Teen Apathy and Happy Trees

Just a quick recap of this weekend’s happenings for all of you Halloween hooligans. The bulk of Saturday morning was spent waiting in line at the DMV in hopes of attaining a shiny new VA license. My hopes were nearly shattered when I glanced into the fancy eyetesting machine and swore I saw something written in Arabic. Now, I am the first to admit that my eyesight isn’t the best, even with glasses, but after that test, I think I may now qualify for that legally blind tax credit.

My redemption was teen apathy. Generally frowned upon by society, the young man behind the counter, obviously didn’t care. Here is a recount of the exchange:

Clerk: Please read line one.
Me: HKGC, wait a minute, is that a 2? Are there numbers in this thing?
Clerk: What? No. Please read line one.
Me: That 2 just disappeared completely, I think I need new glasses.
Clerk.: Just read the line.
Me: I don’t think I can.
Clerk: Read the line.
Me: HCG Tilda 2 smileyface LOL #
Clerk: Close enough.

The afternoon was spent afro shopping for my Bob Ross costume. Did you know that afros come in 2 sizes? Giant and Enormous?

I went with giant. I was really on the fence about the costume. Honestly, I think my Halloween spirit was MIA or perhaps the cough medicine I have been consuming intravenously is suppressing it. Anyhow, my biggest concern about Bob Ross is that these young’ns were weened on MTV not PBS and by and large the PBS painter and his happy trees would go unrecognized. Then I saw Bob Ross on a screen printed T-shirt at target. Nothing screams commercialism like a screen print t-shirt from target (except for a screen print t-shirt from wal-mart). That pretty much sealed the deal for me.

What if...

Every once and awhile someone asks a question.

A question that forever changes the social landscape of the world we live in.

Questions that most people are afraid to ask and more afraid to know the answer.

Last night I thought of a question, a question that today, I pose to the loyal denizens of Topic15.

A question that has zero relevance to the aforementioned criteria, but is thought provoking nonetheless...

What if...

What if, for just once...

What if, for just once, you substituted Old English 800 Malt liquor for water in a humidifier, even if it was just for one night?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Is anyone brave enough to step up to the plate for this experiment?

A Pulitzer Prize or perhaps a Darwinian Award may be just one night away!

For the love of money...

All right first things first, a celebratory whoopty whoop for the reincarnation of the humble topic15.

Holla!

Now barring any further pomp and circumstance, let's get back to the discussions of what's what and unequivocal truths in this world vis-a-vis the observations of the one and only benster.

A qoute recently circulated around the office stating something to the effect of "throw enough money at people and they are liable to do anything." Nevermind the context of its origin. It's true, oh yes, it's true.

I can think of no finer example than from my worldly travels to India in search of the elusive Johnny Three Legs 40, which was banned from domestic shipment many years ago.

During my international excusion I had a brief pit stop outside of Deli when I saw a man attacked by a monkey all over a twinkie incident, but I digress.

I was standing outside of the red fort when I was approached by and elderly man who emerged from the shadows. In an almost trance state he began reciting various architectural characteristics of the fort. Just before I could question where the hell he was going with all of his jibba-jabba he says this to me..."The top of the fort wall is 200 feet from the ground, if you give me 300 rupees I will jump from the top of the wall." Bear in mind that 300 ruppees is maybe 10 bucks on a good day.

So I said, you got a deal, but I'm no pre-paying sucka. You have to jump before I hand over the scratch.

Now if you look carefully, you can see superman mid flight in the picture above. He jumped into that cesspool of a moat and being a man of my word, I handed over his money.

Decisions, Decisions...

Shocking as it may seem, Halloween is less than two weeks away, which means it is time to come up with an idea for a costume in pretty short order. I've set the bar pretty high for the past three consecutive years…Vanilla ice (complete with ICE shaved in the back of my cabeza), Mr. T (yes with a Mohawk), and who can forget the loveable Gangsta Cow (eet mor chikn btchiz).


While no clear winners have emerged from the pack, here is a sampling of this year's current contenders…

Gary Busey—requirements include wax teeth, a blinding Hawaiian shirt, bed head, and copious amounts of whiskey. The good thing about being Busey is that it pretty much gives you carte blanch to do whatever the F' you want and you could always chalk it up to "I was just trying to be authentic." The bad thing is you will end up in jail by 9:30 PM.

