Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Wisconsin Sucks

It has gotten so cold here in the past couple days. In fact, it snowed yesterday. I was mortified. However, based on principle, we are refusing to turn on our heat until after Halloween. So I sleep in layers, and right now I am wearing gloves while I type. Which would be hard enough without the puppy who has never seen gloves before and thinks they are a new toy for him to attack. Writing this paper tonight is going to be virtually impossible.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Mildridiots, Volume 5

To be honest, I could do a hundred more Mildridiots, all devoted to awful things Morgan does. Every day when she comes into work, she asks me things like, "Did you prep roast beef?" and, "Did you slice tomatoes?" She apparently thinks she's my boss. I always respond with, "Yes, that's my job," extra sarcastically.

She also scolded a customer last Saturday. The customers always place their order at the counter, sit down while we make it, and then we call them up to grab their plates and pay. But she has decided to turn everything on its head and make them pay when they order, which causes a ton of confusion, since some of these people have been doing it the normal way for the past 30 years. So a customer came in, placed his order, and then walked to a table and sat down, like he's done for years and years. When the sandwich was done, she called him up, and said, "Okay, now you have to pay. You should have paid earlier, but you just walked away from me. I was like, 'What the hell?' " Yes, she did say all of that to a customer. A customer who knows how this place operates much better than she does.

Anyway, let's meet some new people:

Paranoid ATM User
The first customer on Sunday, this guy called in his order and came in to pay with a credit card. I apologized and told him that we don't accept cards, but we do have an ATM. He looked like I had crushed his soul. I've never seen anyone that devastated about using an ATM. After thinking it over for a solid minute of awkward silence, he decided to withdraw the money. Upon entering his card and his information, the ATM told him that he would incur a $1.75 surcharge. At this, he went from crushed to irate.

"What is this? Are you trying to fleece me?!" he demanded. "No, we don't take the surcharge for ourselves," I assured him, but my words fell on unforgiving ears. The damage was done. I received not a single cent tip for his large order. Jackass. He also tried to tell me that we used to take credit cards, and when I told him that we never have, he told me I was wrong. He was exactly the kind of person I wanted to see first thing in the morning after waking up to a shit waterfall outside my room.

Courtney
Since I introduced you to Morgan, I figured I should also tell you about some of the other coworkers. Courtney is in her early-to-mid-twenties, with many piercings, crazy-colored hair, and is currently going back to college for the third time in her life. She moved out of her parents' house when she was a teenager, and has been working for $6.50 ever since. She enjoys drinking, doing the occasional drugs, and not working.

She frequently calls in "sick," but then admits under further questioning that she is either too drunk to come in (at 4 PM), or she hasn't slept yet because she was up all night drinking. At first, this was annoying, but now I've gotten used to just saying, "No," when I don't want to come in. And it's actually kind of nice to have so many options for extra work if I ever want some more money. Plus she's always up for a switch in schedules if I want to go somewhere for the weekend.

On Saturday she told me that her dog, Spaz, might be put down. Apparently he has bitten about 13 people, and one guy finally complained. Now, Spaz is this goofy little pug, whose bites are more like nips and honestly can't hurt anyone. So the guy who is calling Animal Services and DEMANDING that they kill this adorable pug is pretty insane. But Courtney also needs to get her dog under control. As she said herself: "He bites me and Noah [her boyfriend] all the time, and he's broken the skin twice. But we're always like, 'You're so cute!' " And then she instantly went into how ridiculous the guy was being. She's utterly incapable of seeing how some people may not find getting bit by a dog is cute.

So she's a mess.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

There's Nothing Like Waking Up To Your Roommate's Shit Raining On You

This weekend was nothing like I described in my last post. It was so, so much worse.

First, my cousin ended up not coming. He was going to be in town for an Ultimate Frisbee tournament, but when I called him on Friday, he said he had been demoted to the B-Team for missing two games, so he was being sent to Nebraska instead of Wisconsin (what a brutal punishment, huh?). When I talked to him, he was in the car with his two roommates, drinking, while his little brother drove them to Nebraska. And they were all listening to Fergie. So it seems like he at least was having a good weekend.

Last night, nothing notable happened at the trailer trash party. They were all rather well-behaved, and my friends and I actually stayed upstairs most of the night to watch Sarah Palin on SNL (how great was that episode compared to most others?!). Everything exciting happened after the party.

We left to get some pizza at around 12:30, and when we returned at 1:30, the party was already over. But we could hear some loud moaning coming throughout the entire house. "YES! YES! KEEP COMING!" my roommate's trashy girlfriend shouted. Upon further investigation, we realized that they were not upstairs in his bedroom - they were having sex in the basement on the nasty, mildewy couch that we found down there when we moved in!

