Wednesday Night Caption Contest

It's that time again, and since the Dems have control of Congress, the chances for legalization have been upgraded to just higher than a snowball's chance in hell...So I present this week's caption pic. Post your captions in the comments section below.

Here's mine:

"Man, it was horrible! That guy in the bee costume kept trying to pollenate with me!"


The winner of last week's contest was CleverName, who was judged solely on length (like most contests he's involved in), with the caption: "Whoa, check out the fairway on her!
I wouldn't mind getting lost in her rough, if you know what I mean...
I wouldn't mind getting caught in her sandtrap, if you know what I mean...
I wouldn't mind giving her a double bogey, if you know what I mean...
I wouldn't mind replacing her divot, if you know what I mean...
I wouldn't mind...well, you know what I mean."

Tired from shooting darts at the elephant all night

The elephant is definitely feeling a bit of a sting, and I'll check back in the morning to see if it is dead.

Four more states have banned same-sex marriage, but several have raised minimum wage, there are slot machines in Ohio and we Oklahomans can now buy liquor on Election Day.

My home state of Arkansas have a Democratic Governor once again, Rick "Frothy Mixture" Santorum's political career is over (thank God), and best of all, WE HAVE TAKEN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES!!!

At this moment, we need three more seats to take the Senate. We'll see in the morning whether I will be eating crow or enjoying watching Bush sweat bullets for the remainder of his presidency.

Good night, folks!

Further adventures with my Landlord

Here's a letter I got this morning from my landlord:

"It is brought to our attention that there are some items on the front porch these items need to be moved to the backporch or there will be a $100.00 fine. The above will need to be done by 11/06/06."

I call the number on the letter and the following conversation takes place

LANDLORD: Hi, do you want to rent a house?

ME: Um, no.

LANDLORD: Okay, then.

ME: Yeah, I got this letter telling me to remove the items on my front porch. Tell me, which item do you consider objectionable: The flower pot with the dead jade plant, the empty flower pot or ashtray?

LANDLORD: Okay, you're in the Inez building, aren't you?

ME: Yep.

LANDLORD: Okay, you shouldn't have gotten that letter. That was meant to only go to your upstairs neighbors.

ME: So, I can rest assured that I won't be fined $100?

LANDLORD: Yes.

ME: Forgive me for being cynical, but this is not the first time I've gotten a stern letter from you guys that has turned out to be nothing.

LANDLORD: I'm so sorry about that, sir. If you could please call the office and leave Stacy a voicemail to let her know of this.

ME: Can do! Thank you. Goodbye.

So, I call the office and leave a voicemail for Stacy:

"Hi, this is Dan Fritschie. I live in the Inez building, and I got a letter telling me to move the stuff on my front porch. I have two flower pots and an ashtray. Please don't fine me $100."

Oh, well. This letter will be filed away in my "Evidence against my Landlord" folder. It's so nice that my living arrangements are run through an office that runs with the care and effieiency of an inept temp with a rotten attitude.

License to withhold judgment until the film comes out

I had a few minutes at the end of work today, so I scanned through some of my favorite web sites. One of them had a link to the music video for the theme song for the new Bond film, Casino Royale.

I have a thing for Bond themes. One thing I've noticed is that on their own, they all pretty much suck. In fact, only one out of the 21 themes thus far actually had any longevity beyond the opening credits of the movie, and that was Live and Let Die by Paul McCartney. It was also the only Bond theme whose cover version (by Guns 'N' Roses) actually was a bigger hit than the original version.

After hearing this latest Bond theme, I gotta say it's tough to judge it before I see the movie. I gotta give the filmmakers credit for getting Chris Cornell to do the song. If they are truly gonna go for a grittier Bond this time around, the lead singer from Soundgarden is a good choice to help set the mood. But hearing it now, before the movie comes out...I dunno...I'm not too impressed.

On the other hand, I absolutely hated Madonna's theme for Die Another Day until I saw the movie. Seeing it in that context won me over and made the movie for me. I could say the same thing for Garbage's The World is Not Enough, but let's get real. Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist?!? That kind of casting wouldn't even fly in in movie that was supposed to be funny.

After watching the video, I cruised around other James Bond related sites, and you know what I found out?

1. Casino Royale has the distinction of being the only Bond film so far that has rain! You mean to tell me that after twenty films, they're finally shooting a scene in the rain?!? These films have a reputation of being rather dark and moody, and they've pulled it off so far without that old Hollywood cliche of having it rain?

2. Not only does James Bond hold the record for the longest running film series in history, but it also has the record for the longest running product placement, and for Walther handguns, of all things.

