Ford Taurus to not roll the ENTIRE way down, or the time in which it is NOT appropriate to see if you can still read literature while in a fast moving vehicle with a full stomach.

So now, I ask the populace out THERE… who read this page and others like it, would these be stories and rants and raves in which you would be interested. Or, would the interest alone be with the young, short, gassy one who applies the afformentioned pressure tactics? You know who you are, and your guilt must be difficult to deal with, for look what you have unleashed.