Gangsta rap

I am so sick and tired of being glared at by these wanna-be tough guys every time I walk by the magazine rack. Can't I pick up a copy of "Woman's Day" magazine (I like the quizzes ok? I think I've been "emotionally distant" lately) without having some thug try to intimidate me via magazine cover? Yeah, you're a real tough guy staring menacingly at the camera in that lush studio during your photo shoot. Pass me a bottle of purified water and give me a freaking break you pretender! The "gangsta" rap lifestyle is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of, and the only thing rap music has to offer is the poor pronunciation of our language and the marginalizing of incredibly stupid behavior.

But since this is a million dollar industry, I figure that there are some of you who might want to become "gangstas" so you can cash in on the craze. Fortunately for you, my blog is here to help! You'll be happy to know that this lofty goal is well within your reach!

To be a hardcore "gangsta" rapper, you need to come up with a name so pointless and stupid that it will draw the attention of idiots like a bug light. This might seem daunting to you at first, because it takes a certain kind of dolt to think along these lines, but I'll give you a tried and true formula for doing it and soon you'll sound just as ridiculous as "50 Cent" or "Snoop Doggy Dog" or "Chingy". First, you'll need to find some sort of household object...it can be anything you see, like a spoon. Next, you need to select a letter of the alphabet, like the letter "B". Then, you need to select the name of an animal that sounds cool or tough...like "wolf". Finally, you need to select a term that denotes age or time in some way...something like "Daddy" or "Lil" or "Old". Once you have these terms picked out, you just put them together in random order and you can make all sorts of names! Using "spoon", "B", "Wolf" I was able to come up with the following:

• Spoony B
• Wolf Daddy
• Old Spoony
• B-Wolf
• Lil' Wolfy

I think I'll go with Lil' Wolfy...yeah...sounds all "hiz-ot" (that's how unbelievably intelligent hip-hop artists say "hot")

It's not enough to just have a "gangsta" rap name - you also have to look as stupid as you sound! You can use the magazine cover above for guidance, but basically here's what you'll need. You need to get some pants that are no less than 10 sizes too big for you...you should have to pull these pants up at least once every 10 seconds (if this is not the case then you didn't buy pants big enough). Then you'll need to get either a basketball jersey or some sort of T-shirt extolling the virtues of smoking weed. If you really want to be tough, you can do as "Fiddy" did in the picture above and wear a bulletproof vest around so people think you are involved in constant gun battles all day. Then, and this is really important, you'll need two (2) layers of head covering. You'll need some sort of rag to tie around your head, and then you'll want to wear a baseball hat on top of that - but not correctly. The hat should appear as though it were placed on your head by a drunk clown having a seizure.

Oh, I almost forgot...you need to wear lots of "bling". "Bling" is the term "gangsta" rappers have coined for jewelry that's been created to look like it should be worn by a giant. Whereas a normal pendant would be the size of a penny and hang on a thin gold chain, a "bling" pendant is the size of a dinner plate, has your name engraved on it just underneath the caricature of some girl with an extremely large butt, and hangs from a chain that looks like it should have a boat anchor attached to it. There's a reason it has to be ridiculously big and extremely gaudy - a real "gansta" rapper MUST let people know that he/she has a lot of money. This is crucial, because when people see the way you are dressed and the way you talk and act, their first response will be to label you a poorly-dressed imbecile with no social skills and the vocabulary of a mossy rock. The job of the "bling" is to tell people, "Hey, I may look like Steve Urkel's retarded cousin, but I'm rich so I must not be as stupid as I look and sound" - basically a lie but we're not exactly dealing with a target audience full of geniuses either. Important note: your mouth is a great place for "bling" that should not be neglected! How cool would it be to have gold caps for my teeth with "Lil' Wolfy" engraved in them? How smokin' would that be? That's the...uhh..."shiznizzle" or something.

But hey, where rap really shines is in the deeply intellectual lyrics that these "gangstas" create. I mean, what good is a "gangsta" rapper without his "dope" lyrics? You're probably thinking to yourself, "I can't write lyrics like these rappers do...I've never experienced the gangster sort of life that they write about in their music!" Don't worry- neither have they. Can you make rhyming statements about what life would be like sitting around all day drinking low quality beer and inhaling copious amounts of marijuana while degrading women and taking shots at people passing by your front porch? Congratulations! You're a hip-hop artist! It's actually very easy to come up with rap lyrics once you are able to get yourself thinking like a person who has no intentions whatsoever of contributing one single positive thing to society or the world at large during their lifetime. You should also consider cursing a lot to earn yourself one of those adult content stickers on the CD as those tend to help sales quite a bit.

Boy, I sure am glad society is the steaming pile of waste that it is these days...otherwise, we wouldn't tolerate such absolute crap being produced and mass marketed. Without rap music, these "artists" would have no means of expressing their stupid, immature, vile viewpoints on millions of impressionable 13-year olds!

