$25 is like four small pizzas (with olives).
1: I was unaware that parking tickets were redeemable for pizza (with olives). Crap.
No way can you get four small pizzas (with olives) for $25.
The sliders of pizza. Otherwise, I don't believe it.
Sciulli's on 5th Ave. $6.30 for a small with one topping. So, I'm off by 20 cents.
8: fat lot of good tips'll do when the coffee shop employees DIE IN A TERRIBLE FIRE!
Just don't try to write a blog about eating cheaply, okay Moby? Cause we'll take you down with an exposé.
Did pizza become some sort of euphemism when I wasn't looking?
12: I was just thinking that. $25 = about a day of eating for our household. I don't think I'd make much of an econo-food blogger.
10: I always tip them, though. Today's tip: hey, don't park on Old Preston next to the Omni. You can definitely get a ticket.
Maybe I'm just unusually unenthusiastic about pizza.
15: I usually tip also. They didn't have the cup out today.
They write parking tickets where you live, Stanley???
20: Let's not go that way. I'm really full right now.
23: okay, we'll go the other way. Got an emetic handy?
I love green olives on pizza, but am meh about black olives.
When I lived in PG County, MD Ex and I referred to hazard signals as "park anywhere lights." I don't use them that way, but it's ubiquitous in PG. I haven't seen it in Northern Va, where I live now.
Also, Ex was a volunteer firefighter for a while - apparently the attitude of firefighters to illegal parking in fire lanes and in front of fire hydrants is to simply remove the vehicle in the most efficient manner possible, without regard for property damage. No idea what the car insurance companies do if your vehicle is damaged under those circumstances, but I bet they don't pay out. One call Ex was on had a car parker directly in front of the hydrant, so they smashed the windows and ran the hose through the car. The owner showed up, flipped out, and was informed by the police on scene that he'd have to wait until the fire was out and the hose no longer needed before he could have access to his vehicle.
I like pizza Edward G. Robinson. Discuss.
Lets pretend I know how to use commas.
26 is pretty awesome (sorry Stanley, hope you didn't have to wait long!).
They write parking tickets where you live, Stanley???
No, they have a fancy-shmancy computer-y thing that prints 'em out. And their cars have steering wheels on the British side. We're wicked high-tech.
I am peeved that I got a rather expensive parking ticket on campus recently. I almost never drive there, but I was sick and yet really needed to go to the library and work on some microfilm.I attempted to be good and pay to park, but the damn machine was broken, and wouldn't take any form of money. And I figured it was summer and not that big of a deal and surely the person who distributes tickets could tell that the machine that issues tickets was broken...but no. No sympathy at all.
I feel the need to clarify that I was not blocking a fire hydrant, just in an area designated as a "fire lane". I'm not a monster, people; just your run-of-the-mill bad person.
34: I used to get so frustrated when I'd park illegally on campus just to run in to get several beers at the pub, and they'd give me a damn ticket. Jerks.
35: Come on, Stanley. You could be a monster if you'd only apply yourself. Start small with parking in fire lanes, work up to kicking puppies, and you'll be the next Dick Cheney in no time at all.
Some lady blocked my driveway once. Then her car died. She was saying "If this is the worst thing that happens to us today, we're lucky." Which is technically true (considering the universe of human experience), but beside the point. When she wanted me to wait until a tow-truck arrived, I had to get a bit angry so she would steer and I could push the car out of the way.
37: DON'T SHOOT ME IN THE FACE BRO!!!
I think they were $14 here. They had to raise the fine because that was cheaper than actually paying to park in some parts of town.
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I know no one wants to hear about my cat, but:
She just knocked over my Diet Coke with an errant lash of the tail. Mostly empty, so no big deal, just a little puddle on the desk. I go to get a towel and come back to find her dipping her paw in the puddle, licking the Coke off, and repeating. I'm seriously amused.
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42: I love it when cats do that!
Of Sir Kraab's two cats (a brother and sister), the female will, when faced with a desirable liquid down in the bottom of the glass, wedge her head down into there to lap it up. The male, however, uses the paw dipping method. It's adorable.
I love you, Stanley, but my hair-trigger sense of moral outrage causes me to just fucking loathe the "park anywhere lights" users as exhibiting an unacceptable sense of self-importance so I'm glad to learn that it is possible for someone to be ticketed for doing that even though I am not specifically glad that it happened to you.
44: I was acting like a jackass and got called on it. That should happen to lots of people a lot more often.
