We can rebuild him, too

3.....2.....1.....Happy New Knee, Jim!


Is this another one of your Deja Vu weeks? I distinctly remember A Very Similar Post not all that long ago.


Well, yes...that was to commemorate Loyal Reader Mark's knee surgery. Today marks Loyal Reader Jim's knee surgery.


So, your readers have a lot of knee surgeries?


I like to think it's purely coincidental. In fact, over 83% of the Loyal Readers of the blag here are NOT having knee surgeries right now.


I like those odds! Good luck, Jim!

We all live another day

Disaster narrowly averted thanks to quick thinking and plastic tongs!


What kind of "disaster" can be dealt with using plastic tongs?


Today's Sametime Status deals with my latest encounter with the source of all evil.


Rush Limbaugh?


Worse. You all remember The Famed Toaster of Hades, right? Well, it tried to strike again with a vengeance the world has never seen. It tried to burn my bagel!


No! What happened?


You know how the bagel is supposed to ride on a chain-like conveyor, then drop off and slide down a chute at the end? Well, the bagel's center of gravity was off or something, and it got stuck on the chute...still holding on to the chain...as shown in this dramatic recreation:


Noticing the upcoming preemptive strike, I quickly grabbed the nearby plastic tongs, reached up inside the toaster and freed my bagel before it burst into flames. Victory was mine this day!


Stay alert...there will surely be other battles to fight.

Let the bidding begin!

Jeremy is once again an Undrafted Free Agent


Who exactly is supposed to draft you?


Well, that's not really important. What is important is that YET another draft has come and gone without my name being called. The NHL draft was held last Friday, and instead of starting my hockey career, I'll still be doing my normal job.


Well, you're not eligible for the NHL draft anyway...it's only for 18 and 19 year olds.


Hardly the point.


Also, your career stats aren't quite up to par with the other draftees. Zero Goals and zero Assist to go along with zero Penalty Minutes in zero Games Played. Not what the scouts are looking for.


Which is why I'd make a perfect sleeper pick!

Ding Ding Ding!

I would be ready to Rumble if it weren't for Michael Buffer


Yeah...he often gets in the way.


Hilarious.


You make stupid jokes all the time. Don't get all snippy when I have a good one.


Your use of the word "Good" is troubling.

Anyway...this weekend is the annual Pottstown Rumble volleyball tournament in sunny Pottstown PA. As you might expect, I will be participating.

Michael Buffer is the boxing ring announcer made famous for the line which I don't know if I can reprint here due to copyright issues...but you all know it. It involves Rumbling and asking if you're Ready for same. According to Highly Reliable Sources, Buffer has copyrighted his catch phrase, and has made a ludicrous sum of over $400 Million in licensing fees.

On a completely unrelated side note, I'd like to announce the "Jeremy Is In The Office Catch Phrase Contest" in which you, The Most Intelligent Readership In The World submit your quality ideas for a new catch phrase to be used on the Blag here. It's gonna be a thing!

Sock it to me?

I need to reengineer my sock strategy.


I sincerely doubt that's a form of engineering. You put on socks. Not hard.


Simply wearing socks is not really the issue at hand, here. The issue is in the variety of socks, and the need to be more efficient in my sock wearing and cleaning.

Since it is the custom, I tend to wash my socks on occasion. When I do, I find myself with a far-too-vast collection of sock types I have to work with. I have dressier socks, casual socks, white socks, blue socks, grey socks, black socks, various shades of brown socks, sporty socks...it's really a disaster. When I finish with the laundry, I find myself spending more time on the sock sorting than anything else. A new solution is required!


I'm sure there's an infomercial here somewhere...


Here's what I need to do...and what I'll almost assuredly not do. I should toss out all but one type of dressier socks for work. I will have two colors....black and brown, and all will be interchangeable. No more patterns, no more varying types of brown...no more thicker and thinner nonsense. Black and Brown socks for work. Then, I'll have a flurry of black sporty socks for the gym and volleyball. No more grey with yellow, grey with red, black with blue....no...Black. Done. All of my casual socks will be thicker and grey for comfort and style. Laundry day will be a treat. I'll have 4 piles and can just grab and fold instead of sorting through a mountain of socks. Why didn't anyone think of this before?