3. A few of the complaints I've seen on the internet, aside from casting Daniel Craig as Bond, is the idea that, since they are rebooting the Bond storyline and telling the story of his first mission, that they still have Judi Dench playing M. Their point is that Dench came on to the franchise in Goldeneye to replace Bernard Lee after his death, and that causes a major continuity flaw in the franchise. Seriously? Bond has fought everyone from Communists to voodoo cults to South American druglords to media moguls in the past forty years...his age was only addressed as a potential problem two movies ago...Bond and Miss Moneypenny keep getting younger while Q kept getting older and older...and this is what ruins the franchise for you? Lighten up.

I'll be at the theater November 18 for Casino Royale.

The Wednesday night caption contest

Once more into the breach, dear friends. Post your caption in the comments section below.

Here's mine:

1. That's not really a costume. He's an albino with severe acne scarring and a bee sting allergy.

The winner of last week's caption contest is Xanaboobs with the caption: "Just give me another quarter before it starts the spin cycle! You know, these mega washers are expensive, but worth it..."

How my wish to be the characters on Heroes would backfire on me if it came true

7:30 am: I'm the Japanese guy who can bend the space/time continuum

My alarm goes off, and I could use a couple more hours of sleep. I tense my face up and freeze time. I fall back asleep, lose concentration and it's back to real time.

Plan B: I teleport myself back three ours back into my own bed. The problem is, I'm laying on bed next to myself from three hours ago and I/he is snoring like crazy. I nudge him/me and the snoring stops long enough for me to fall asleep. I wake up on my own accord, but myself from three hours ago had rolled over while I was asleep and was spooning me.

Completely creeped out, I take a shower and get ready for work.


7:50 am: I'm the cop that can hear people's thoughts.

I'm in line at QuikTrip, waiting to pay for my breakfast sandwich. There are lines to each of the three registers. A guy in one line is trying to remember how much change he has in his pockets to pay for his twenty dollars worth of stuff. A woman in another line is repeating her lotto numbers to herself to have the clerk key them in by hand. The third line is full of people with completely blank minds, typical for this early in the morning, so I get in line with them.

While in line, I hear a woman thinking "Hey, that guy in the suede jacket (that's me!) has a cute butt." I look over my shoulder to the attractive redhead behind me and flash a smile. Her thought: "What the hell are you looking at?" Then I catch a glimpse of the sixty year old woman with the thinning hair standing behind the redhead, and she's thinking "Mmmmm...yummy..."

Again, completely creeped out, I leave and go to work.


10:30 am: I'm the cheerleader with the healing powers.

I'm walking through that hallway at work where everybody keeps stacking all their extra crap. I trip over a box and hit my head hard on the concrete floor. I can't feel anything below my neck. I start to panic. My God, I'm paralyzed. I've told these people time and time again that someone's gonna get hurt with all this shit stacked up everywhere. Well, maybe a big fat lawsuit will teach them a lesson.

Just then, my head feels a lot better, and I can move again. Shit. I could've used that money.


12:05 pm: I'm the guy who can fly.

I head out the door to go to lunch, and remember that my car is low on gas. Oh, well, I'll just take to the skies then.

Able to fly at sonic speeds means that great sandwich place downtown is about three seconds away. When I get there, the line is out the door. Too bad I wasted my time/space continuum powers this morning. I wait in line for almost an hour. Not a real problem, I can eat on the way back to the office.

Unfortunately, a French Dip is really difficult to eat at Mach 1. I had to stop at home to change shirts and was late getting back to work.


2:00 pm: I'm the artist who can see the future.

Sitting at my desk, I start absent-mindedly doodling a picture of one of our more troublesome clients boring me close to death in a meeting. When I snap out of my daydream. I look at my drawing and and decide to go get a soda from the break room. Somthing tells me I need to stay there for a while.

After about fifteen minutes, I head back to my desk. I hear my boss calling for me to come into the conference room, where that client is ready to talk my ear off for the next hour and a half.


4:00 pm: I'm that spooky chick that has some sort of split personality/She-Hulk thing going on.

I get ou of my meeting and get back to my work. It is now that I find out that there are some major problems with that big project I thought I was finished with yesterday...the one that's due tomorrow!

My boss finds out as soon as I do, and he proceeds to rip me a new asshole. I kinda black out for a while, but when I wake up, my work's all done, the project is back on track, my desk is clean, my boss is nowhere to be found and there's a small blood stain on the wall.

I shrug it off, clock out and head home.


7:00 pm: I'm the guy that can absorb other people's powers.