43: Yeah, she does it when her water glass (she refuses to drink out of a bowl) gets low. I however am just seriously amused that she's drinking soda; in that terrible sort of what would happen if I gave her more sort of way. (I won't, promise).
My cat has taken to going and sitting in the bathtub when she's thirsty. Even if she has water in her bowl/glass. It's bizarre.
The flouting of parking laws is quasi-encouraged by delivery companies:
"This is part of the price of doing business," said Jim McCluskey, a spokesman for FedEx, which paid San Francisco $434,046 for 7,711 tickets last year. "We encourage our operators to park legally, but we also need to meet the needs of our customers who want reliable, on-time service."
From the same article, SF has a "corporate program" for frequently ticketed companies:
Companies can enroll if they have at least 20 vehicles that park on city streets and if they have what Lynch described as "a history of citations." The participating firms are billed monthly and cannot protest the tickets. In return, they avoid late fees and having their vehicles clamped with immobilizing boots when a vehicle accrues five or more parking tickets.
46: I've never giving a cat anything improper to drink. So far as anybody who wasn't in the garage after high school graduation knows.
45: In a tiny way. Were I penalized every time I acted like a jackass I'm pretty sure I'd have worked my way up to the death penalty by now.
Tickets in my hometown were $2 or $3, something like that, and my mother tended to have any of three reactions to them:
--what an admirable attempt at clinging to a better time
--they've got to be fucking kidding me
--compared to paying $0.50 to park, it's a gamble I'll take.
Even though this was one of the first seemingly-objective indicators that the place where I lived was inarguably behind some sort of cultural curve, I remained insulated. When I got my first parking ticket in college I was pissed off that tickets were so much.
45: I agree, but it occurs to me that if you plan on continuing your crime spree you ought to consider *not* using park anywhere lights - they are, after all, distress signals of a sort, and tend to attract attention. A mildly distracted parking enforcement person might not have noticed your vehicle if not for the *flash*flash*flash*. I think you subconsciously *wanted* to get caught. You have a thing for authority figures, don't you? It's OK. We won't judge.
47: What's wrong with your cat enjoying a nice soak in a hot tub from time to time?
So Stanley are you going stop parking there?
51: In shitty parking, leaving the blinkers on does at least indicate that you intend to be back before the car battery dies.
I just realized my cats' food bowl is a ramekin. I only have the one, but if I had another I could stack them. In a stack. Of ramekins.
Kind of as if Ceasar had put a dozen termites on the ships instead of burning them.
$25 is a very cheap parking ticket. I got one once (£30 - double that if you don't pay it quickly) for parking on double yellow lines outside the entrance to the hospital when I had been sent to eye casualty with a corneal ulcer. I shouldn't really have been driving myself around, but C was being a dick (at home) and I was angry and upset and couldn't face negotiating the multistorey. C paid it for me by way of apology.
One of my parents' cats went through a phase where he would only drink running water. So he would go and sit in the bath, and you would have to put the tap on a tiny bit for him.
So Stanley are you going stop parking there?
Yes.
58: That's adorable. My cat just runs from running water.
58: Yeah, I've known cats with a "fresh from the tap" fetish.
My senior cat only likes food fresh out of the bag. If there's already a bunch of food in his bowl he just sits there looking at me until I take a few pieces from the bag and drop them into the bowl, at which point he'll gobble up everything.
Ok, I totally apologize for turning this into a cat thread, but I'm curious if other people's cats growl. (Mine has been wandering around growling for the last 5 minutes because of loud noises coming from across the way).
Our cat will climb down into a toilet bowl to drink, which I find really disgusting.
Both our cats growl.
I like that togolosh has a senior cat. We have one to, and I keep trying to impress the seriousness of his duties upon him, and he keeps on shirking.
Discussing cats is surely more morally acceptable than discussing wanton criminality.
My mother's cat liked to drop his toys into the toilet bowl, so there was a house rule: close the toilet lid, dammit, please. Because that's just a drag to have to be fishing drenched little fuzzy-balls and catnip-filled pseudo-mouse-shaped things out of the toilet.
No idea why the cat did that.
I always put the lid down, but my roommates tend toward obliviousness.
68: Our house's junior cat collects toys in her water dish. No idea why, either.
62: Mine too. My hypothesis is that it's a loss of the ability to smell.
63: Of course cats growl. Our new cat growled at me the first time I picked her up, which I found adorable.
FWIW, Bave, assuming your toilet is reasonably clean, the water in it after a flush is pretty clean, too. Plus fresher.
Of course cats growl.
