QOTD 120: Even a Stopped Clock…

MeekinOnMovies’ Spirit Animal

1. A friend with a reputation for believing anything he heard
swore to me that Bears don’t shit in the woods in the winter.

We ended
up calling the zoo, and low and behold Bears do not shit in the woods in
the winter. They develop something called a ‘fecal plug’, and I am not googling that for more information.

He once proposed the perfect murder weapon is an icicle, and upon asking the to our Science Teacher he responded that 1) yes, you could but you’d have to sharpen it, and 2) Yes, it’s been done before. A cohort responded to this information with “Even a Stopped Clock is right Twice a Day”.

Joey’s upset Punk left.

 2. Joey Harrington going HAM during Thanksgiving a bunch of years ago because he had a cold.

Probably one of the best games of his relatively mediocre career, with the flu likely allowing Harrington to rely on instincts and muscle memory versus the impending doom of yet another sack, loss, and losing season.

There’s actually a bunch of these. Kane vs. Albert being an incredible match. Vinny Mac for whatever reason bringing the GOODS whenever he has a match despite being older than some dirt. Doug Johnson played his way into a huge contract through TWO games, and we all know the ballad of Matt Cassel, don’t we?

I bought DDP yoga to prevent this.

3. After a particularly fruitful perusing of my OkCupid quiver, I started up a conversation with a very sweet and incredibly sexy girl named Maria – Think Jewish Selma Hayek.

She was in law school, liked cats, bad reality tv, drinking heavily, and wearing heels that made her appear about a foot taller than she actually was. Sight unseen, she invited me to a bar for a drink the very night we started chatting online, and fully prepared to say goodbye to my kidneys, I agreed. My pudgy little heart was smitten, but trepidacious.

Two hours later, I was in her apartment and under her covers. Her only rule: Pants stay on. This was fine with me because she had plenty to enjoy above the belt. Of course it turned out she was bonkers. Her cat had a little cat bed, her bathroom was the sort of mess that deserved its own episode of hoarders, and she really only seemed to enjoy seeing me very late at night after she’d been boozing hardcore with her law-school buddies. As our pants-on relationship grew, I invited her to a party, only to watch her flirt with a guy I’d never met the entire time, in front of all my friends.

This, I thought, was the last straw.

It wasn’t. A man’s libido has a habit of circumnavigating things like pride, common sense, and basic decency, eagerly silencing that little voice in the back of your head that looks out for your well being but goes ignored far too often in the face (and legs, and bosom) of physical beauty – I think Offspring wrote a song about it – “Pretty Fly for a White Guy”.

Still, because my ‘stopped clock’ was right in this instance – in that I was totally kind of hooking up with a girl I perceived to be out of my proverbial ball park, I put up with it. Even better, when I moved back to Boston, she did too, and the shenanigans have continued.

4. Back in my Meth Cooking days, me and this old dude I worked with, Mr. White…erm..Mr Black, were totally stuck in the middle of freakin’ no where.

No food, no water, our van was dead, and BAM I say some dumb shit about making a battery with science and next thing you know we’re starting our van via the power of loose change, salt, and sponges. Yeah! Physics, Ho!

Science, Bitch.

5. 2004 I watched a lot of O’Reilly Factor because he was popular, I was a teenager, and politics and news and current event stuff was new to me. Anyway, I for the LIFE of me can’t find it, but I know for a fact Bill said something about Gay Marriage / etc, that struck me as making sense.

He told the story of his aunt who never married, and lived with her step sister or some other non blood related female relative. As they aged, unfortunately one of them grew old and senile and her best friend in the whole world could only stand by and not help as she wanted because there was no way to share the legal privileges marriage provides.

Thus O’Reilly said that while he viewed marriage as ‘between a man and a woman’ (which is stupid), he DID think the idea that allowing any two peoples to gain LEGAL WEDDED RIGHTS, while removing the element of requiring romance and love and passion and gender in general, was the way to go to make everyone happy. Call it a “Federally Recognized Legal Union”.

I think it was George Carlin who said the longer a phrase is the less power it has. By essentially splitting the idea of ‘marriage’ from the legal rights given to domestic partners, you get to have your cake, and eat it too.

…It’s actually the finale of Boston Legal as well.

But my point: Here’s Bill O’Reilly,  who I’ve is obviously a polarizing figure who says all manner of insane and not very…substantive things, making a good and pretty valid point. The stopped clock that were his ‘Republican’ ideals being right in that day in that context – at least to the point where it seemed like a reasonable compromise.

6. Tech School Shuffle – There’s a joke about going to vocational school. The idea is that folks who go to regular highschool have their whole lives and every opportunity and possibility available to them. Folks that go to voc-tech school have….6 or 7 options. I ended up going to Bristol Plymouth Tech instead of my local high school because I was a geek and wanted to get in the ‘tech support’ sphere. 

It was certainly one of the top three good ideas I’ve had.

Low and behold the ‘shop’ I wanted, Computer Information Technology, was full up, and I ended up kind of shoe-horned into an “Electronics” shop, which was essentially at the time printer repair and circuit boards. It was kind of a bummer. Flash forward to sophmore year and we have a new teacher who sets on an INSANE path. We learn robotics, we learn TCP / IP, we learn routing and access and excel and microsoft office macros, how to build our own machines, and I even ended up being the chapter president of “Skills USA” / VICA.

BECAUSE of this fortuitous development, I essentially have a particular set of skills I can put on my resume that at least get my shoe in the door. It’s interesting. With computers being so cheap these days, most folks know HOW they work, but not why. When the internet goes down, folks panic if the solution isn’t a Wifi reset. If a computer is slow or freezing, they reboot it. If it gets a virus? They buy a new one.

While I’m proud of everything I did at Columbia College in Chicago, and all the places I went and people I boned on my Debate Team at Bristol Community College, I hold BP-Tech up as the school I’m the most proud to be an alumni of. Perhaps one day I’ll get my masters and kick start a TV production shop. Who knows.