Please see HR to claim your boxers

Oh, you know, just another one of those days where you go to the ladies room and there's a random pair of men's worn boxers in the hallway.

Our HR girl has dreamt of this day since she began a career in this industry...

"Ensuing Company-Wide Staff Email

To: Office Staff

From: Lisa

Subject: Found

A pair of men's Tommy Hilfiger boxer briefs was found near in the hallway near the elevator. Please see me to claim them.

-HR"

It's the little things that make a day great.

Davy Jones was the grooviest

Davy Jones 12/30/45 - 2/29/2012

Been working on other projects

Hang in there.

Calvin and Hobbes, 26 years later...

Click to enlarge.

Still hard to read?  Click here.

Signs my future is doomed.

Reasons that I'm convinced I am headed for senility, or Alzheimers, or Huntingtons, or some kind of mad cow disease:

Keeping Up With the Joneses

Christmas is Coming

If you were born in the long summer, you wouldn't understand.

Just kidding! Amelia and the Muppets have saved me from the end of the internet!

P.S. David take me to see the Muppet Movie okay thank you bye.

A Layman's Guide to Office E-Mail

For those entering an office environment for the first time, I offer a brief introduction to professional e-mail communications.

The Care and Feeding of Your Ellipses

All this grammar nonsense can be a great hullaballoo of rules and procedures. Luckily for you there is a short cut that grammarians don't want the public to know about. The secret is thus:

If you are ever in a situation where you don't know how to punctuate a sentence you can use the special "catch all" punctuation: the ellipsis.

While many people have invested a great deal of energy perpetuating the myth that the ellipsis is intended to designate omitted words, the truth is that the ellipsis can also replace omitted punctuation!   This versatile little guy can represent anything writer wants.

Take this sentence:

"I have a party on Saturday, I'm bringing the cake!"

This can easily be rewritten without changing the meaning as:

"I have a party on Saturday… I'm bringing the cake…"

Exactly the same.

The End of the Rainbow

A DC Metro User's Guide

This weekend, I sent the following text (verbatim) to my fabulous co-blogger Katie: "On the weekend, pure anarchy descends on the metro. Strollers. On the LEFT side of the escalator! Asdfjkl;"

Remember how your mother always said patience is a virtue? Well, the DC metro between the hours of 7:00 and 9:00 a.m. on weekdays and ANY time on the weekend is like immersion therapy for those of you struggling to compensate for your not-so-virtuous (would we go so far as to say villanous?) natures.

Metro pet peeves have been done to death as a topic, but a series of incidents over the last few days have created a straw-that-broke-the-camels back phenomenon:

• Taking the red line on a Saturday, during the day. (omg did you know the zoo in DC is SO COOL?? You should go. With all your friends. On a Saturday. And stand directly in front of the doors so as not to allow people on OR off. Then definitely act totally shocked when people shove you politely tap you to ask you to move.)
• A ten minute wait for a Shady Grove train yesterday morning at the peak of rush hour (why? Why does more than every other train stop at Grosvenor instead of going all the way to Shady Grove? You don't even just do it at rush hour anymore! DON'T YOU KNOW I WORK AT TWINBROOK?)
• Speaking of Twinbrook - randomly skipping stops during rush hour is super cool (yo, some of us use the train to like, Idk, nap in compensation for the 6.5 hours of sleep we got the night before. Also, it's very difficult for me to ravenously devour gossip pages time my newspaper reading if I don't know when I might need to hop off the train. We need more notice that you're skipping a stop then, say, just as a random example, immediately before the doors close at the previous stop)

So today, in the spirit of the DC DMV's Open Letter welcoming you to our roads, I offer you, DC traveler, the following survival guide to making your ride on the metro the most pleasant it can possibly be:

1. Stand on the left. Especially on the escalators.
2. Don't, under any circumstances, move to the center of the car.
3. Lean on the pole. No-one else needs it, and besides, you look so much more emo that way!
4. Make friends with your neighbor. The "every other" principle, so common with bathroom stalls and bar stools? Doesn't apply to train seats, at least not in DC. It's not friendly!
5. Spread out. Your stuff deserves a seat just as much as you do. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
6. Make yourself at home. The metro is a perfectly appropriate place to apply your makeup, brush your hair, pluck your eyebrows, etc. Though brushing your teeth might be pushing it a little.
7. Eat your food. The whole "this is not a diner" campaign? Totally false. You're a busy man/woman on the go, and the Metro is a perfect place to enjoy a leisurely meal. The more aromatic, the better.
8. Hold the door. Though the conductor tells you "these are not like elevator doors you may be familiar with...," definitely stick your bag in the door to hold it for your travel buddy. Don't worry if they wind up having to offload your car - that's just more time to sight see in the tunnels under Metro Center!
9. Crank the tunes. There is no such thing as a quiet car. Consider it a public service to entertain your fellow passengers with your personal music player. Bonus points if they can hear you more than three seats away.
10. Time your trip. Whenever possible, do ALL of your travel during rush hour. New "peak of peak" time slots preferred. It's totally when the atmosphere is best under there, and when you and your stroller/shopping bags/suitcases will make the most friends.
    

You'll know me when you see me. I'm the short kid giving you the thumbs up.

Could Gotham City be In NJ?

The Star Ledger just posted this video, answering every fanboy and girl's favorite question: Where is the Real Gotham City?

Incidentally, if this works out, that would move Ellis Island and the Nets down to the 2nd and 3rd most important things that New York has tried to steal from New Jersey.