I'm realizing this; I suppose I just always had hissers as opposed to growlers growing up. Never experienced it until this cat.
I figure the water is fresher than what's in the bowl, but the toilet itself is not always reasonably clean.
You do realize that cats lick their own asses, right?
And, that dirty litter gets stuck in their paws and they then trail it everywhere?
That's why I like dogs. They go for the asses of others. It's just more social.
76: Disgusting! My aunt despises cats because of that ... that ... behavior. Yet she has a big slobbery dog who may well inadvertently piss on your leg or shoe in her excitement to see you when you enter the house. Huh.
My cat will only drink from a bowl of melting ice cubes.
Dogs piss on fire hydrants, thus getting some revenge for tickets for blocking the fire hydrant (or lane).
One of my cats loves mint, so the bathroom door has to be closed to protect just-used toothbrushes.
For cycling in the wrong bit of Battersea Park - that is, along the river front, one of the nicest bits - I got stopped by the 'parks police'. Despite my best efforts at 'you got me fair and square', they said they'd have to take down my details. There was even a half-hearted attempt at rights reading. A week later, I got a letter which said this:
"I have received a report from the Parks Police ... regarding an incident involving breach of the by-laws which apply ... I have carefully considered the facts relating to this particular case and on this occasion, have decided not to prosecute ... should at any time in the future, there be a similar complaint against you then you will be prosecuted. Yours faithfully, Borough Solicitor."
To give this some context, I'm informed that 'successful prosecutions' in such cases tend to attract a several hundred pound fine or community service. So I'm tending to think that Wandsworth's response, though it hasn't resulted in my having to hand over any money, is nastier than the sixty pound fine and the three points on the license which I got for doing ninety on the M1 a couple of years back. Also, I think it's utter toss: a bit like going to nine points on your license in one go. I'd rather live in a community which took each situation on its merits: and either fined or didn't fine. Or perhaps they think I've taken the first steps towards becoming a proven menace.
Further context: in America, I've successfully wriggled my way out of several speeding tickets just by being nice to policemen. It's a great country in which to speed; in my experience only South Africa is better, although I have to say I sometimes wonder about Baha. Of course, my luck may have begun to change.
I've seen firecrews run a hose right through a dog that is pissing on a fire hydrant. The dog then has to wait for them to finish battling the fire before he/she can move.
81: There's also the slobber, in some. I am not a fan of slobber.
I had a cat who went through a several-year phase of refusing fresh water: she'd only drink from an old glass coffee-pot of water stale enough that it was growing mild green algae at its bottom. Odd. That stuff won't kill ya, though.
82: Relevant? Maybe. My grandma tells me it's common practice among the locals not to kiss the Blarney Stone, because the town drunks like to pee on it at night.
I've stopped kissing fire hydrants.
I don't really understand 84. Not getting fined/pressed into service is nastier than getting fined plus points on your license?
The owner showed up, flipped out, and was informed by the police on scene that he'd have to wait until the fire was out and the hose no longer needed before he could have access to his vehicle.
Wow. Firefighters are gangsta. That is awesome.
It's the threat. Also, with regular tickets, you don't have to go to court; with this, it looks as though that's the next stop.
87: Ha! When I visited Ireland at age 9 I refused to kiss the Blarney Stone on the grounds that "kissing is gross". I'm glad to learn that although my reasoning was wrong (as I later learned), my course of action was right.
94: In fairness, it's not Otto's fault the town drunks keep peeing on him at night.
95: No don't get me started talking about that . . .
Oh Blarney Stone, you can try to pretend that you don't want me, but I know the real score.
C and I are arguing about who should go and buy chocolate. He said he'll go if I suck his cock. What a beautiful snapshot of our marriage.
One of our cats doesn't particularly want to drink from our glasses but does know how much it would annoy us for him to knock one over so, when he wants attention, he'll put his paw on the rim of a glass and look at us. He's such a spoiled little shit. No I do not then drink from the same glass after his filthy paw has been all over it.
I love cats, though, and dogs, and pretty much every animal (except for exotic birds after having grown up knowing a creepy old lady who had one that gave her "kisses" and watched TV with her and, just in general, being terrified of what they would decide to learn to say). In my highly detailed fantasy life, Rah and I devote at least several dozen acres of our expanse of isolated, wooded land to building a kind of last-chance home for animals nobody else wants to adopt. I'd have acres and acres of well-cared-for dogs of the three-legged and/or annoying-bark varieties and moth-eaten old cats with bad attitudes and anything else any local rescue agencies couldn't unload on willing homes and I would love every single one of them.