Dirty Sanchez—the beauty of this costume is in its simplicity, a sharpie mustache, a Sanchez jersey, and a good roll in the mud is all you need. Most unfortunately, this costume has a severe drawback, and no I am not referring to inevitably having to explain to you parents what a dirty sanchez is when your friends share their online photo albums. Oh no, the real problem is irony and the distinct possibility of falling victim to an authentic dirty sanchez at some point during evening. Thanks, but I'll pass.

NunCowboyPirate---Yeeehaw-praise Jesus-Arrrrrrrrgh! Who doesn't love a Nun-Cowboy-Pirate? Give me a habit, a Stetson, an eyepatch and a hook hand and when asked what I am supposed to be, I'll reply "a fireman of course." Pro—it combines three ordinary costumes into one hot a$$ ensemble. Con—too high brow for the audience to truly appreciate.

Darth Gader (pronounced gay-dar)—I am secure enough in my manhood to own pink pants, so why not show up to the party as darth vader's effeminate cousin? Take one darth vader costume and some pink spray paint and you are one fierce jedi slayer. Unfortunately I am not THAT secure in my manhood.

I've had a few other ideas, but due to decency laws, I will refrain from posting them.

Maybe I will join the masses and buy an off the shelf costume from target. I did see a pretty swank David Hasselhof get-up last time I was there.

Any one hear of this book?

The Fourth Turning--if so what are your thoughts?

Sonnawa...

Comcast is hatin on a brother's modem right now, so I am still in blog denial.

Enjoy this while you wait for topic15 to emerge like a phoenix from the ashes.

He he he!

Coming soon...Return of topic15

We move into the new crib tonight and cable guy comes tomorrow which means wez bez back in bidness real soon now ya hear!

In the meantime here's a good joke to tell a priest...


What's a cat's favorite color?

Puuuuuuurrrple.


Conversely, here's a real tasteless joke...

What's the definition of Rolaids?

Rock Hudson in a wheel chair.

Yeah, go ahead hand me my pitch fork and I will get in line.

LOST pt II

Yeah I know, stick to your knitting...the blog should be back up and running with that mad crazy old school flava in a few days.

In the meantime, ponder this observation per last night's epi of lost...

During the orientation film, the narrator discusses the nature of the Dharma program (ie that damn hatch) as being a research facility dedicated to the enlightenment of mankind and furthering the works of the likes of B.F. Skinner.

That kat had quite a rep among the psychological community and he was stirring isht up until his very last days. His game was based in operant conditioning and he was well known for his Skinner's box, a box that would contain an animal that would be trained to press a button or lever to elicit a response.

He argued that people don't make decisions on their own, but rather they are conditioned to make decisions based on external stimuli that would result in some sort of reward/punishment avoidance.

Is there some parallel between a pigeon locked in a box pecking a keyboard and that dude in the hatch pressing keys? I guess time will tell.

4 8 15 16 24 42 execute. peck peck peck

LOST

Damn that show is good. It almost makes wednesday as good as friday.

I ain't even gonna half step and pretend I'm not hooked, cause I am. I've been in withdrawal since last week. The summer was even worst. I had delusions about the show. In my mind, they decided to capitalize on the success and spin-off another show about the tail section of the aircraft.

There was a whole different pack of survivors on another part of the island, and the wacked out french chick was the only one who knew. She leveraged this information by pitting each side against the other under the guise that they were the others. In the case "the others" refers to other survivors rather than other inhabitants of the island.

The hatch contained Jeff Goldblum who took a career leap and played a nerdy scientist. Ok I made that last part up just now.

On a side note, I heard the numbers are all retired Yankee Jerseys.

Tribiani for the block

Oddly enough, the second most popular choice in my democratic battle royale was "Future stars of Hollywood Squares." Until a day or so ago, I truly felt ill prepared to handle such a discussion. Truly, I felt it would go unnoticed, similar to how those wily politicians decided to put the whole draft thing up for a vote again. Both cases were incorrect.

So in a vain attempt to satiate the good samaritans of topic15, my first prediction of a star headed straight for the center square goes to...

Matt "boom boom" Leblanc.

How could I do such a thing? Well let me count the ways.

