Try to Find the Common Theme...Good Luck

Parenting

So, I'm just gonna go ahead and say it: I don't think I should have children. Obviously anybody who has read this blog realizes I would be a bad role model.

Sidenote: See my first entry entitled 'Subtlety'

I think I'd probably make fun of my kid. If the little guy swallows a piece to the game 'Operation' and then has to have surgery to remove it....I would laugh my tits off.

But more than that I think I would be far too demanding. I'm not raising a dumb kid. I've heard all sorts of tactics and things to make your child smarter:

• Talking to the baby instead of putting it in front of the TV. What if I have it watch Bill Nye?


• Have the baby listen to Mozart. What if the store was out of Mozart and I turn on some Chopin instead? What would that turn my baby into?


• Breast-feeding..........If exposure to boobs made you smarter, porn sites should be ACC accredited, and I'd be getting my post-graduate degree right now.


• I think the best way to have a genius baby is to hook up with someone who is way smarter than you and hope for the best.

Now, if I did all these things, and my kid turned out to be dumb.... I quit. I'm selling it for scientific experiments and trying again.

My Phone

For those of you who know me, I hate my phone. It turns off every five minutes even if I just charged it. It takes two days for it to tell me I have a voicemail. And sometimes it will just randomly start beeping for no good reason. My friends now hate me because of my phone because they can never get in touch with me.

My phone wasn't always like this. It used to be quite dependable. Here's what happened though. Last August, right around the time we started this blog (oh the memories), my phone fell into a public pool...for several minutes.

I got it out, dried to dry it off, and put it in front of a blow dryer. I had given up hope. Hours passed....when suddenly....there was a glimmer of light from the LCD. A miracle! My phone had come back from the dead!

Except now it sucks.

It's kind of like when somebody gets shot in the head..... and they live..... but now they're retarded.

No Misleading Title Here: Shit under a Desk

As mentioned in a previous blog, I'm in an Ornithology course (study of birds). I have the first test of the year tomorrow, which I'm trying to avoid studying for, which is why I'm doing this.

We had a review session today for this important test.

Our professor has a puppy dog that she occasionally brings to class with her because she can't trust her at home. It's a very cute dog. Likes to romp around the class during lecture, ear all flopped over, tripping over her own paws. Adorable. And it's a nice little momentary distraction every now and then.

The review was going well. I knew all the stuff, I was feeling very confident, and then the dog started farting.

The thing about dog farts, in my experience, is that they are completely silent. Maybe their sphincter isn't as tight as ours (from all the thermometers). It was pungent to say the least. It was like when a lactose intolerant guy who just ate beets tries the gallon challenge. But then the smell got worse.

It started at one end of the room and started rolling over the class in waves. It smelled like Indian Restaurant and Ass. And that's when people started noticing the source of the smell. Underneath a back desk....was a nice little coiling of digested Kibble.

As one good ol' boy in the back said, "Tha' dawg is naasty."

Sidenote: This guy is one of my favorites in the class, cause he has a whole other view to bird physiology that even the teacher doesn't have. Somebody asked what partridges usually eat, and the professor stopped for a moment to think. This guy immediately piped up in the back, "Seeds mostly, but they can eat all kinds of stuff." When asked how he knew that, he replied, "Well I shot one last week and knifed open the gizzard."...... He's gonna be a great scientist one day.

Eventually we were forced to clear out of the room, and the professor, lacking options, put the dog into her car.... As of yet I don't know the end of this story, but she might be biking to class tomorrow.

One More Thing

I was just watching the Oscars (I enjoy it, leave me alone) and they were doing the montages for those involved in films who had died in the past year. Now, I was actually visibly upset when I heard Heath Ledger had died. "The Patriot", "Knight's Tale", "10 Things I Hate About You". He was a fantastic actor in fantastic films. But for the montage, all they showed were a bunch of clips from Brokeback Mountain

.....uhmmm....

byah?

Rob

Playing with Myself Cause I'm Not a Team Player

So I'll just go ahead and say it. I am not an athletic person. I don't particularly like contact sports such as basketball. And it's not because I'm not an aggressive person, it's because everybody seems to sweat...a lot. And since I suck, I'm always matched up against the 273 pound guy (oh yeah, he has a mustache) who invariably feels the need to take off his shirt. In that situation, I'll let him dribble past me. I ain't touching that.

I'm more of a loner sport kind of person. I played tennis in high school. In case you've never seen real tennis matches before, it is a fantastically exciting sport. Not so much because of the exciting gameplay (come on, it's oversized ping pong) but because you've never heard cussing like this. And nobody gets in trouble for it because it's not directed at the other person, or the ref, or the dozens of cheering fans. The guys are yelling at themselves. "Get to the f***in ball you s**t for brains donkey f***er! My great aunt's left nut could have hit that f***n ball back! F**k! F**K! ...... dammit ..... aargh ...... OK, 15-30."