So they finished up while I was taking Bark Antony outside. The roommate's girlfriend (they're Jessie and Steve, for future reference... hopefully they don't read this) stumbled outside and said to me - keep in mind she had just finished having sex with her boyfriend not two minutes prior - "God, you're sexy. If only I was single."

"Yep," I responded. "Magic would surely happen."

Eventually I got Antony back inside and into his crate to go to sleep, and as I climbed into bed, I heard a familiar sound 'round these parts - "GO TO FUCKING HELL, YOU BITCH!"

Yes, Jessie and Steve were having their weekly epic fight. Last week, the fight was so bad that the neighbor's called a domestic violence report to the police, and they showed up pounding on our door at 4 AM. This week, no such luck, but the fight was pretty much as intense as last week.

No one ever knows what they fight over, but it sounded like she was slapping him and he was asking what he did to deserve getting slapped and alternating between screaming, "I FUCKING LOVE YOU!" and "I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!"

Finally, they quieted down and I drifted off to sleep, already pissed at how late I had been forced to stay up when I just wanted to get a decent amount of sleep before work in the morning.

Around 3 AM, I woke up to the sound of a veritable waterfall outside my room. My instant assumption was that someone was either puking or peeing in the hallway, so I got up to investigate.

First, let me explain that earlier in the day (seriously, around, like, noon), our roommate Jon had clogged the toilet upstairs, and then had tried to fix it, which resulted in the toilet filling to the brim with water so it could no longer be plunged without overflowing. So what did he do? JUST LEFT IT. Didn't try to get the water down, didn't call maintenance, NOTHING.

Well, someone must have flushed it during the night, because brown water was pouring out of the ceiling down onto our floor. I raced upstairs to see what was happening, and discovered the worst sight ever: a two-inch deep puddle on the floor of the upstairs bathroom and hallway, with hundreds of little pieces of shit floating in it.

And it had soaked through the floor and was raining down on me. An artist's rendition:


Unbelievably irate, I grabbed a piece of Tupperware from upstairs, threw it under the stream of shit water, and went back to bed. When I woke up, the shit had dried, but Steve was brushing his teeth down in our bathroom (understandably), and he was even more pissed than I was (again, understandably, since his room had been invaded by a widening lake of shit in the night).

So... I'm going to enjoy these five hours at Mildred's and just hope all the problems at home are solved and/or everyone is dead when I get back.

College!

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Pictures of My Dog and The X-Files Best Moments, Episodes 9 and 10!

Wow. Almost a week since my last post. I apologize. I haven't even been doing that much. Although I was supposed to finish reading Invisible Man by today for a class, so I've been frantically plowing through that for the past week when I realized that it is impossibly long. I almost made it, too - only 50 pages short! Is that an excuse enough for you?

Anyway, let's do this bullshit that no one looks forward to:

This astronaut was possessed by an... alien ghost,
I think? And it sometimes made his face into the
"face" carved into the surface of the moon.

I wasn't joking about the alien ghost.

And then in the next episode, an invisible alien
(notice how their aliens are never fully visible, to
save money?) REALLY wanted to take this guy
on his spaceship.

I assume the aliens wanted to study grunge fashion.

Also, I have a new article! It's my review of "Towelhead." Not an interesting read, really, but good movies never make for exciting reviews.

I feel like all I do on this blog anymore is plug my reviews and post lame X-Files pictures. So here's what's going on in my life this weekend: my cousin is coming to visit, so I'll try to show him a good time around Madison and I'll try to document it for your viewing pleasure. And my roommate's white trash girlfriend is hosting a party at our house for some reason. (I'm not joking about the white trash thing. Although she assured me that she doesn't want the party to "get ghetto," but all of her friends are "super preppy" because their dads own roller coasters.) I will try to remember to keep my camera on hand at all times, because something awesome has to happen when you mix 20 trailer park girls and a bunch of cheap beer.


And, to make sure I haven't totally wasted your time, here are some pictures of Bark Antony:

I thought his ears were going to stand straight
up, but for the past month only his left
ear has stood up, making him look pretty
stupid most of the time.

Antony and his BFF Apollo taking over my
favorite chair.

Sleeping with one ear up and his tongue
sticking out. How embarrassing.

Friday, October 10, 2008

In Which The Sarah Silverman Article Goes to Print, And They Fuck It Up

My two latest articles for the Cardinal are a review of Beverly Hills Chihuahua and my interview with Sarah Silverman. For once, they didn't edit a single word I wrote in the interview story, but they did censor her quite a bit. They cut a couple shit jokes and a joke about Osama bin Laden, which is weird because there's enough stuff left in there to offend anyone as it is.

But what's even weirder is that they didn't promote it at ALL. You'd think if we got to interview a big name like her, we'd make a big deal about it, but they didn't even include a picture of her, let alone promote the interview on the front page to let you know that it was in there.