I can't decide whether to cook dinner at home or go out to eat. I figure I'll just drive around for a while to try and make up my mind, and I wind up at my favorite restaurant. Even though I'm already at the restaurant, I can't make up my mind if I want to stay. I mean, I'm craving those fajitas they make here, and I've got stuff to make them at home, but I can't make them as good as they do here.

Then, it hits me: I can just stand next to the kitchen and "absorb" the cook's ability to make the fajitas just how I like them. All it takes is just standing near the people with real powers, right?

After about ten minutes of standing around the kitchen door, I feel confident that I've got all I need. I head home to my kitchen and go into some sort of a trance...like I'm standing outside of my own body watching me cook this meal.

However, I get less and less hungry as I watch myself use the bathroom without washing my hands and spitting in my own food before I snap out of the trance.

I puke and decide to go to bed early.

The angry ballerina

I showed up a little early to work at the bar last night. When I go tthere, it occurred to me that most of the people coming to the bar would be in their halloween costumes. I had a enough time to run back home and break out the inflatable fat ballerina costume I had from last year. There were several concerns I had with wearing the costume:

1. Having a huge ballerina with a goatee taking money at the door might hurt business rather than help it.

2. Sitting is a real problem in that costume, so I faced the prospect of spending all night standing.

3. No pockets. All the door money would have to be in my hand the whole time.

4. I pretty much lose all street cred as a bouncer when I'm dressed like that.

5. It was daylight savings last night, so I had to work for an extra hour.

Well, it turns out it helped business. People came to play with the ballerina's tits and stayed for the band. Although, this is one of those moments that I wish I wasn't such a nice guy because I soooo could've asked so many of the women that were feeling me up to let me return the favor...a tit-for-tat, if you will.

It wasn't so bad having to stand for most of the night. Once Larkin started playing, I actually started a little Irish jig in the costume that made everybody laugh, including the guys in the band. I kept a close eye on the money the whole night. Being able to stick my arms inside the costume allowed access to my jeans pockets.

When it came to doing my job, I didn't let the fact that I looked rediculous get in the way of doing my job. I yelled at a couple bums for begging from our customers, I had a couple assholes come close to crossing the line, but I kept order. About the worst interaction I had all night came around midnight.

This one girl came to the door. I asked for her ID, and she fiddled around for a couple minutes and gave me her license. She was nineteen...not even bothering to hide it. I told her she couldn't come in, which prompted a pouty "Why not?"

I replied, "Gee, I dunno, maybe it has something to do with this sign next to me saying "No one under the age of 21 allowed on the premises.""

"Well, you let me in last time I came down here!"

"Not on my watch, you didn't. Unless you used a fake ID last time."

"I'm pretty sure I did."

There were so many stupefying levels to that statement that I couldn't find the words to point out just how much of a moron she was. She then went into this whole diatribe of how she was meeting her boyfriend who was already inside, and that she would NOT be drinking, and how she doesn't understand why I was being such a hardass about not letting her in.

I asked her, "Does this boyfriend of yours have a phone with him?"

"Yeah, but I don't have my phone with me. Can't I just go in for five minutes and let him know what's happening?"

At this point, there were ten people behind her waiting to come in. I know I shouldn't have done it, but I caved. I told her, "Look, I'll give you two minutes. After that, I will come in there looking for you."

"Great, thanks!"

After that, I got swamped at the door and didn't get a chance to go after her after the agreed upon two minutes were up. As soon as I got someone to cover for me at the door, which was about twenty minutes later, I found her sitting in the back room, chatting it up with her friends. As soon as she saw me, she pretended not to notice me.

I got right in her face and said, "Let's go...NOW!"

At this point, her boyfriend came and went right into ass-covering mode. "Hey, man. Everything's cool. Look, she's not even drinking."

I put on my mean face. "Doesn't matter. She's not supposed to even be in here. I did her a favor to let her come in here and tell you she wasn't staying, and now, she's leaving. This is not negotiable. Let's go."

The boyfriend tried to keep this argument going all the way out the front door. Once I got them outside, I heard the girl say as she was walking away, "I'm never coming back to this place."

I yelled at her as she was walking way, "Not until you're 21, you're not!"

So, that settles it. No more favors at the door, ever. No more Mr. Nice Guy.


I gotta say, the costume was a bigger hit than it was last year. Toards the end of the night, a friend came up to me and leaned against my costume and told me that she was tired. I told her that it probably didn't help that my costume was essentially a giant pillow. She rested her head for a moment on my inflted shoulder and rested her eyes. At that moment, I got to thinking about my job as a bouncer, and how you wouldn't see this in the deleted scenes from the movie Road House.