I would love to adopt a dog but I don't have time to take proper care of one.
My two cats (who are littermates) prowl on the side of the tub while I'm taking a shower. They don't want to get wet, of course, but they do want to run down and lap up the pools of fresh water after I get out.
They're very good about not waking me up, but occasionally when I first open my eyes, there's a cat staring me in the face from a distance of approximately zero inches. When this happens, the culprit will typically make a trilling sound and jump over to my other side.
Finally, one of them has a serious thing about licking the sides of magazines, ruffling the pages.
I'd have acres and acres of well-cared-for dogs of the three-legged and/or annoying-bark varieties and moth-eaten old cats with bad attitudes and anything else any local rescue agencies couldn't unload on willing homes and I would love every single one of them.
This is like to make me cry with laughter and joy, you Robust, you.
And then I paid the city twenty-five dollars for a really great bike this dude was selling.
Firefighters are gangsta. That is awesome.
OTOH.
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(Apropos of the title...)
No more masturbating to John Hughes.
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But we can still masturbate to characters in John Hughes' movies, right?
The flouting of parking laws is quasi-encouraged by delivery companies
Phone companies, too, to a lesser extent. When telecom techs are doing a work-to-rule* action, they won't park illegally and will keep circling until they find a legal space.
*If you're not familiar with the term, it means that workers follow every company rule and policy to the letter. No company can actually operate on that basis, of course.
In case any of youse cat people are not aware: cats in sinks.
I was threatened with a ticket in Disney World for "touching the characters."
In case any of youse cat people are not aware: cats in sinks.
I was just about to mention my old (RIP) cat's thing about sleeping in the sink. And the current cat's thing about hopping in the bathtub and drinking from the drip. I should probably throw in the dog's habit of using the current cat as the tractor-substitute in the dog's version of a tractor pull.
max
['Bipetual.']
At this moment, one of my cats is doing the paw dip and lick method to get out the last drops of milk from the glass I was drinking from. The other cat is curled up and snoozing away in a Trader Joes bag I left laying on the kitchen floor.
If I had a ca-at / I would pet it in the morning / I would pet in the evening / All over it's bu-utt
After my cat eats cat food, my cat's breath smells like cat food.
So you give it a breath mint?
The other cat is curled up and snoozing away in a Trader Joes bag I left laying on the kitchen floor.
My cat's favorite sleeping place is a Co-Op bag.
My family had a cat we got from the pound who loved sleeping in boxes. One of my aunts gave her a more comfortable, cushioned box-like-non-box from a pet store, but the cat simply would not sleep in it--until I put a cardboard box in it as a sort of lining, at which point the cat got right in.
115: Funny. I was quoting Ralph Wiggum randomly today, and an Ecuadoran cow-orker informed me that Chief Wiggum is known as Jefe Górgory on the version of The Simpsons shown in South America.
I am imagining Chief Wiggum reading the post title.
If we all imagine in silence together, will we be heard?
114 made me smile, and I barely noticed the misplaced apostrophe.
See, I was too focused on making parsimon smile to attend to my apostrophe placement.
Frankly, I think you need to reëvaluate your priorities, neb. Would you rather have perfect punctuation everywhere, or would you rather have the happiness of a Baltimorean? And don't go all "false dichotomy" this and "the road to happiness passes through perfect punctuation" that on me; for some of us, there is only so much we can do in a day. As we grow older, we begin to accept our limitations.
I don't see why I need to accept your limitations, though.
A limitation of never being able to accept other's limitation's, no matter how s'mall, i's perhap's not a limitation one s'hould accept in ones' s'elf.
126: Good lord, people, Otto's not still single, is he? What are people thinking?
It matters surprisingly little, what people think.
In some moments I am willing to accept that neb has such high standards only because he cares about us so much and wants the best for us. In other—darker—moments, what I feel is more akin to the heartache of the son who has realized he will never meet his father's expectations, but has not yet used this knowledge to set himself free.
Those aren't incompatible, Otto. I want the best for you, but I know my wanting is futile. You will never be the best.
This realization hurt me.
I will never have perfect grammar. This saddens me.
If 131 were true, neb, you'd have better blog material for us all.
135: Yeah, seriously. I'll post any old drivel, crap-story, whatever. (Cf. this post.) You should try it some time, neb.
B. is alluding to an off-blog conversation in which she encouraged me to masturbate in public.
Specifically in a library. Would that not make for a great blog post?
138: Entitled "Browse, browse, arouse, browse"?
