Word of the Day: April 14, 2012

Bloghunter

Whoa, Silver! Me smell laptop, must be blogger nearby.

(BlahG-Hun-Terr)

A television program about a washed-out cowboy who hunts down wayfaring bloggers in the wilds of Canada.  He actually cheats by having local guides who know the blogging terrain better than the animals who live there. He has a large female following due to his rugged assholliness *(hey, i can make words up if i want! This is, after all, a blog about fake, blogging-related words and acronyms…) er, i mean, old-man-type good looks. Sort of like an Old Spice commercial spokesman with leather chaffs and a big ol’ hat! riding a big steed! (take from that what you will!) He redefines the RCMP’s motto of “We always get our man.”

 

 

*NOTE;  IF YOU HAVE ANY SUGGESTIONS FOR A FAKE, BLOGGING-RELATED WORD OR ACRONYM THAT YOU LIKE, DESPISE OR USE, PLEASE LEAVE IT AS A COMMENT, ALONG WITH A SHORT DEFINITION AND THE PHONETICS. YOUR SUGGESTIONS WILL BE AN UPCOMING DAILY FEATURE!

 

You could win a Million Dollars!!!

(well, not from me, but you could, if you bought lottery tickets and got extremely lucky. Like finding am 800-carat, rough, flawless diamond in a local stream kind of lucky. Like having an asteroid made of rubies and diamonds crash into the Earth, 5 feet in front of you kind of lucky. Hey, it’s Friday the 13th (well, it is now, when i’m writing this…) so you never know what could happen!

 

CONTENTS OF THIS BLOG ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE. WORDS MAY APPEAR CLOSER IN A MIRROR THAN THEY ACTUALLY ARE. 9 OUT OF 10 LIBRARIANS  ARE MOUSEY INTROVERTS, 19 TIMES OUT OF 20, YET STILL MANAGE TO APPEAR TO BE SEXY. THIS SITE IS NOT ENDORSED BY THE SPCB (THE SECOND SPC (SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY) IN THE PHONE BOOK – THE SPCA (ANIMALS) HOGGED THE FIRST SPOT ON ME AGAIN! THOSE BRUTES!) THE APATHETIC AND APPALLINGLY APROPOS “SOCIETY OF THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO BLOGGERS” (DONATIONS ACCEPTED AND SUGGESTED).  9 OUT OF 10 DOCTORS ARE APPARENTLY ON THE TAKE, SO WHEN YOU LOOK FOR MEDICAL ADVICE, MAKE SURE YOU ASK AT LEAST 20 DOCTORS…

I Coulda Been A Star, Ma!

It’s like watching a train wreck. You just can’t look away, even though you know that what you’re about to lay witness to will more than likely (if there is any shred of humanity left in you, that is) make your stomach turn and yearn for the phone call to Ralph on the big white telephone. Yes, I’m talking about reality TV stars, mainly Dave Hestor and Alex Debogorski from Storage Wars and Ice Road Truckers, respectively (no respect intended, though).

Ralph, the big white telephone

You know that when you hear Dave start with his “yuuup” and “I’m so great, my competitors are all idiots and amateurs” and “everything I touch turns to gold” (actual quotes from the show), you will throw whatever is in your hand at the TV, and worry about replacing it tomorrow. Maybe from a pawnshop. When you hear Alex start with his brain curdling laughs, of which he is always the architect of the joke and the only one laughing, you cringe and wonder why they don’t show more reruns of The Brady Bunch instead. But you keep watching for the little guys. And the cute girls. Hmmm, Lisa in that big truck, so sexy!

Stop! Idiot!

Do the people that watch “Storage Wars” not realize that they are paying preposterous prices for whatever they buy when they shop at Dave Hestor’s pawn shop, second hand store or his new auction house? He says on the show that he’ll  list that $10 side table for $120 at his store, and he’s actually successful? Some people will do anything to get onto TV, which is evident with the number of people who show up at these auctions and never make one single bid. But to buy overpriced merchandise just to get close to one of TVs most obnoxious characters (I just can’t refer to this dork as a star) is about as low as Snooki would go. And, that’s real low.

Yuuup! Kill Me Now!

What’s wrong with people these days?

Nooope!