Naturally, the reader might assume that I must enjoy golf as well. That would be a wrong assumption. I like golf movies. Legend of Bagger Vance, Tin Cup, Caddyshack. All great films. But the sport itself is dull on a level I can't fully comprehend. If you ask my Dad, though, he would say I love it. In middle school I would beg him to bring me out with him to the courses. He never seemed to notice that after the fourth hole I would get bored and stop playing. He also never noticed that when his back was turned, the golf cart was gone. That's because I would be tearing it up on the back nine, doing donuts on the fairway. My favorite pastime was to wait for someone to hit a ball over a hill where they couldn't see where it landed, drive up, and snatch the ball. The next ten minutes were spent giggling as senior citizens started crawling under bushes and climbing trees trying to find their Titleist.

Of course, if my Dad ever finds out about this, he isn't one to talk about golf course etiquette. He used to be the real competitive type, and took the sport WAY too hard-core. He used to go to driving range and videotape himself. After each shot, he would say "Shank" or "Good Shot" depending on how he did. And then he would watch himself on TV for hours, and all we could hear through the house was "Shank....Shank....Shank.....Good Shot....Shank....Shank...." He wasn't very good.

Well, it was at the height of this obsession that he took me out to the course one day. I was about eight at the time. And after an excellent opening drive, he shanked (big surprise) the next shot. Now most people, given this situation, would have swallowed their anger, perhaps be a little withdrawn for a while. My father, however, decided to go a different route. He yelled some kind of obscenity that I think is banned in the Eastern United States, and hurled his nine iron behind him. This would have been traumatizing enough for a nine year old, but the story gets better. There so happened to be a fellow golfer about forty feet behind us who unexpectedly received a golf club to the face.

I think my Dad has lightened up a little since the lawsuit.

Byah!

Rob

Tastes Like Chicken

I am a Biology student. A student of Biology, if you will. One of my courses this semester has been Ornithology (i.e. the study of birds). I find birds quite amazing actually. Go to Wikipedia and look at their skeletal and muscular structures (its INCREDIBLE!). But I won't try to bore you about the supracoracoideus muscle (seriously, check it out), I just want to share some stories with you.

First off, I used to volunteer at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. It's kind of a deathtrap. "Sure red pandas can eat rat poison!" I blame President Bush. But the place I worked, the Bird House, was actually pretty nice.

I was a good little volunteer. Cleaned cages, fed the birds, took observations. It was fun. Here's a fun story: During the day, a bird called the Great Argus stays nice and quiet in its fenced in area. At night, she patrols the halls. Well apparently nobody decided to tell me this on the first day. So I'm opening up at 6 AM, walk in the doors, turn the light on, and this is staring at me.

Needless to say, I was shocked. It started fluttering at me, so I took a step back....into some Great Argus poo.

Here's a not so fun story from the Zoo. My favorite bird there was the rhea. It's a South American rattite (kind of like an ostrich). They are very passive, and I could stroll into their exhibit whenever I felt like it. Right next to the rheas, however, were the cassowaries. This is a cassowary:

They are very territorial, very agressive birds. Right above their enclosure there was a nest with baby birds in it. One of them fell out. It was scrambling on the ground, calling out in a very adorable whimper. The cassowary walked up....sniffed it.....and stepped on it. This is what cassowaries do when people get near them:

Sidenote: Whenever you're at a zoo, and you see an animal near the glass watching you and following you....it's not friendly.....it wants to get you. So take a picture and don't look it in the eyes.

So one day, I'm cleaning in the rhea cage, and somebody locks me in on accident. I see that the only way to climb out is by propping myself against the cassowary wall and flinging myself over. The wall is only about 7 feet tall. It was feasible. So I get a grip, haul myself up, and look over the wall......The bloody cassowary is just sitting there watching me. Not hissing or growling like normal...just...staring. Well, I get myself over. No big deal. The next day I'm walking by and stop to read the information about cassowaries they have on signs outside: "These magnificent animals can jump seven feet straight up in the air."

......

It's a good thing my shorts were already brown.

Well, those were my zoo stories. So now I'm taking this Ornithology class about birds. I like the anatomy side of it (supracoracoideus dudes). But not all of it is good. There's another side of the class that sucks cloacae. I have a 7 AM lab...to go birding. Thats an abbreviation for birdwatching. And while i still laugh whenever I see a "Tufted Titmouse" it's not quite what I want to be doing at 7 AM. Regis and Kelly aren't even awake yet. This is wrong.

Well, right now in Ornithology I'm doing a project about Bird Infidelity....I'm going to wait a while for you to take that all in. OK, here's the scoop: 90% of birds are monogamous for atleast the breeding season. Male and female both help in feeding, incubating, and caring for the young. But what is relatively unknown is that in many cases, mostly in large social groups, the female birds...has somebody else warm up the nest. While Papa Bird is off at work, Momma Bird is fellating the neighbor.

Sidenote: Bird blowjobs probably hurt

My project is going to be about this behavior, but part of me is going to feel really awkward about it.....Should I tell Papa Bird?..... He has a right to know. A rift will form in the family. Who would get the nest in the divorce? And what about the chick?! DAMMIT I WASN'T READY TO PLAY BIRD GOD TODAY!

Byah!

-Rob