Shit I Overheard (or If It Wasn't For My Horse, I Wouldn't Have Spent That Year In College)

She forgot a towel.

Think about this question very, very carefully - do you really want to know ?

I'd love to know this too - and just to point out the difference in societies, here in my secular state where over 80% are still members of the church, I have never spoken to a person who literally thought these things would happen.

I had a similar conversation with my mom the other day. NBC News did a segment on the Mayan calendar and how the end of the calendar represents the start of a new cycle and absolutely does not foretell the end of the world. I commented that they neglected to mention the part where what the Mayan calendar really means is irrelevant because Mayans couldn't predict the future. My mom agreed with me and then quoted scripture on how no one will know when the end comes. So she still believes the world is going to end one day, but no one will see it coming.

This isn't so much as a "stupid thing someone said" as it is a stupid thing someone did. A woman -- the sister of someone I know -- put a perfume bottle cap up her vagina to use as birth control when she was a teenager. And left it there for TEN YEARS. As an adult sher couldn't figure out why she couldn't conceive, and her doctor took a look and... she had to have surgery to have it removed. What the motherfucking fuck. *facepalm*

On the bright side, at least she couldn't have any children in that time.

Holy crap, I'm surprised she didn't die of infection.

Her body had a way of shutting that down.

Not overheard, but said to me, in reference to Fregula Sarda, a Sicilian pasta: "Does 'Sardinian' mean that it tastes like sardines?"

NO FUCK YOU WHORE YOU LOOK LIKE A MAN IN THE TODD-AKIN'S-WIFE SORT OF WAY

Shit overheard on the street in Philly:

"I've never been positive for anything before!"

Elsewhere:

"You got money to buy incense, but none to buy me shit to eat!"

#hippieproblems

I'm gonna put this one here, because, it's not really an image but it is goddamned funny.

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/rnr/3518036575.html

I am a bad person for laughing so hard at my desk about this.

No you're not.

"You don't have to be smart to laugh at farts, but you have to be stupid not to." - Louis CK

I was at a Batteries Plus store a couple of nights ago, and I was in line behind a customer who had just paid for his purchase. The guy kept standing there, staring at his receipt, while I and the sales clerk behind the register looked on, wondering what was taking him so long.

"Y'all haven't started adding the health care tax yet, huh?" the guy said. The employee seemed a little puzzled. "No..." Customer: "Yeah, in California they've started adding the health care tax to receipts because of Obamacare."

Before I could stop myself, I said, "That's crap." The guy shrugged and left.

As near as I can tell, he may have been referring to this. I'm sure the incident (but not the Snopes explanation) is making the rounds of Fox News, etc.

Holy shit. That last paragraph.

Yeah, I'm sure it's an accident that a company owned by a known conservative that will likely be effected by Obamacare 'accidentally' screwed up and did something that would make its conservative-leaning customers even more upset by Obamacare. Yeah, oops, mea culpa, we'll totally clear this up in the media guys.

Right.

It annoys me that Snopes framed the whole thing as 'true or false, people will be charged extra for medical items' when the thing going around is clearly someone freaking out over being charged extra for non-medical items. That's like taking the 'spider in the bouffant' urban legend, reframing it as 'sometimes spider bites can hurt' and declaring the question true.

Bouffants can hurt. They can even kill.

Barack Hussein Obouffant approves this message.

This morning in Starbucks, two guys in front of me eyeing the Puerto Rican barista:

"I'm not racist, but - have you noticed that Mexicans just can't make good coffee?"
"I wasn't going to say anything, but I was thinking the exact same thing."

They get up to the counter, and the first guy just barks out "Soy caramel macchiato."

The barista bats her eyes and says "Hola, caramel macchiato! Soy el barista, como estas?"

They were both so flabbergasted that they just stammered through the rest of the order and high-tailed it out of the shop once they had their drinks. It was wonderful.

Faith in humanity +1

That is always the start of an amazing sentence.

The locker room at my gym has a swimsuit drying machine that spins around really fast, pulling the water out of the suit with centrifugal force. Last night while changing I heard some college students expressing their bafflement at the device, wondering how it magically got their clothes dry. One thought it must blow hot air through the suit, another thought that it used sound waves (as evidenced by its noisy operation) to shake the water out.

I glowered at them, wondering how even if none of them had heard of centrifuges, neither had they encountered the same principle at work in a washing machine's spin cycle or a salad spinner. They were college students.