Mixed signals

I've been a bit of a wanker when it comes to the blog this week. I've been busy at work and at home.

At work, I had a huge project come my way with a tight turnaround time. In my office, you know a job is rush when we clock it's due date in hours instead of days. The good thing is all the information was supplied to me. All I had to do was put it all together, which only took a few hours. Binding the book together was an all-hands-on-deck situation, so I literally saw this job from concept to completion. I got pulled away at the last minute because there was a schedule change in the program. We didn't have time to reprint, so we had to put together an insert.

The day before, the client had asked me what they need to do to make the job easier next year. I told them flat out that they just needed to finalize all of the information a week sooner. Not that I mind the overtime...

Friday was an interesting day. I lost my cool with one of my bosses and he threatened to fire me as a result. He's the kind of guy that likes to push people's buttons because he thinks it motivates them. Well, he was pushing all of my buttons like he was playing the Track & Field Arcade Game; explaining to me what I need to do three time, each time more condescending than the next. He needed proofs right away, and all of them were outputting on the color printer as he was scolding me. I finally just snapped and yelled at him, "THEY'RE OUTPUTTING RIGHT NOW! I'LL HAVE THEM DONE IN TEN MINUTES!"

The rest of the day was spent only speaking to the man when I had to, and even then, I said no more than I had to. The ironic thing is my other boss told me he was giving me a raise to offset the rise in medical insurance costs. I almost got fired and got a raise in the same day, for completely different reasons.

In my five years at this job, I've been threatened to be fired three times including Friday. The first time was shortly after our film stripper, a man who had saved my ass several times and was a intregal part of our pre-press operations, had unexpectedly died. The second time was soon after my boss found out his teeneage daughter was pregnant. I began to wonder about Friday's episode because my boss was leaving early to attend a funeral. So, I guess you could say that the fragility of my job security is a matter of life or death.


Thursday night, Candy and her boyfriend came to town for a visit and they stayed over at my place...and slept on her/my couch. She kept worrying about Chuckles to the point that I'm starting to get worried. I'm now overly aware of how much he's scratching and that spot on his back that causes him to meow and lick his shoulder (which causes him to sound like a tauntaun from Empire Strikes Back), could be a tender area where he's been chewing and scratching too much. The concensus seems to be that he may have fleas, so I'm going to the store today to get him a flea collar.

A couple friends called me to see if they could come to my place to hang out that night. I explained to them that they were morte than welcome to come over, even though I had overnight guests. When I told them who those guests were (my ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend) they almost said how weird that was, but then they said, "Well, this is Fritschie we're talking about."

This was one of those statements that could either be a great compliment, a completely innocuous statement or a massive insult...trapped between the three extremes. I know they didn't mean anything about it, but it did get me thinking. Have all of these women dumped my ass in the past because they knew I would be their friend afterwards? Did they decide to date me for the sole reason that they'd have an easy out?

Something to ponder, I guess.

The Wednesday night caption contest

It's caption time again! Post your captions in the comments section at the bottom of this post.

I'm only gonna go with one this week to be more fair to the other participants:

"We go live now to the 100-Meter Mashed Potato Freestyle, already in progress."


The winner of last week's caption contest was Toni with "Not making enough money on the Latino wrestling circuit, Enrique (aka Dia Del Muerte) moonlights as a beer guzzling referee on the weekends."

What can I say, I'm a sucker for Mexican wrestler humor.

An open letter to the dickwad that broke into my car last night

Dear dickwad,

First of all, thank you for recognizing that a Ford factory stereo has practically no resale value. That was at least a small comfort when I got out to my car and saw that you my window was shattered into a million pieces...at least I still have tunes as I'm driving to work in 30 degree weather.

Secondly, you're welcome. Due to the fact that I cleaned out my car Saturday afternoon, and brought inside everything of any material value, I'm saying "you're welcome" because now instead of being a thief, legally you're just a vandal. If you had done that just two days sooner, you would have gotten every CD I've purchased over the past six months, most of my pay stubs and deposit slips from the past few weeks, tons of Camel Cash and about five bucks in change. You would have had to dig through a pile of fast-food sacks, but it would have been more valuable to you than what was in there when you broke in...which was absolutely nothing.

For future reference, try looking in the window before breaking and entering...dumbass.

Lastly, another thanks to you for solving that mystery of what to do with that extra $250 I had in my bank account. Man, oh man, I've been pondering that one for days now. Mystery solved. Any time you wanna pay me back for that would be great. I'm not holding my breath.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go wash my car, so that the dirty old windows at least somewhat match the crystal-clear new window I just had installed.

Sincerely, with middle finger upraised,
Fritschie