Since my wife and I are expecting twins, we’ve been getting all sorts of garbage in the mail for baby stuff. Promotions, free magazines, coupons, all sorts of junk. It’s kind of amazing all these places even know we’re having babies. I have a feeling my wife must have signed something that was forwarded to a bunch of companies so that they’d start sending all this crap, but whatever.

About two weeks ago we received this paper in the mail saying there was some “free” Safety Seminar for babies in the area. I had no interest in this, but my wife wanted to go and after twisting and pulling my arm for the last few days I reluctantly agreed to go. We arrived at the hotel this morning where the event was taking place. There were only a handful of people there and it appeared to be ran by this dude in his mid 40’s or 50’s. I noticed a couple of typical baby products were set up like cribs and car seats.

This seminar claimed to go over helpful baby tips like SIDS prevention, and baby CPR, but I had a feeling there was some sort of catch to it. At the start of the seminar it seemed helpful enough. The guy wasn’t really trying to sell anything in particular, just going into detail about different types of car seats. Instead, I noticed he was working on peoples fears. Essentially telling them that unless they buy a proper car seat, their kid is going to immediately die even if the parent gets into a fender bender. I thought it was a bit strange that he was getting people worked up in a seminar that should have been about building confidence.

The past two days have seen some rather windy weather in this neck of the woods. Seriously, its hurricane quality winds threatening to blow you off your feet as winter is struggling with its grip. That picture above is NOT where I live…but you get the point.

It has been so windy, that yesterday morning I found a shit ton of trash on my front lawn of my building as I went out to catch my bus. I saw a swath of trash and litter lining the street with a nice chunk of it settling into the corners of my building. I was annoyed, but figured it would be gone when I got home that night from work. I was wrong.

Much like the snow that doesn’t get removed from my sidewalks, the trash was still there last night. It hadn’t been touched.  This got under my skin, but I walked past it. See, I pay a monthly maintenance fee that goes towards the building’s insurance, water bill, and for the ground’s upkeep. In a nutshell, I pay to not have to worry about mowing the lawn and whatnot.

This actually happened yesterday, but it was a pretty great little story I thought I’d share. I work in Hell’s Kitchen in NYC which means I get to see all manners of humanity walking around. For lunch we decided to head out and get some cheese steaks at Shortie’s which is located right next to the asshole of Hell’s Kitchen: the back entrance to the Port Authority. The under pass by there is home to some of the most horrid examples of human beings you’re likely to come across. Once a buddy and myself found an old lady trying to pull a guy who passed out drunk into the middle of 9th Ave in this very same area. We hauled the bum out of the street and he asked us if “the Yanks won”. They did not that night, and neither did that guy.

Yesterday, we were finishing up our lunch when the door to Shortie’s opens. The place is pretty small so it’s almost impossible to not notice anyone coming in. We hear what sounds like someone tripping and turn around to see a middle aged man wearing a Jets jacket come stumbling in. He is clearly sauced beyond belief at one o’clock in the afternoon. He fumbles his way back to the take-out window located at the rear of the restaurant and places an order. He somehow manages to find a stool and plops down in a heap. After a few minutes, he gets his lunch to-go and stumbles yet again on a few stools.

Now, its winter time out, and just about every store in the city either sets up a little kiosk outside on the sidewalk, or they set up a few drapes in the inside to keep the cold air out. Shortie’s had a few drapes and a large piece of clear plastic, like you would find in a giant freezer, to keep the cold air out when people use the door to enter and leave. This man obviously didn’t see the door that was DIRECTLY in front of him, so he first tried to go out of the window next to it. This alone was worth a good laugh as clearly it was a window and not a door.

I work in New York City, but live in New Jersey which means I have to commute. I take the bus in everyday to work, and as most people will tell you it’s not exactly chocolate and feathers. In most cases you’re jammed in there with someone’s armpit in your nose or you have to stand until a seat opens up. You meet many a whacky person on the bus. Today may have been the day when Phil saw the Wicked Witch of the West on Broadway, but tonight was the night I saw her on the bus heading to Patterson.

I’m actually not sure if this is a Whore Daddy or a Clutch because I was laughing my ass off during the whole ordeal, but it was also one of the most insane displays of humanity I’ve seen lately.

I was running a bit late for my bus to get home tonight. I saw it getting ready to leave the PABT, and I was last in line. As I was boarding, I saw a girl standing at the doorway looking a little lost. She was young and cute, wearing glasses and fiddling with a bus schedule. She was asking if this bus stopped someplace. I didn’t hear where. She seemed a little unsure. I got in and I guess she just decided to get in after me.

I finally caved and bought a Dual Shock 3 controller for the Playstation 3 yesterday so I could get in on some Soul Calibur action with my wife, and whoever else happens to come over in the future and would like to play a round or three. After nearly slicing my hand trying to pry the controller out of that awful and flat out dangerous plastic that companies continue to wrap their products in, I saw that the Dual Shock 3 didn’t come with a USB cable for charging the controller. I guess Sony assumes you already own a cable for the device (or maybe a few others for all your other computer products) that they could skimp out on including one. Guess what? I just paid the price of a brand new and since I can go right over to Amazon and buy one for a penny, I know price isn’t a factor.