1. Leblanc's spin off "Joey" recently lost in the Neilsen ratings to a ball of lint. Never underestimate lint, especially belly button lint.
2. Word on the street is that Jenny Craig is eyeballin' swollen post friend's Joey as their next representative now that Kristie Alley weight is back undercontrol (and she is no longer having an adverse gravitational effect on the moon).
3. Some people will argue that monkey's thespian skills are far superior.

You can't judge a book by its cover (or can you)

It the case of Freakonomics versus The Tipping Point, heck ya.

Who's gonna win in a fight? A match or an orange in fuji apple clothing. No contest. Freakonomics layeth the smackdown on The Tipping Point, beating it like a government mule that owes money to Levitt and Dubner.

And that's with not even the cracking of the spine. Popping these literary works open illustrates an even more pronounced disparity. Freakonomics is peppered with top drawer examples of fodder for cocktail hour discussions for weeks on end. What do the KKK and real estate agents have in common? Why Sumo wrestlers and teachers cheat? These are the questions I have been asking since 7th grade and now I finally have answers!

I was eager to get my next fix courtesy of Mr. Gladwell. For some reason, in my mind the tipping point was going to be in line with the 100th monkey theory. Sadly, it was more in line with that scene from america's funniest home videos where a monkey picks its butt, sniffs it and falls off a log. Seriously, half the stuff out of there is psych 101 and common sense. I reached my tipping point at page 111 and decided watching german mtv was more intellectually stimulating. Then again, I am but a simple man.

In the TP's defense, its initials are the same as toilet paper and the part about the effect of reordering social networks on outbreaks of the clap in charm city was cute, but in no way compares to a book with a chapter on name selection that puts "Benjamin" among the top 5 high-end white boy names among the well educated population.

Take that Jordan!

Pssssst! one more thing....

Fill up your gas tanks today.

I'm not a slacker, (well I am, but not really)

I'm no dummy. I hear the grumblings of the masses resulting from the B-league posts as of late.

The inactivity is not for lack of want as much as the lack of time and technological impedances. For example, for some reason if my post is more than 6 sentences, they won't publish from work. Secondly, for the next few weeks, Shannon and I are living in a van down by the river. Ok that's a lie. But our stuff (including my computer) be in storage, so I don't have any other places to blog from.

So keep hope alive. topic15 will return to its formerly glorious site in a few short weeks. Until then, enjoy this picture of an 8 person beer funnel.

Cheese Doodles Memoirs

Despite my somewhat cynical exterior, at heart I have always been an optimist (tempered by a liberal dosage of pragmatism). Furthermore, I have always considered myself a quick study and taken great pride in my ability to quickly size up a situation. These traits have been evident in my behavior since I was a young boy, a young husky boy, a young husky boy with a lusty addiction to cheese doodles.

I’ve always had a penchant for hanging out with society described “trouble-making hooligans” with too much time on their hands. Call me old fashion, but it was just plain fun. One such hooligan was named Eric. We had adjacent backyards which made for a perfect arena for mud pie wars, digging holes to china, setting the Gobots we received from santa instead of transformers ablaze and typical youthful deviance…

One day in 1982, Eric and I were hanging out on our porch listening to Thriller on my boombox discussing how to score some bottle rockets, you know, typical kid stuff. So anyways, my mom pulls up with groceries in tow. Being the good mom that she is, she kicks over a bag of Jax Cheese Curls. Unfortunately, they were intercepted mid-flight by Eric who insisted on playing a game of cat and mouse.

Now if we were only taking into account individual speed factor alone, the smart money would have been on Eric. However, separating a fat kid from his cheetos is not unlike parting momma bear from her favorite cub. I quickly grabbed my mothers hand held gardening spade and ensued pursuit on foot. Eventually the chase led to a very cartoon-esque, route around the large (but low) bush in my parent’s front yard. Eric kept perfect pace keeping and exact 180 degree equidistance between us for several laps. Once I got a bead on him, I let that shovel fly with everyone ounce of rage I could muster, clocking him square in the back of the cabeza and flooring him in the process. I nonchalantly walked over, picked up my cheese curls and went back to the porch just in time to catch the end of PYT.