How does someone like Dave Hestor or Alex Devogorski become a TV star? How do they ever cash a paycheck from the bowels of Hollywood? Paris Hilton I could almost understand; the way I almost understood why Santa Clause could come into our highrise, 22nd floor apartment, or the way I could almost understand people saying that they were abducted by aliens and subjected to anal probes.

What’s with all the anal probe obsessions? Everyone who claims that they were abducted by aliens confesses to being probed anally. And, no, that’s not yearly! Could being “abducted by aliens” be code for “coming out of the closet”? For universal justice, why doesn’t Dave Hestor get abducted by aliens? Or, was he? Or, is he one of the abductors, sent here to annoy us to death so that when they do come to colonize Earth, there will be far fewer people here to fight against.

I tell you, there’s just no justice these days.

The All-American Case of Blind Justice

What’s wrong with people these days?

Am I Bad? A Sadist?

I don’t know about you, but I watch these shows hoping to see Dave take a major loss, like when he thought he had an original Stradivarius violin (it was, but it was a popular student model, worth a couple hundred bucks, a tad shy of the millions he was expecting and salivating about to the cameraman), or to hopefully see someone finally lose their tempers enough to plow him a few (won’t take much more than what he normally spews). I even hope to see Alex be the first driver to, on film, break through the ice and laugh all the way to the bottom of some frigid lake in northern Alaska.

Okay, I know. I’m a romantic.

When Dave dropped that valuable, intricate and ancient Chinese herb box getting out of his truck, telling the cameraman that he was sure it was invaluable, I almost whooped with pleasure!

Where am I going with this?

Funny you should ask. I was starting to winder that myself. I get that they might run a couple of marathon showings of a popular TV show, but showing every single episode, one after the other, 2 or 3 times a week? It’s become the Storage Unit equivalent of Law & Order. And now with Storage Wars Texas and Haulage Wars, Lady Hoggers, Wild Hoggers, Hog Diggitty Doggers, they’re getting out of control. Just like Kate Plus 8, or those horny little Duggars in 19 Kids and Counting, those randy little Little People and the out-of-control Gypsy Wedding shows, you would think that rock bottom had been found within the realm of reality TV…

Think Again

Yes, Virginia, we have no shoes. It seems that pedophilia is in fashion these days on the reality TV circuit. With the barfable (another new word! I’m telling you, I’ll have my own dictionary by 2013!) Toddlers and Tiaras, we see a bunch of out of shape and mostly very homely mothers with their kids, getting the wee ones ready for beauty pageants. From age 7 days to over 20 years, they strut their stuff like they were trying out for a photo shoot in Playboy. These parents torture their kids, turn them into miniature street walkers all in the hopes of winning a trophy, and maybe even a thousand bucks (if they finish first overall, over all age groups).

One night I was watching it with my ex, and there was a 23-year old Texas blonde bombshell registered, along with about 40 girls under 10. She was rather vacant, stupid, creepy. She won. 4-yr. old girls cried. She took home $3,000 and lost about $25,000 worth of dignity (she had just purchased $20,000 worth the previous week). She cried in victory (vacancy?). She even gave a thank you victory speech, telling the oh-so understanding children that they, too, could be a bimbo. If only they tried hard enough.

And the weiner is...

Dreams Can Come True!

You just have to be in the right place at the right time for your dream of being on TV to come true. Or, you could fill your house with garbage, bugs and buried, dead cats and be on Hoarders. Or, you could be extremely frugal, and if you are able to use coupons to buy $1500 worth of groceries and pay only $23 total, they will make a 1/2 hour show all about you on your coupon-fantastic shopping trip (much like a Captain Fantastic acid trip). In Canada, that $1500 shopping trip would, by the way, garner $225 in sales taxes, turning their $23 total into a $248 total – that’s why you’ll never see an Extreme Coupon Canada show.

But, if you live in the right city, have some time to spare and can hang out at storage unit auctions long enough, you too could be on TV! And if you do, I’ll pay you to kneecap Dave Hestor! I’ll double your money if you take out his vocal cords. Hey, you could even be a superhero, a congressional medal of honor winner for doing so – you would be saving your country!

Yes, America! Dreams still do come true. Just not mine about Dave catching a ride with Alex, and dropping down into the middle of Great Slave Lake (the biggest and deepest fresh water lake in North America that’s not part of the Great Lakes).

What’s wrong with people these days?

What’s wrong with me these days?

Too much wrong with society these days!

Who Sues the Suer?