Our rivals, the Badger Herald, published their story a day after ours, but even though the writer - in my opinion, at least - isn't as good as I am (sorry, whoever you are), they gave him the royal treatment: pictures, promotion, and a damn good headline.

My headline when it was published was "Sarah Silverman Talks About Season Premier" or whatever. My headline that I submitted with the article was "Sarah Silverman Talks Show, Politics, and Pubes". Guess what the headline for the Badger Herald article was? "Sarah Silverman Talks Obama, Osama, and Pubes".

WHY AM I NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE A HEADLINE WITH PUBES?

Thursday, October 9, 2008

HALLOWEEN MADNESS: The X-Files Best Moments, Episodes 7 and 8!

Episode 7 was lame. A computer was attacking people. The only thing I liked about it is that it proved my point that Eagle Eye was nothing new.

Episode 8, however, kicked ass. It was such a great little horror movie condensed into a 43-minute episode.

Basically, some dudes were up in the Arctic, drilling for ice samples, but they happened to be doing it above a meteor crater. So alien worms got into their brains and made them kill everyone at the research lab.

The episode was really well done, especially in showing the growing paranoia of the crew sent up to investigate (headed by Mulder and Scully, obviously, but also made up of Felicity Huffman and Bania from "Seinfeld"). Definitely their best episode yet.

Here are some crazy pictures:

So first this dude had these weird black things
in his armpit, and I was like, "Shit, he's fucked."

Then they looked through a microscope
at some blood and the alien just looked like
sperm with spikes.

But then the pilot tried to kill them all, so
they obviously held him down and ripped
a worm out of the back of his brain.

This is the worm. It was really fake-looking.

And then, to close out the episode,
Felicity Huffman got naked and Scully felt her
tits. Seriously.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

The X-Files Best Moments, Episode 6!

I have to admit, this episode bored the shit out of me at first. Boring ghost story, blah blah blah, he's in love with this woman and is protecting her even after he's dead.

But then crazy Exorcist shit started happening, and it suddenly became the strongest episode yet.

I mean, first, Mulder and Scully were reviewing surveillance footage, when they noticed something strange:

So they enhanced the quality, and what did they discover?

A CREEPY GHOST SMIRKING AT THEM.

Shit only got weirder from here. First, the woman's bath filled with blood (noticeably coming from the two holes drilled in the sides of the tub):


Then, Mulder came into her house and discovered a floating dude, who was currently having his throat crushed by the ghost.

Ultimately it was another (sort of) happy ending, but I didn't care about the resolution, because so many crazy ghost shenanigans had gone on that I was already thrilled with the episode. Hopefully there are more like this the closer we get to Halloween.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Now That It's Cold, This Is What I'm Wearing



Here's the back of it:

(Made with the help of Cafepress).

Mildridiots, Volume 4

This is a very special volume of Mildridiots. You see, my roommate recently quit for another job, so our latest Mildridiot is the newest employee!

Her name is Morgan, and she is a bitch.

Let me provide some examples. First, I should preface it by saying that she lives in the apartment above the store that Nels rents out. (The only reason this restaurant hasn't gone out of business in the past 30 years is because he owns the entire building and rents out the top floors, so they pay for our lack of customers.)

On Thursday, it was Bodnar's last day, so I accompanied him for what was sure to become a sob-fest as he closed down Mildred's for the last time. (I also accompanied him for the free food, of course.) We drove his car, and as we were parking in Mildred's lone parking spot, we accidentally ran over a dead, rotting log.

The second he got out of the car, Morgan was out on her balcony, and she instantly said, "Are you going to pick that up?" while pointing at the dead log that was smashed to bits.

"Uh... what?" he asked. Keep in mind during this that Morgan had no idea whether or not we were employees. For all she knew, we could have been customers she was chewing out.

"That log there. That was a really nice thing that Nels had." What the hell? That dead log was really nice? In the six months that I have worked here, I have never once seen Nels go out back to take care of his log (sexual innuendo definitely not intended).

Naturally, my roommate got pissed that she was trying to insinuate that she knows Nels better than us, or even that she had the balls to say anything about this stupid log at all. "Oh, really? So you know Nels, like, really, really well, then?" he snapped. Frankly, she deserved such a sarcastic onslaught. She tried to respond, but he just stormed inside before she could even say anything.

So of course I was looking forward to Saturday, when I would be training her. I didn't think she'd have the cojones to mention the incident to me, but OF COURSE she did. Within the first ten minutes, she said, "I'm so glad it's you here and not your idiot roommate." Did she really just come in to train with me and in the first ten minutes call my best friend an idiot? I just brushed it off with a, "Yeah, he's really awesome," and moved on.