Caution: Nerdiness

When you get down to a fundamental, atomic level, nothing ever actually touches...but that doesn’t make it hurt any less when you fall up the stairs.


So, your fingers never touch the keys, either? Is that why the Blag's been missing for a while?


Actually, there are various reasons for a lack of Sametime Status updates the last couple days. They are as follows, in no particular order: World Cup, Ridiculously busy day, Field Trip. So anyway, the Blag you know and love is back today with Sametimey Goodness.


We love this?


Yes you do. So anyway...we had a philosophical discussion in a physics class years ago about the nature of atoms, charges, and how it relates to picking stuff up. Sure, when you look at things from a larger scope, you touch something, and can pick it up, or press it, or whatever. Even down to a cellular level, the cells of your finger are in contact with the stuff you're touching. When you break it down to a ridiculously small, atomic level...the protons and electrons that make up you are not actually contacting the electrons of other stuff. The charges simply repel and nothing hits. It would be bad if they did, as the electrons would stop moving or be anihilated by the protons of another atom, and everything would be lost. You would lose parts of your finger every time you touched something. The mind boggles.


If you touch something hard enough, it can break.


So anyway...at the time, this was a whimsically fun discussion on the nature of matter and sub-atomic particles, even if the Higgs Boson was not involved. Why this discussion went through my head the other day as I was busy falling up the stairs at home is beyond me. Apparently, from a sub-atomic scale, I didn't actually land...the elctrons in my arm simply repulsed the electrons of the tile floor and I floated there magically...suspended on a mushy soft bed of negative charges. It should have been quite comfy, but somehow still resulted in a bruise.

Physics sucks.

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!

This Soccer stuff would be better if it was Hockey.


Most sports would. In fact, there was a series of commercials a while back about just that. Here's one about Bowling:



So anyway...if you're like me, you've noticed that the World Cup is going on right now. If you're extremely lucky, you've even seen a goal. Given that there has been a goal every roughly 55 minutes of soccer action, it's a rare and special gift to actually witness. This is the primary reason that the fans are constantly blowing those zuzvela things...they have nothing better to do.

Let's examine some fun facts about the 2010 World Cup as it stands at the time of this writing.

• There have been a total of 23 goals scored in 14 games.
  
• 4 of those were scored in Germany's 4-0 Feel-Good whooping of Australia, leaving 19 goals in the remaining 13 games.
  
• Brazil's 2-1 victory over North Korea last night (The 14th game of the World Cup) marked the first time in this year's World Cup that a losing team scored a goal.
  
• 14 games...6 ended in ties. Two of those were of the 0-0 variety.
  
• 0 Fights, but a number of Red Cards.
  

This is nonsense.

By comparison, let's take a look at some fun facts about this year's Stanley Cup Final:

• 6 Games, 47 total goals scored.
  
• Game 1 Alone saw 10 goals in the first 40 minutes of play. (So much for "Defense wins Championships)
  
• Only one game of the Finals saw fewer than 7 total goals.
  
• No Zuzuvelas.
  

So there you have it. Hockey is clearly better than soccer. Discuss!

Sadly, I don't have any styling gel

The hair on my arms is now shiny and manageable.


I think it's time for an arm faux-hawk.


Yeah...I would tend to disagree.

So today's Sametime Status comes to you courtesy of the gym. The idea is, I hit the gym, have a shower, then head straight to work...it works for me, most times. Anyway...the showers at the gym have little all-purpose soap dispensers which are okayish. It tends to dry out my skin a little...but nothing that can't be solved with a good moisturizer...maybe something vanilla-lavender scented.


Classic stuff, Jeremy. Get to the point.


Since my hair can occasionally be finicky, I bring my own shampoo with me, rather than use the all-purpose soap. The issue not long ago was that the soap dispenser was empty...so I had to use the shampoo to clean the rest of me. My shampoo is one of those 2-in-1 deals with conditioner built in. As such, my arm hair is now shiny and manageable.