Second, I went to turn on the controller so we could actually play the game and it wasn’t even charged! Not only does it not come with a cable, but the controller isn’t even charged once you finally get the damn thing out of the package. So I had to find the 2 inch USB cable Sony included with their console and wait a half hour until I could play a little 2 player action in Soul Calibur 4. I don’t care if this sounds like petty bitching, and seriously, can you ever have too many USB cables?

Don’t know what I’m talking about? Well…

I can’t stand these shitty Match.com ads. I don’t use MySpace very often, but every time I do these stupid ass ads have to pop up. For the love of god, who thinks these things are a good idea? Do they really think that by showing a somewhat attractive lady acting like she’s interested in an IM conversation is going to make people want to use their service? The only thing this girl is interest in is her pay check. I guess these must actually work, because they’ve been using these ridiculous ads for a while now. I suppose I’m guilty of watching every one I see multiple times because I can never get over how stupid they are. I’d love to be there when they are filmed. Is it really silent and creepy in the room like how the ad is displayed, or is there some dude in there saying absurd things to her to make the girl laugh here and there? You know what, I don’t care what the answer is because I already know I don’t give a shit.

I’ve been using Flash professionally for maybe the past 5 years. Certainly, it has had its share of ridiculous bugs. It has earned its reputation for making entire objects disappear when a single point is deleted, you couldn’t use the brush tool (thus not being able to draw) in a flipped symbol, and a line is going to go wonky on you if you push and pull it more than once. In my experience I’ve seen an entire piece of artwork go away if you drew on it in a manner that displeased Flash. You never knew when any of these and many, many more instances would happen while you worked. They would just happen.

Well, as most people already know, Macromedia was bought by Adobe a few years back, and Flash has fallen under their “Creative Suite” banner. Many of these bugs have been worked out in Flash CS3. You can thankfully draw in a flipped symbol now which I can tell you is huge. However, the touted video support is leaving much to be desired. I think I’m still going to do a PNG export and bring that into After Effects as Flash’s Quicktime support still has its quirks. But this is not what’s prompting me to type this Whore Daddy up.

While Adobe has successfully fixed a number of bugs that have been plaguing Flash for a number of years, they have managed to some how put one in there that is absolutely mind blowing. As I have stated before, Flash doesn’t like it if you push and pull a line too much. It suddenly adds points that were not there before, and the line gets all wonky and unmanageable. So, I have gotten used to using the Sub-Selection tool to select a single point (or a group of points if I need to) and tweak a line using Bezier handles. I get the curve I want, and I can use the arrow keys on my keyboard to nudge a point to exactly where I want it. I’ve been doing this for years.

Now, I’m not talking about the song and I’m not talking about poor old Rudolph himself… I’m talking about the TV special with all the goddamn puppets. It’s not the puppets that bother me either… they were pretty damn innovative for their time. My problem with Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer… is that every single character in it, other than Rudolph and the little elf dentist Hermie, is a complete and total asshole.

Seriously now, I was watching this with my daughter and I was just cringing at the way these rat-bastards treat Rudolph like a total piece of shit. Let’s go down the list shall we?

• Donner (Rudolph’s Dad): Asshole
• Comet (The coach): Asshole
• Santa Claus: Biggest fucking Asshole of them all (I’ll get to him later)
• Elf Manager: Asshole
• Other Elves: Assholes
• Other Reindeer: Assholes

This is just the warm-up round for Friday night (SRP#11), but seriously… This shit makes me disgusted to play video games. I mean, it’s not like I expected anything worthwhile from Spike TV, but jesus christ…. this is just total garbage. So sit back and get fueled up with some hate… make a game out of it. Smash a Halo 3 flavored can of Mountain Dew on your head every time someone makes a joke about the fact that she show is in Las Vegas. You should be out of Mountain Dew by the time this 9 minute clip is over.

And for shit’s sake… what are the friggin’ assholes from The Hills doing there!? I’m going to go slash my wrists now.

Figured I’d kick off the Halloween fun with the above video. Funny story about this god awful and weird video. Frank, feel free to correct me in comments, but I think it goes a little something like this.

Many years ago, we were getting Comcast High Speed Internet installed at the house. Naturally a Comcast employee comes to the home and begins to install god knows what to get their software working. Anyway, the guy says to Frank “Check out this video of my buddy dressed as Mr. Softie” and then proceeded to download the video to our desktop. Yeah, it’s weird, and I probably have the story wrong, but that’s the gist of it.

Regardless if I’m wrong or not, what a weird video. First, the Mr. Softie costume is just plain hideous, but the guy dressed as him is clearly in his glory while the familiar Mr. Softie tune plays in the background. At the 8 second mark, the guy is obviously in his own little world by this point. Second, talk about the worst Halloween party ever. This guy went all out, he’s dancing around with his music playing and not a single soul is even reacting to it. At the 5 second mark all you get is a single cough, which is comparable to hearing crickets chirping. Then you hear some guy in the background say something along the lines of “That’s the closest so and so ever came to doing a push up, eatin’ a Mr. Softie.” These people have to be totally bombed out of their minds. Well, no matter which way you slice it, I love it.