In some parts of academia, when the state of the revision control system indicates that written output is likely to be scanty, the graduate students go naked to the libraries by night, and there seek to join with the books precisely as they would with another person, while at the same time they call out for "More papers!".
Who would notice in the library, anyway? Actually, I'm fairly sure I've run into a guy doing such in the stacks of religious history. I turned around so fast though that I really can't be sure.
Perhaps he was making a bashful offering.
Yeah, things should be especially quiet given that it's summer session--there's probably no better time of year for library masturbation than now, in fact.
134: Sigh. Console yourself with the thought that some are excited by this.
Who in the world is excited by imperfect grammar?
I don't mean "as opposed to perfect grammar", just—what makes that something exciting at all? Neither is perfect grammar exciting.
144: it may be true that, in general, in the summer session things are quiet in the library. However, at the moment there is someone working not seven feet from me. (This is the departmental library; very small. No stacks.)
138: Specifically in a library. Would that not make for a great blog post?
Which part would make a good blog post? The part before neb was arrested or the part after neb was arrested?
max
['I think this is a ladies only exercise.']
I just meant that imperfect grammar is charming, to some.
143: Ouch! Ancient times!
You would think that those people would become insensitive to the charms of imperfect grammar pretty rapidly.
Indeed, would Lolcats make us LOL as hard as they do if they consistently obeyed all orthographic and punctuation usage conventions? I think not.
But, on the other hand, have they not worn out their welcome? Did they not provide diminishing marginal LOLs? And yet they remain as ungrammatical as ever.
True! Their ungrammaticality has some charm. But it is a charm that has lost its power to charm.
151: Oh, I don't know about that.
Otto did say "consistently", Flippanter.
150: I would think so, yes. Yet this thing persists. The genius of the inartful, as it were. Lolcats is not the same thing.
Otto said a lot of things. Some of them to the wrong people, Sam! You gotta get me outta town.
153: What's with the layout? I read it as "Fuck I am you cat".
157: Complain to the management over there. Do I look like Xeni Jardin?*
* I do not.
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I have been offered (unsolicited!) what amounts to a tryout for a jam band. I find this amusing.
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But, on the other hand, have they not worn out their welcome?
No.
One of my fraternity sisters single-handedly (zing!) put an end to the career of a locally well-known serial public pud-pounder. She looked up from her studies, seated in a window niche in her departmental library, saw him jerking off to/at her through the window and proceeded to point and laugh and call some people over to join in her amusement. The guy clearly didn't count on that response, fled the scene and that was that.
Ah, but in the library, naked graduate students must beware of the library cat... I once had a kitten who decided my roommate's balls were excellent scratching posts. The screams were heart-wrenching.
One of our cats has become terribly neurotic and high-strung. She runs upstairs and hides under our bed when there are strangers in the house. We are considering anti-anxiety drugs. She has also developed an anti-cat litter fetish, despite our use of paw-friendly pine dust. When she does use the litter box, she perches with all four feet clutching the rim of the box, so as to protect her dainty tootsies from the EVIL CAT LITTER!
The other cat has musical aspirations and has taken to leaping at the mandolin hanging on our living room wall, so as to unseat it from its hook. She, however, thinks strangers come to the house only to worship and adore her. She flirted so successfully with the AT&T guy that he did stuff not in his job description when trying to fix our intertubes service. She looks like a tiny Maine Coon cat and he had just lost his after 22 years. The stove repair guy was also a cat person. I think I'm going to demand that all repair people who come to the house be cat people.
If I am going to meander hijack a thread, it's this one.
Further proof sartorial innovation keeps America covered.
-- Econolicious
163: The gendering going on with the tunic- versus toga-style is...curious.
re: 161
The seems to be the standard approach, yeah. I used to work in a mental hospital and you'd see patients (mostly male but sometimes female) masturbating fairly regularly. Two of the nurses told me one day when they were walking through a local park some flasher jumped out and they just laughed hysterically.
"We see this everyday, you're not exactly scaring us"
159: If you're ever in town and want to sit in with this band, I could totally make it happen.
It is. My nana's. She was in a band.
It's a very cute scene.
You should sell it on postcards.
Brilliant! Who'd have thought that I could start making money from my kids after just a month of violin lessons?
165: Two women I knew as an undergrad had a flasher appear outside their window, masturbating furiously. They found it hilarious and tried to take pictures of him, but all they got was a bunch of shots of themselves reflected in the window, due to the flash washing out the flasher. They tried to call the police, but were laughing too hard to make sense and the dispatcher hung up on them.