Good to know. Thanks, Jeremy.

It was pretty exciting

I met the Snotface!


This is huge news! You've been waiting a while for this one.


Indeed...over a year in fact. So here's the deal:

It is often said that art resembles life and life resembles art. As it turns out, the art form that my life chooses to imitate more often than not is the Sitcom. It's one of the reasons I've chosen to write a sitcom, but that's beside the point entirely. In this particular case, my life mimicked a certain episode of "Seinfeld" in which Kramer gets a new license plate for his car. You Probably Remember the Results. (Warning, clip contains some mild profanity)

You may also remember a blag post made here last march, in which I introduced everyone to The SNOTFACE. I'll give you a moment to catch up if you're not familiar...


...


Okay...now that you're back up to speed, I can tell you that not long ago, at a friend's house, (As a matter of fact, the very same person who was made famous in the Blag last week for "The Monkey Dance." That's three Blag Entries in one week about him...I just realized that now.) I actually met The Snotface. Imagine my shock when I go out to the car to unload some stuff into the house and I walk past a little red car...just happen to glance down and see the plate..."SNOTFACE." I was floored...I was at a party with The Snotface. I could finally learn what it meant, and be able to sleep at night.

Truth be told, I had met The Snotface earlier this year at a totally separate party...but was completely unaware, as I had not seen the car. It wasn't until recently that I had made the connection between the two.

As it turns out, the car, and more importantly the SNOTFACE plates belong to a young lady, who for strictly Blag purposes we'll call "Brittany." I learned that it is a reference to a favourite childhood movie of hers, "Drop Dead Fred" starring, among others, Tim "Otter" Matheson, Carrie Fisher and Phoebe Cates (yes, THAT Phoebe Cates, though in a much more family-friendly role). The character of Fred is an imaginary friend of young Elizabeth (Cates), and continually refers to her throughout the movie as "Snotface," and at one point in the movie, actually picks his nose and wipes it on Elizabeth's cheek. Elizabeth repeats this performance on Otter's face later in the film...which is probably more than you wanted to know, but that's okay.

So, later in life, "Brittany" decided that she enjoyed the movie so much that she needed to drive around as the Snotface...and the mystery is solved.

Theme Week, Part 108 Degrees

Jeremy's Sametime Status Proudly Presents: Back From Vacation Week! Traveling from Detroit is fun!


You did mention that the trip back from the desert was a bit of an adventure. You met a guy at the airport selling shower curtain rings?


Really, that's about all we didn't meet up with. We made it out of Phoenix without issue, but once we got north to Detroit, things went south.

The following happened, in no particular order:

• Flight from Detroit to NY got cancelled
  
• Every restaurant and shop in the airport closed, leaving a very hungry Jeremy
  
• The "Customer Service" for the airline (Which, for purely hypothetical Blag purposes, let's call "Greek Difference Airlines") sucked...having 6 people behind a desk to watch people scan their own tickets to be rebooked, only to point them to a bank of phones to call "Customer Service" if they didn't like what they got.
  
• Screaming match with one customer, after she was (allegedly) told to walk to the hotel at which she had been booked.
  
• We were all rebooked on the exact same flight that just got cancelled. Way to go "Greek Difference"
  
• Upon talking on the phone with "Customer Service" we were given the options of one flight 2 days later, a flight the following morning, with a nice long layover in Atlanta (That's right...Detroit to New York by way of Georgia), and (Our ultimate choice) a flight the following morning to the wrong city.
  
• Spending the night in a deathtrap hotel with short-circuiting alarm clocks, physicist-approved zero-friction shower floors, and a jerk who turned the temperature in my room down to a balmy 61 degrees.
  
• Late shuttle back to the airport, including Chihuahuas.
  
• Vindictively spending every last frickin' cent of $18 worth of food vouchers at the airport.
  
• Getting lost trying to leave the airport in the van we had to rent since we were in the wrong city.
  
• A black cat crossing the road in front of said rental van.
  
• A certain middle hitter who may or may not have been recently made famous for "The Monkey Dance" locking the keys inside the rental van.

