An Open Letter To The Superstore Cart Retrieval Guy

Dear Oakridge Superstore Cart Retrieval guy,

I feel your pain. You have been doing this job, rain or shine, for what must feel like decades. Your fellow cart retrieval guys are idiots, but they are just trying to raise themselves out of their hard-scrabble Oakridge environs. And smoking, being lazy, and wearing an iPod to work is the ticket out of that suburban hell.

As for the clientele, yes, it is a mish-mash of SUV-driving soccer moms, SUV-driving assholes, minivan-driving urban djs, and fitness chicks with thousand yard stares. And a quck side note to DJ Gavin and MC Cory...a Winstar will never be cool, no matter how loud you play your music, or how funky you wear your hat.

Back to Cart Retrieval Guy...

Guy, buddy, pal, friend. You have got to calm down. You look like you are about to explode into a thousand razor-sharp shards of repressed rage and poisonous bile. You are scaring the kids. Hell, you are scaring me, and I have had 16 or 17 years to get used to you.

Trust me, this is not a good work face:



I don't know, maybe some herbal tea might help, maybe a haircut, maybe practice a couple of different expressions in the mirror. Look, you do a good job, and from what I can tell, you take your job seriously. REALLY seriously. But I worry. And I care. I blog because I care.

And I'm a little bit frightened.

Book Review: Darwin's Blade by Dan Simmons

The glorious aroma of the arabica wafted out of the Newco OS8 thermal carafe drip brewer, the only one that had stood up to his rigourous testing and proved capable of consistently providing 40 ounces of café filtré brewed at 92.223 degrees C. These beans had just arrived from Yemen after waiting 8 years to be picked. Most people drank coffee from beans picked after 7 years, but 2 tours with the French Foreign Legion had taught him that the small Middle Eastern country, located on the Arabian Peninsula is Southwest Asia, knew a thing or two about coffee. And 8 years was the key to Elysium.

His 27.59 cm feet, freshly shod in sheepskin hard sole moccasins, padded across the Epanko cork flooring. He loved the cork, not only for its environmental friendliness and sound absorbing qualities, but also for the way it reminded him of Kampuchea.

South East Asia seemed so long ago, so long that he remembered it as if remembering an old movie, where a previous version of himself, younger, less bitter, more idealistic, fresh out of college with a summa cume laude to his credit, learned the ways of love and war while attached to a special forces team known only to a select few in the Pentagon. But that was a story for another chapter, and another flashback.

Armed with a large citron presse, he seated himself at his Poetitech computer station, and, quickly typing in the 128 character password, based on cryptographic principals that had won him his first Ph.d. from M.I.T. at age 18, opened his custom web browser. Instantly his 35 gigabit connection, routed through 18 different switches based in 14 countries, brought his 47 inch plasma display to life.

Snopes.com was his homepage, his personal cornucopia of royalty free stories to use in his novel. Here he could take his character's name from an internet meme, and assure fame and fortune.

The red dot from the laser sight of a Barrett M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle flashed on his screen when he had moved his head to sip from his Belfor Manon lead crystal hiball. This wasn't the first time that Smirnoff vodka as a morning pick-me-up had saved his life, and it wouldn't be the last.

What Happens When Even Anal Gets Boring

When the rich get bored, the rich get funky.

"Max Mosley, one of the most powerful men in world sport, was under pressure to resign as boss of Formula One’s governing body last night after he was exposed enjoying a Nazi-style orgy with five prostitutes.

Jewish groups condemned the behaviour of Mosley, 67, whose father, Sir Oswald, was the leader of the British Union of Fascists and a friend of Adolf Hitler.

Mr Mosley was caught on video by the News of the World with five women in an underground “torture chamber” in Chelsea, where he spent several hours allegedly indulging in sado-masochistic sex.

The Oxford-educated former barrister, who is president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), reenacted a concentration camp scene in which he played the role of both guard and inmate.

Speaking in German and brandishing a leather whip, he beat the women after allowing himself to be subjected to a humiliating inspection for lice and an interrogation in chains.

Mr Mosley, a close confidant of Bernie Ecclestone, who holds the commercial rights to Formula One, paid £2,500 cash for the sex services, the Sunday newspaper.

I am really looking forward to Peter Windsor's pre-race interviews this weekend.