People in my life

These people are here for somebody else's entertainment. Not necessarily mine, though some of them are kind of funny. Possibly, they're here for your amusement. Be on the look out, because their actions are apparently funny to somebody:

1.) The Guy who parks across two spaces in my apartment parking lot. Which he hasn't been doing for a while, but did this morning, making it so that I had to park a couple of buildings over. Which wouldn't have been a problem were I not carrying groceries.

There's been a discussion on exactly this sort of thing over on Barry's blog.

But as I was walking by his car, I noticed that he had not one, but two flat tires. I stopped for a closer look, and saw that the caps were off the valve stems, and were lying on the ground next to the tires. So, somebody had let the air out of the tires. It was funny in that schadenfreude way, but I realized that it was also kind of self-defeating, because it's going to take that guy that much longer to move his car to park correctly, because he's going to have to air up his tires.

2.) This guy isn't funny, but he thinks he is: The guy who hears a joke being told to a group of people, and gets bored by the joke because he's heard it already, so he ruins the joke for everybody by blurting out the punchline.

A buddy at work was telling a joke....and another of the listeners had already heard the joke, so mid-way through he just blurts out the answer, and then starts to criticize how the teller was telling it.

You know...it's one thing to be bored. But ruining somebody else's fun because you're bored just makes you a dick.

But you see, the problem was, I didn't get enough of the setup to understand the punchline the asshole blurted out. And the teller just threw his hands up in frustration and walked off, leaving me unable to connect the set-up with the punchline.

I really wanted to know what happened to that duck.

(Luckily, I got the teller to tell me the joke later. Sadly, it wasn't that good a joke.)

2a.) Come to think of it, people who comment on a joke written on a blog just to say "I've heard that joke 19 times" and "It would be better if you told it this way..."

Seriously. What are you trying to prove? You're just showing yourself to be a prick who wants attention. Just get yourself a neon sign that says "Look How Smart I Am" and if you see a joke that you already know, just move on.

Or tell a better joke.

Seriously.

It's one thing to talk trash. It's another to whip it out and show you're bigger.

3.) The new boss. Who is allergic to something in the office, and it makes him sneeze. And he sneezes in a way that makes me laugh.

(It goes "eeeeeeee-Blech'-em").

The first time he sneezed in front of us, I thought it was funny because I was loopy from insomnia. I had one of those no-laughing-in-church moments, where you're wrestling with the Devil not to laugh. I hoped I'd gotten over it, but every time he's sneezed since, it starts making me laugh. The sort of insane laughter that may not stop once it starts.

4.) Braves radio broadcaster Pete Van Wieren, who used this phrase to describe a slow runner from the Braves' past: "He couldn't run out of sight in two days' time." I just like that phrase.

5.) BSTommy, who forgot to close the window with the fan in it before he went to work last night. It was 65 when he went to work. 40 when he got back from work. Jeebus this apartment's cold.

6.) And lastly, these people. The ones who held the skit where the Easter Bunny got whipped.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons.

I just don't get the rationale of smashing kids' delusions in the name of Jesus. I think one of the most disheartening days in my life was the day I admitted to myself there was no Santa. How is it that you're going to attract people to your belief system if you're violently smashing and attacking the other belief systems? I mean, there are lots of belief structures. You can't destroy them all so that yours is the only one available to people.

But mainly, I bring this story up because when I hear somebody's beaten up the Easter Bunny, I think of Jay and Silent Bob. Who will never be outdone in their Anti-Easter Bunny vendetta. Puts me in the mind to watch some Mallrats.