As such, "Greek Difference Airlines" earns a big thumbs down from me and the rest of my travelling party. In fact, they're officially 3rd on my list of companies On Notice (Which I totally invented long before Colbert, but I didn't have a Blag or a TV show at the time to prove it.) So yes...it goes UPS, "High's Home Improvement Warehouse," and "Greek Difference Airlines."


Have a good weekend, everybody!

Theme Week, Part 104 Degrees

Back From Vacation Week! Ask our Middle Hitter about "The Monkey Dance"


What's this Monkey Dance?


Dude...what did I just say?


Technically, you did play 1 1/2 games as Middle for the team, so it's not completely out of the realm to ask you. Also, the other Middles don't have Sametime Status blags.


Fair enough. Every sport has its truly one-of-a-kind iconic moments. Hockey has Ray Borque winning the Stanley Cup, Baseball fans all recognize the name Bill Buckner. Football has the Joe Montana to Dwight Clark Pass, and Basketball has Ron Artest starting a brawl in the stands. The sport of volleyball used to have The Vegas Line, but move over Sean Rosenthal, a new sheriff is in town.

Team member and Loyal Blag Reader "Z" decided to take over one of the games we played last week, earning himself the MVP of that particular little while. After a pair of impressive blocks on the other team earned us back to back points, "Z" got a little caught up in the moment and performed a celebration that can only be described as "The Monkey Dance."

Unfortunately for other members of The Most Intelligent Readership In The World, this description, and it's the only description I can really give it, doesn't really paint a vivid picture of exactly what happened. Rest assured, we're working on getting the video for it, so we can share with the world. Until such time, rest assured that it did not look like this:

Theme Week, Part 100 Degrees

Back From Vacation Week! For the first time in industry history, a hotel stole MY towel


You brought a towel on vacation? Hotels generally supply you with that sort of thing.


I know...and standard hotel protocol is for the customers to steal the towels. It's pretty much expected. In this particular case, since I was in the area for the purpose of playing in a volleyball tournament, I brought my own gym towel, expecting to keep it largely separate from the hotel towels that I might use for showering and cleaning purposes. It seemed smart...until I accidentally left it out one day. The hotel's cleaning staff jacked it as one of their own, and now it is in the hotel's rotation. More likely, it's already been stolen by somebody else, and is hanging in their shower...it's a pretty nice towel and all. I got it at Wal-Mart.

So anyway, I ended the trip minus one towel, and resisted the urge to swipe one of the hotel's towels as payment. I'm not even sure why...

Theme Week, Part 99 Degrees

Jeremy's Sametime Status Proudly Presents: Back From Vacation Week! That guy, Guy knows what he’s talking about.


Welcome back, Jeremy. A bit later than expected, but I trust we find you hale and hearty?


Indeed. There were some issues with the trip back from the desert, which have already been captured adequately in Silver Screen Form. Some of those misadventures may be also shared in Whimsical Blag Form later in the week. I guess we'll all find out together as Theme Week progresses.


So what Guy is this you're talking about?


The Guy in question would be Guy Fieri from the Food Network, who stopped into the ironically tiny Matt's BIG Breakfast in downtown Phoenix for his show "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Matt's would adequately fall into the "Diner" category, and came with a recommendation from the hotel, just a few blocks away.

The first day we set out to find food, Matt's was sadly closed. It was also ridiculously small, and we lowered our expectations for the place. When we went back the next day, holy crap were we wrong. The food in the place was amazing, and the coffee was the best I had on the entire trip. The service was also noteworthy for a couple reasons. The Blag-Friendly reason was that there were 4 waitresses in a restaurant with no more than 8 tables, including the people eating on the window sill. I'm not making that up.

The place was so good, we actively made it a point to go back on the last day of our trip so that our last memory of Phoenix would be that breakfast. Just so happened that Sunday's special was Steak and Eggs. Yeah...that was good times.

So, bottom line...if you're travelling in the greater Phoenix area, do yourself a favour and hit Matt's one morning. Tell them Jeremy sent you.


They'll look at you kinda funny and ask who Jeremy is.