“…hand me some Vaseline”

I’m in that half-reclined position that makes you feel slightly on edge anyway when I hear a couple of lines that I did not expect when I got up this morning.

“Could you hand me some Vaseline?” Spoken on my right slightly behind my back.

“Now, just try to relax and breathe”.

“And if you could put your hand on the tube, please”.

Uh… okay. Heh.

Well, it might just be the context, but you can’t really grin and offer up sailor jokes when you’ve got three pieces of equipment and two sets of hands in your mouth.

I went to the dentist. I can’t help it if it sounds like a cheesy porno, those were my dentists exact words. He’s a great guy, but not so much with the subtext there, you know?

Anyway – what struck me was the rapid development of dental technology. I had a complete sadist for a dentist when I was a little kid, like right out of The Little Shop of Horrors. He didn’t like kids at all. Weird profession to chose, but there you go.

These days, instead of the old fashioned drill that sounded like something you’d use to break up the black top, you get a pair of safety goggles when you go to the dentist. Which is all kinds of great and amusing ‘cause there’s some serious splatter when they go to work on you. And afterwards you get to rinse and spit and then my dentist gently dabbed my face with a wet paper towel.

Oh, there is just no way I can avoid the sailor jokes running rampant in my head at that point, but I contain them as best I can. You don’t want things to get awkward with a guy that basically has you at his mercy and you don’t want him to be thinking too much about that the next time you come for your check-up.

Still. “put your hand on the tube” is pretty much an obvious led-up to “as the sailor said to the girl”.

Or, maybe that’s just me?

ROL

Bad Music

Okay, so this is just plain funny.

There I am, typing away quietly at my computer, as I am wont to do, when all of a sudden my neighbours – nice quiet people that they are – suddenly decide to play some music. Loudly.

I have been known to do this myself, but mostly when I get loud I do so with my headphones on, ‘cause when I get loud I get Rammstein-loud. And that is … noisy.

So anyway, for a few seconds I just sit there grinning like a loon. This is just funny. It’s like bad elevator music, only slightly more upscale. So, the phone rings and I tell my friend that my neighbours are playing some craptastic sleazy elevator music that sounds vaguely like Julio Iglesias, only worse.

My friend thinks I’m taking it unusually well.

What can I say? Crap music tickles my funny bone sometimes. Especially at that volume. I can’t really picture why anyone would want to play it that loud unless they’re trying to cover over other sounds… and I’m not going there. I have to look this people in the eyes if I meet them on the stairs, okay?

Also I can always return fire.

And I can be loud with the best of them. Rammstein, remember. Orff’s Carmina Burana. Wagner. Disturbed. Nine Inch Nails.

That’s the equivalent of someone flicking a rubber band at you and you returning fire with a Stalin’s organ (you know, a Katyusha rocket launcher).

Anyway… there I sit, still sort of smirking and then it hits me.

Shit. Fuck. Damn.

It is Julio.

Load ‘em up. Time to return fire.

ROL

I’ll fight pretty much anything, but the sun…really?

I find it a little disturbing that things never really change.

When I was a kid, young, innocent and fresh faced (yes, this was a very long time ago) we lived in the shadow of a full blow nuclear war. It was just one of those things that could happen at any given moment and you sort of factored that in to your everyday experience of things.

In part I think that’s why it’s so easy for my generation (probably the Gen X, or roughly thereabouts) to figure we’re all going to die horribly and in bits. So we got behind the whole “save the planet” thing, because there’s something to that. Seems like a good idea, you know?

However, there’s always something new to worry about if you’re the worrying kind.

So now, we’ve god Black Holes created by mad scientists (ah, not to worry, they are very small black holes, you’ll hardly even notice them) and poisoned seas and test bombing in flu pandemics and lions and tigers and bears, ohmy.

So when the alarms go off about solar storms, or geomagnetic storms, that can cause massive damage and disrupt communication, satellites and navigational systems frankly I basically shrug and go … yeah, and?

But, we must protect ourselves from the evil sun! it’s out to get us! It’s going to rough us up.

Again – yeah, and?

‘Cause I can take on the stupidity of man, as in “stop blowing shit up!” and I can take on the stupidity of science and progress as in “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” but I really can’t take on the sun.

Celestial bodies are beyond my pay grade and way out of my division.

ROL