The Moral of the Story? Life is nothing more than an educational experience, nay, an educational journey through which each individual is charged with learning their strengths and how to leverage them to overcome challenges. When in doubt, use a shovel.

Exercise your democratic right!

And vote for the subject matter for my next blog post!

Here are the current choices....

1. Racism in 2005
2. Freak-o-nomics vs. The Tipping Point -- a psuedointellectual book review
3. Never take a fat kid's cheese doodles--stories from Ben's childhood
4. Fundamental Differences in Chick vs. Dude Logic
5. What really happened to Michael Jackson
6. Another installment of topic15's world weekly sun enquirer news
7. Your mamma jokes...Ah snap! Don't make me go there!
8. Where are they now?-- Cool stuff and people from days gone by
9. Hollywood Squares bound--Stars on the fasttrack to nowhere
10. The energetic capacity of the human body

The polls are open!

One more thing...

I just saw an episode of the Family Guy and they totally referrenced "Breakin 2."

Brilliant!

The countdown

1. Only one more day to find out what's in that damn hatch! I thinking the hatch will contain Richard Hatch and hatchet.
2. Less than one month till the warriors come out to play on the PS2 courtesey of those devilish developers at Rockstar Games. I may very well call in sick for that entire week. Can you dig it suckaz!
3. Two months till Walk the line hits the big screen. Even cooler, is the fact that Shepard Fairey of Obey the Giant fame designed the movie's poster.

Topic15 NEWSFLASH!

This just in...

A line of cocaine was spotted snorting Kate Moss in London Underground's Waterloo Station. The drug's rep was unavailable for comment at the time of press.

Until recently illegal substance abuse of Kate Moss (or special K as it is referred to on the street) was seeing a decline, sparked by the availability of more potent addictive substances such as the Family Guy. Experts attribute the recent resurgence as an anomaly resulting from a summer peppered with reruns and global climate shifts.

25 Useless facts...

C'mon, you know you love them! (side comments in red)--Sorry for the B-league posts, I actually have to do some work from time to time.

1. Butterflies taste with their feet.
2. A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why. (According to mythbusters, this is a lie, the acoustic signature of the quack mirrors and masks the echo)
3. In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.
4. On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.
5. On average people fear spiders more than they do death.
6. Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.(100% of NY cabbies are d!ckheads)
7. Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
8. Elephants (and Star Jones) are the only animals that can't jump.
9. Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older (only one person in four billion will give a crap).
10. It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
11. Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
12. The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.
13. A snail can sleep for three years (rookie, I slept all four years through high school).
14. No word in the English language rhymes with "MONTH" (or purple, unless you count nurple).
15. Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.
16. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and earsnever stop growing.
17. The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
18. All polar bears are left handed.
19. In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies,including their eyebrows and eyelashes.
20. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
21. TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using theletters only on one row of the keyboard.
22. A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.
23. "Go." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
24. If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall.
25. The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

Das Hip Hop Natione

Would you believe it if I told you that behind the United States, (and for some crazy reason, France) that Germany is the world's third largest hip hop nation?

Oh yes, it's true. One hour of german MTV and a trip on the subway is all the evidence you will need. Man, the graffiti stylings are everywhere and straight out of beat streat or wild style. I was pretty much expecting the german version of Ozone, Turbo, and Special K to jump on the train and start breakin their way down the aisle. No such luck.

As for groups, well a trio know as Fettes Brot was getting heavy rotation on MTV. Literally translated, their name means "Fat Bread." I wonder if something was lost in translation. Who knows. MTV was also peppered with domestic hip hop essentials such as Eminem and Wu-tang clan.

No good examples of fashion to speak, well unless of course you consider some fantastic Kobe Bryant pants.

Did I buy them? Hmmm, well you'll just have to wait and see. (note1 there is a real earing in the jeans in Kobe's ear)

So thus far, I have briefly painted a picture of the general adoption of the hip hop lifestyle among the german youth. What's missing? Well how about violent crime? Virtually non-existant.

An interesting observation in light of the criticism this form of music often receives. If listening to hip-hop has the ability to corrupt the moral fiber of the youth and produce criminals (or at a minimum, encourage criminal exploits), why then is this result not replicated in Germany?

Is it the disparate population density as compared to the US?

How about the general better standard of living?

Could it be the gummi bears?

Probably because of the McBeir.