I’m not perfect; there was this time when I thought I was wrong, but it turned out that I was mistaken. To admit defeat and then to grasp it within the eyesight of victory is to admit to yourself that you are not wrong, you are merely mistaken. Yes, it takes a big man to admit defeat and a bigger man to accept victory, yet we keep going to the polls and voting. Why? Sometimes, having the best of the worst is better than having the worst of the best. But does this hold true for doctors too?

Vote or put up with the consequences!

Double Quagmire?

Quagmire is a character on the satirical, comedic adult-themed animation “Family Guy”. He is the most crass, vile and sexist character on a TV show, shown on Sunday evenings, no less, that has such scenes as the town’s most Christian person end up in love with Satan. That’s not to say that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ‘s relationship with Satan is in peril, because He can have as many concubines as he wants. However, Peter, the show’s main star, is dumber than Al Bundy (“Married… with Children”) and yet has the same things; a nice, big house, a car and the financial wherewithal to travel, stay at expensive resorts and buy all the new gadgets. And the extroverted pervert, Quagmire, is a pilot for an international airliner and can barely get by. Perer works at a toy factory on the assembly line, and Al Bundy was a women’s shoe salesman. Makes me wonder just how much money these low-payng jobs pay.

Al Bundy at work

Idiotic Bureaucracy?

I actually knew a guy, a friend of my mother’s son, who worked as a shoe salesman at a women’s shoe store. He made very little money, but he was able to draw a disability pension after just 6 months on the job, due to stress. Now, just how stressful of a job is selling women’s shoes? And just how idiotic is the bureaucracy that allows this? There was a woman in Ottawa who successfully sued a major shopping mall because she walked into a wall that wasn’t properly marked. In Toronto, a family successfully sued the school board because their kid’s school didn’t have a decent hockey program for their son, who, under proper guidance, could have been an NHL hockey star. He was playing in the house league, bottom of the barrel for talented hockey players at the time.

He shoots, his parent's lawyers score!

I was misdiagnosed 3 times; a major back surgery resulted from a failed diagnosis of herniated discs (before MRIs became prevalent) in my lower back, a big “pimple” on my face (left cheek) that I was told to wash frequently and to stop picking at turned out to be a tumor, squeamish cell carcinoma (cancer of the connective tissue), which, while left to grow for 2 and 1/2 years, ate into my jaw, orbital bone and gums, saw the loss of my left nasal cavity and resulted in a 5 hour operation to clean up the zit and then 37 doses of radiation. I went into the hospital once complaining that my appendix was going, and was told by the female attending resident that if I wanted to have someone “do these kinds of things to my anus” that I should investigate my sexuality. I was in the OR 2 hours later, my appendix blowing up while I was waiting for my father to pick me up.

And the winner is... incompetance!

Now, you would think that any one of the misdiagnosis that I went through would have resulted in a lawsuit. You’d be very wrong if you thought that. In Canada, it takes about a 1/2 of a million dollars to successfully sue a doctor in court – they never settle out of court unless liability is flagrantly obvious and resulted in death or paralysis – and without that death or paralysis you won’t win more than 1/3rd of a million bucks. You win but you lose money in doing so. I was taken to a very good lawyer by my father on each occasion, only to be told that I would probably win the suit, but we would not win enough compensation to even cover the costs associated with suing a doctor in Canada, starting with the fees that specialists charge for court cases. If I were living in the USA when these “mistakes” happened I would be a multimillionaire right now.

The Moral of the Story?

Yes, dear reader, sometimes there really is a moral to my stories. If you are to become sick or disabled due to a doctors malpractice, make sure that you live in the USA when you happen to be misdiagnosed. Sometimes there really is a need for a good lawyer and to live in an overly litigious country. But we should still drop about 95% of the lawyers into the deepest abyss of the oceans. Considering that about 5-8 percent of the inmates in prison really were innocent, the lawyers who represented these unlucky souls need to be held accountable, and successfully sued, along with the State and Federal governments.

The scales of justice need calibrating.

Lawyers suing lawyers – now that’s a courtroom drama that I would watch on TV. I would just hate to be the one paying the legal bills for the court case. In an overly litigious country, people sue and get sued over the tiniest problems, which in most other countries wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow.

It’s time that the civil litigation legislation is overhauled, so that the little guys have a chance at suing the big insurance companies.