Category: General

General posts.

The fly in my office… the follow-up

Today I was sitting in my office – decorated in post-modern warehouse – with pretty blue walls, a rather comfortable wicker chair and a fabulous flat-screen monitor and who walks in but the Terminex guy. I’ve heard good things about the Terminex guy from those who have worked here longer than I. He hates bugs, doesn’t mind mice, despises rats. An exterminator who has a passion for his job – you don’t see many of those these days.

Our Terminex man was called because my boss thought he smelled dead mice in the ceiling and walls. I just thought the smell was normal as I haven’t been here that long and who’s to say what’s normal here? As Mr. Terminex examines our drop ceilings for ‘droppings’ he asked if I had seen any flies. What a question! I respond with a ‘Yes!’ and say in fact, I have noticed a few flies the last couple of weeks and the day they annoyed me most was Thursday, August 4th. He says, and this is where it gets gross, that the flies show up when the carcass of the mice are decomposing, hence the reason he does not see mice carcasses in the walls and ceilings.

So not only was I bothered by ridiculously large flies for about 2 weeks, I was actually sitting below the dead carcasses of mice.

The fly in my office…

My office. A standard office in a warehouse building. It’s a large room, enough for a good-sized, L-shaped desk and all of the standard office accrutrements. This office, being the front room and the only room air-conditioned in the middle of August in Atlanta, gets plenty of visitors, including Atlanta’s most obnoxious fly. It’s huge, the fly, landing on the rolodex, the flat-screen monitor, my coffee cup. I’ve attacked it with my phone message book, tried to pin it between the window and the blinds. I’ve tried to coax it out the door – to freedom! – to no avail. At most, I’ve been able to shoo it into Dave’s office but it always comes back to annoy me.

I thought these things we’re supposed to have a life span of 24 hours.

It’s the fly from hell. It’s been here since Monday. And it likes to fly near my ears.

Dear Publix Bagger Boy

I love you.

I was watching you as you bagged my groceries. I watched you separate and combine like with like. I saw you push the pork to the side and keep it there until it was the right time to put it in the cart. I watched you delicately place the eggs in their bag. I watched you gingerly bag the fruits and vegetables so there would be no unisghtly bruising. When I saw that you had placed the bread and rice cakes on their end, backed by the flat pack of bacon for support, I thought I was in heaven.

Thank you thank you thank you, Publix Bagger Boy.

Cool map thingie

This is way cool: http://www.webdevref.com/wjr/. It’s a web app that works with google maps to measure distances. It’s billed as a running/jogging/exercise thing, but some of us actually walk to get to places, and its useful for us too.

You can zoom in and get pretty exact. My walk to work is 1.18 miles according to this thing. .04 miles to the bar where we play trivia.

Which we tanked at last night.

Democracy grows out of the barrel of a gun.

I love love love the social realist style of Soviet propoganda, so I think this was made just for me:

Democracy grows out of the barrel of a gun.

from Kirk Anderson, Minnesota, via slate.com: http://cagle.slate.msn.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/PCbest30.asp

UPDATE: You can purchase these now at: http://www.cafepress.com/molotov_comix. Nice that he split them up into several different posters.

It’s a shame to move Pac-Man down

But I have to.

Apparently one of my posts over at Atlanta Metblogs pissed off a local Boy Scout troop leader. Steve Barton, of Troop 764 in Dunwoody, to be exact.

I bashed the Boy Scouts of America for discriminating against homosexuals and for a recent scandal here in Atlanta in which they inflated their statistics for inner city memberships so they could get more funding from the United Way. Even after they got caught, they still asked for the $1 million dollars that they would have gotten for inner city programs because of their inflated statistics. That takes a lot of guts.

In my opinion, they are lucky to get anything from the United Way in the first place. Many local United Ways cut off BSA funding over their discrimination against gays and athiests. I know it happened in Philadelphia when I was there.

Its sad, the Boy Scouts have the resources to do so much good for boys, especially inner city boys, who may not have the positive male role models that suburban kids have. And despite what Mr. Barton says (“Scouts teaches nothing bad about homosexuals”), they do in fact teach that homosexuals are dangerous, subversive, and prone to child molestation by not welcoming them into their organization. They discount the fact that it is possible to be gay and be a positive role model for children. Every homosexual is a bad seed in their eyes.

I wonder what the statistics are on child molestation comparing straight men to gay men.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been as condescending in my response to Mr. Barton, but I couldn’t help myself.

Karl Rove’s Plumbing Service

That’s right. The Tuesday update is all about trivia. Leslie and I went by ourselves. Everyone else crapped out. We weren’t sure if we should stay at first, and did pretty poorly at first. In the end, however, our 2-person team in a field of nine teams finished in 3rd place.

Not too shabby at all for two people. Thanks for nothing team. When we drink our winnings, the last ten dollars in all Leslie and mine.