I also was able to more or less ignore her terrible customer service, such as saying, "Right on, dude, you've got the perfect amount of change! $4.20!" to this elderly guy who had no idea what her stupid stoner joke meant. I also ignored the fact that it took her over 10 minutes to make two Leadbedders, our most basic sandwich. I know it's her first day, but it's not like it's her first day on Earth. A baby could have figured out which side of the bread to put the mayo on faster than she did (seriously, she asked what side the mayo goes on, to which I responded, "THE INSIDE"). Although, I did make it up to the customer by sneaking a free cookie in her bag with a note attached to it that said, "Sorry about the wait!"

But I could no longer ignore her when she started telling me how to do my job. First, she wouldn't let me reuse a piece of wax paper that had touched a different slice of bread. Then, when I was showing her how to slice an onion, she virtually demanded that I throw away segments of the onion that were either too thin or too thick. Nels would have gone insane had he been there - he throws literally NOTHING away. He has an entire jar of dead seeds (which he already got his money back for, because they were dead when he bought them) that has sat on the shelf for several years. Keep in mind these are dead, completely useless seeds that he essentially got for free. And he can't bear to throw them out.

So I said, "No, we don't throw anything out here unless it is totally useless. Nels would have your head." But she decided to ARGUE with the guy training her! "Oh, come on, man. Just get rid of them."

Naturally, I yelled at her. "Okay, listen. I'm training you. Not the other way around. Don't tell me how to do my job."

That shut her up for a while, but she made a few more passive-aggressive comments about how I apparently don't know how to work here.

Joke's on her, though. The next day, she had to work 6 hours alone after my morning shift, so I under-prepped and left her stranded on her second day, alone and without any cheddar, cucumbers, or tomatoes. I plan on doing this every Sunday for the next few weeks. HA! How's that for passive-aggressive, bitch?

Sunday, October 5, 2008

My White Roommates Learning Dance Moves From MTV2

Last night, we discovered our On Demand system contains how-to videos from MTV2 that teach all the hottest dance moves kids are doing these days. My awkward, white, nerdy roommates decided to learn a couple.

First up, the Biz Markie. Fairly basic, and I think he nailed it pretty well. Ignore the dog fight in the background.



Next they attempt to master something called "Jookin' It," which was taught by some group from America's Best Dance Crew. This one is much more difficult, which means the result is all the more hilarious. (Important note for animal lovers: he isn't seriously that mean to his dog. He was joking. This is much more important than dogs.)

Man, I just watched the video and my commentary is retarded. Ignore it.


And now, the entire routine comes together. Watch my roommates totally serve each other.


This was a stupid post. I apologize.

Friday, October 3, 2008

An Afternoon With Sarah Silverman

Actually, just a conference call.

That's right, I interviewed Sarah Silverman for the past hour for an article I am writing about the newest season of the "Sarah Silverman Program."

She was hilarious and really nice - other than the time when she called us all "fucking fat" - and made it a much more enjoyable interview than Michael Chiklis (not that he was mean or terrible or anything, he just didn't tell as many jokes about shit).

But she wasn't the star of the show. Oh, no, not by a longshot. This MORON decided that rather than doing some in-depth reporting or asking a question that would help him write his story, he would spend his one question sucking up to her. This is how he decided to play things:

Idiot: Hey, Sarah. I'm Jewish, too, so, you know, we have that special bond.

Sarah: Uh... Great!

Idiot: My question is, um, what question should a reporter ask to convince you that he should write on your show? (Ed. note: HE SERIOUSLY FUCKING ASKED THAT.)

I don't remember what Sarah said in response, because I was seething with rage that this moron was making us all look like retards.

Also, the first three questions were about her "Great Schlep" viral video, and about Obama. Seriously?! That's what you're going to all ask her about when she's here to talk about her new show? She actually said, "I feel like I should be plugging my show, not talking about this."

Oh, and some starstruck girl asked her what celebrities she has met.

I went last again (seems it'll be that way every time, because there aren't many schools that come after "Wisconsin - Madison"), and we had gone about 10 minutes over the designated time. So here is how my glorious interview went:

Moderator Jill: Alright, our last question is from Danny.

Me: Hey, Sarah.

Sarah: Hey, D--

Jenny from Comedy Central: Sarah, we're out of time!

Sarah: Is that Jenny? Hi Jenny!

Jenny: Hi Sarah! How are you?

Sarah: I'm well!

I was dumbstruck. Luckily Sarah is awesome and intervened and said she could take one last question. But that totally threw me off. Of COURSE I'm the one to get cut off. I bet the asshole from the Badger Herald (our rival newspaper) was giggling to himself. But I think we all know who asked the better question. I asked her, "Do you have any plans to release another CD or movie like Jesus Is Magic?" because, frankly, I've been dying for a Sarah Silverman stand-up CD. The Badger Herald asked, "You are very good at getting your audience to respond with awkward, uncomfortable silence. Do you try for that reaction?" Her answer: "No."

I definitely won in this interview.