Katie: i tagged my batman video with dc, because i'm hilarious

get it??? dc COMICS

Éamonn: haha

Katie: i'm funny.

Éamonn: I got it

Katie: i'll pat myself on the back since your arm can't reach to dc

Ruminations on This Blog on its 2nd Month Anniversary

Some important and fun facts:

1. People have come to this blog via some of the following google search keywords:

• kegbus average tip
• positive reinforcement
• celebrity with hemochromatosis
• cluster headaches
• guy in empty house
• thefamouslastword.blogspot.com

I admit, I'd be most perplexed about the positive reinforcement, but who googles the address of a blog instead of just typing it in?

2. We have some regular Russian readers.  Zdravstvuj, comrades!  You are my favorite readers.  The rest of you may fight to the death for second place.

3. I have clearly come a long way from my fear of having an internet presence.  Now you all know about my little family of oxygen tanks.

The oldest one I shall call "Oscar."

4.  I've learned a lot in the last two months of blogging.  For instance, things that are conducive to blogging: 

• boredom
• professional ruts 
• wine 
• REVENGE!
• rants by people I do not  like 

Things that are not conducive to blogging: 

• cluster headaches 
• hospitals 
• forced sobriety 
• not being able to look at lights 

I promise a triumphant return to the former.  

Although I may keep Oscar.  He's cuddly.

Read this article on Lynda Barry

 

The New York Times Magazine just ran an article on Lynda Barry.

Lynda Barry is awesome.

Probably best known for her comics, she's also an award-winning author whose works have been converted into plays.  Other bonafides?  Matt Groening refers to her as the "Funk Queen of the Universe," and she hates Jonathan Franzen.

More importantly, she's teaching seminars on creativity and writing, and making a lot of people feel really great about themselves. 

Check it out:
Cartoonist Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe in Yourself

All of a sudden, a whole new world opens with this O2 tank.....

ChewBACHa

Speaking of the 90s and Very Special Episodes

Kaz gets the alley-oop for this one.  Remember, "topical" is the word of the day.

Clarissa Left Some Stuff Out

Certainly not everything.

Things Clarissa Did Not Explain:
1.  Sex
2.  How to Change a Tire
3.  How to Properly Clean Tarnished Silverware
4.  Gay People
5.  How to Fold a Bottom Sheet
6.  The Single Bullet Theory
7.  Where do babies come from?
8. The difference between Baptists and Methodists
9.  Who keeps watching Two and a Half Men?
10. Stonehenge
11. Chapter 14 of Joyce's Ulysses
12.  Who really was the Boss?  Mona?
13.  Roswell
14.  Why do all the best tv shows get cancelled?
15.  Why do so many musicians and artists die at age 27?
16.  The theory of relativity
17.  Benedict Arnold: traitor, or really Just That Whipped By His Wife?
18.  The Triangular Trade
19.  The Game of Mao
20.  How to whistle through a blade of grass
21.  Walt Whitman's poetry
22.  Ezra Pound: genius poet, or poetic fascist?
23.  Where to sit in the high school cafeteria
24.  Why did the New York Times hire Ross Douthat?
25.  How to be Catholic and pro-choice
26.  The Book of Revelations
27.  Where Jimmy Hoffa is buried
28.  Rongorongo
29.  The difference between a 4-3 and a 3-4 defense
30.  The 2011-2012 fantasy football seasons of Jamaal Charles, Peyton Manning and Chris Johnson
31.  Why did Donald Duck not wear pants, but used a towel after the shower
32.  Plato's Cave
33.  Cluster headaches
34.  Dry versus sweet vermouth
35.  Bourbon versus rye
36.  Neil Diamond
37.  How to diagram a sentence
38.  Minotaurs!
39.  Megasharks
40.  Giant Octopi
41.  The outcome of #39 versus #40
42.  Menstruation
43.  Bears
44.  Octupuses verus Octupi versus Octopodes
45.  Smiley Smile
46.  The Holocaust
47.  Irish Travelers
48.  The Carnac Stones
49.  Did King Arthur ever exist?
50.  What about Robin Hood?

An Open Letter to My Officemate: I don't like you.

Dear Officemate,

I don't like you.

For a while I thought I just didn't know you.  There you sat, sometimes chatty but mostly quiet. We said good morning to each other and made bland remarks about the office temperature (usually too cold).

But you've worn out my last nerve, officemate.

I hate your stupid polite telephone laugh, exactly three syllables long each time.  Do laughs even have syllables?  The fact that I'm questioning this makes me hate you all the more.

I see you checking my computer screen and judging whether or not it is directly work-related.  And don't think I don't see you checking your Netflix queue.  Your double-screen placement isn't nearly as good as mine.

Officemate, you think you're so superior.  You with your organized  box of work shoes under your desk and your collection of extra umbrellas in case any of the higher-ups need one during a rainy day.  Kiss ass.

And dammit, I can hear you smugly eating your salad at me.  I don't care about your nutritionally-savvy lunch choices, nor does it impress me that I have never seen you buy a lunch.  Ooooh look at you with your organized mornings spent both ironing and getting your lunch together.  Ooooh look at you, getting to work "on time" and then "staying late."  I know your game, officemate, and I'm still leaving at 5. 

Oh, and how about that time I was sick, and you were the only one-- the only one!!-- in the office who didn't ask how I was feeling when I returned.  Like you didn't even know I was gone!  I'll remember that slight the next time you're out sick, officemate, and you'll see how YOU like it.

Not that you're ever out sick. 

I want the book back I lent you.

Most sincerely,
Your Disgruntled Officemate

The fun can not be halted.