College has almost nothing to do with intelligence. Shit, I had a roommate that couldn't use the washer, drier, or dish washer when he moved in. Once, I came home to find him trying to setup our internet connection by taking a phone line and jamming it into the ethernet port on his computer. He had the dialogue box that was asking for the phone number to dial (DSL) and he put in his home phone number. Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

At work, of course.

"Obama has passed a law that means he gets secret service protection for life! Most ex-presidents only get it for ten years, but he wants it for LIFE?! Paranoid much?! How much is THAT going to cost us?!"

The mid-term could be setting the clock.

My partner got an email two days ago from a woman trying to contact a board member of her organization. "Jennifer," it said, "can you forward this email on to board member x? She's fucking my husband, but the email bounced when I tried to send it to her and I can't find the right email address." The email she'd written was about how she knew about how the board member was sleeping with her husband, but that so were about 5 other women. And how she was pathetic for doing so, a disappointment to her kids and her now deceased husband, etc. Crazy stuff.

If it's a VCR clock, I know I'd probably fail.

I tend to avoid them other than making a quick cup of tea or reheating veggies in a rush (I'm a toaster oven kinda guy), but my junior high home economics teacher did exactly that, and this was in the late 80s. She helped dispel a lot of the myths I'd heard about microwaves and spent a lot of time teaching us some smart shit about using them properly that still sticks with me; wasn't the sort of thing one usually expects from a home ec teacher. (I also learned how to cook on a gas range in that class, something I only learned to appreciate many years later.)

All the clocks in my apartment are synchronised.

Oh great, now you're throwing off the curve for the rest of us.

People seriously underestimate the amount of domain knowledge that harmonious houselife can require. Doing laundry seems simple, but do you have to make sure it's non-Bleach detergent? Warm vs Warm/Cold vs Cold? Permanent Press vs Cottons vs whatever else? What kind of stuff goes into the dryer? What stuff goes into the dryer but on non-heat-drying only?

What can or cannot go into the dishwasher? How do you load the dishwasher for optimal getting-things-clean (there's non-obvious water flow issues related to the center), and how often do you have to clean the filter? What goes down the disposal and what doesn't? Did you know that you can pour grease down the sink, probably, but you should run hot water for a while afterwards? How long is a while? How can you tell the difference between microwave-safe and non-microwave-safe plastics? What's recyclable, what's not, what should be disposed of more carefully (certain batteries, for example)?

Sure, each of these things is trivial and can be looked up. But not all of them are obvious; shit, I didn't even know that dishwashers had a filter till I had to clean mine due to fruit flies.

And this doesn't even get into stuff related to apartment/house laws, dealing with taxes, dealing with banks, dealing with landlords, etc etc etc. All of this is obvious to anyone who grew up knowing the stuff or living in that context, but completely non-obvious to people who didn't.

warm wash /cold rinse for most things. All cotton that you don't want to have wear on you fast, cold/cold and no heat dry.
Warm tends to loosen up the normal crap that can get in clothes. You probably can get away with cold/cold if you don't get your hands into physical things.

You're always fucked.

TurboTax

You're always fucked.

You're always fucked.

My Coworker, A Few Things She Said In The Past Week Preceded By What She Likely Meant To Indicate.

(My coworker means to indicate that someone she hires to remove snow for her cleaned off her driveway before doing the same for a neighbor.)
"My guy came by and plowed me last night, but I couldn't have gotten more than one or two inches. Then he went across the street and plowed the Chinese guy."

(My coworker means to indicate that she is so angry with someone she will give him a very stern talking-to.)
"I'm going to eat his ass out! I'm going to eat his ass out right!"

(My coworker means to indicate that she went home and just lazily watched TV for a few hours.)
"Yeah, I donno, last night I just felt like it, so I just went home and vagged out for a few hours."

I can't remember if I shared this story here or not, but some years ago there was a program developed at my non-profit to help seniors use computers. The idea was that we would train seniors who were interested, and then they in turn would go out to various homes and community centres and train other seniors.

At the meeting when they unveiled this idea, they also told me the name of the program: Seniors On Seniors.

I immediately burst out laughing. Everybody else gave me blank stares. "What's so funny?" "Oh, nothing, just that the Seniors On Seniors section was always the one I avoided at the back of the videostore when I was a kid."