Here's hopin' some fool don't go get his gat and bust a cap on dis playa fo bustin' out such dope lyrics on da state of da rap game...you feel me dawg? You can't fade Lil' Wolfy!

Feel free to create your own "gangsta" name and post it in my comments section!

Halloween Candy

After carefully reviewing the candy my daughter received this year from "Trick or Treat", I think it's time for a blog on the subject.   

"Tootsie Rolls" - I personally don't care for these candies because I think they taste like chocolate that's been dipped in warm sweat and then baked to the point that it's uncomfortably chewy, but I can at least understand why some people would like these, so giving the regular flavor of these is ok I guess.  Where I have major problems is when I look in the bag and see FREAKING FRUIT FLAVORED "Tootsie Rolls".  FRUIT FLAVORED!!!  Again, here we go mixing pleasure and pain...we can't just have chocolate, oh no...we have to throw healthy stuff in there with it.  Who wants candy that tastes like fruit?  "Tootsie Rolls" are supposed to taste like chocolate, not bananas or blueberries.  If I want bananas I'll eat a dang bowl of "Corn Flakes" (because that's the only way anyone EVER eats that "Corn Flakes, as it tastes so bland and boring that you literally have to put fruit in there so that your taste buds don't become confused and think you're eating the Styrofoam lid off of a beer cooler).  Congratulations on making a mediocre candy much worse.

Ok, seriously...what are "Dots" supposed to be?  When you take them out of the box they are really dry and have some sort of powdery substance on them...but then when you put them in your mouth they get all slimy!  It's like eating candy oysters.  They really don't have much taste to them either.  I think these might be the leftover slime from the gummy bear factory...any gummy stuff that doesn't get any sugar and flavoring on it gets molded and boxed up as "Dots".  Plain and simple - these suck worse than an afternoon at a bluegrass festival.  Do not give these out to anyone you even remotely care about.

No candy presents quite the dilemma that "Whoppers" do.  These little malted milk balls are definitely tasty, and they don't seem to fill you up much either, so you feel like you can eat about a hundred of them.  They're like puffed air with chocolate goodness and angel wings.  Later in the day though, you realize something about stuff that's "malted" - primarily, that it will cause you some intestinal discomfort through the production of copious amounts of gas.  You probably didn't know about this, but that's why I'm here...to provide you with insights you normally wouldn't have on your own.  (If you want proof, go get yourself a box of "Whoppers" and a chocolate malt, and then clear your schedule for that afternoon - oh, and I'd also recommend a fresh box of matches and a $50 gift card to the Yankee Candle store, get the "Caramel" scent and you'll be all set)  So what do you do?  Complicating this is the fact that, unless you've been to an extremely crappy neighborhood and have a sack full of Peach "Tootsie Rolls", you'll have plenty of other good candy to choose from that won't bloat you to the point that you float in the bathtub later that evening.  Do you risk it?  Is it worth it?  I'll leave it up to you.

It really bugs the heck out of me to see people giving out stuff other than candy on Halloween.  Your kids go up to the door all excited, expecting some candy, and then some wisenheimer gives them a stinking toothbrush or an apple or some sort of herbal Vitamin-C lozenge.  These hippy do-gooders need to be forcibly removed from our neighborhoods and our communities!  How dare they force their healthy habits on our children!  How dare they interfere with our night of sugar orgies and rotting enamel!  My kid should come home with an aching belly, a shirt smeared with chocolate and preserved marshmallow guts, and a buzz that will require 2 or 3 Nyquil popsicles to beat down.  When I dump that bag of candy out on the floor to sort through the loot and see a tube of AquaFresh toothpaste in there, my brain begins to smolder and burn and I begin to wonder how sweet it would be to jam that tube up your left nostril and squeeze it.  I seethe with rage at the thought of you smugly sitting there, so happy with yourself that you've turned Trick Or Treat into some sort of crusade...what a freaking NERD!     

See you have to remember that it's all about the kids!  When you're making your candy purchase, you need to consider them!  Think about the disgust on their little faces when they get home and see that you chose to go with that sack of off-brand no-name candy just so you could save 20 cents.  Think of the heartbreak when they reach in and pull out a poorly-packaged "John's Peanut Butter Cup" and choke it down.  Think of the disappointment and frustration they'll feel when they see that you gave them some mint floss instead of candy.  Think of the sadness they'll experience when they see that you decided to give out "Milk Duds" instead of any one of the fine "Hershey's" products.  Don't be an absolute loser on Halloween - step it up and give out some good stuff.

"I'd like to thank everyone for coming to today's meeting and...wait a second...where's Jeremy?  He hasn't been at his desk all day and he's missed 2 other meetings!" 

"He's...umm...indisposed at the moment sir."

"DARN IT I told him to go easy on those Whoppers...why do they even offer those in a 5 pound bag?"

The doctor's office

I've been struggling for about 2 weeks now with some sort of sinus infection that's ravaging my body, and it never fails that when you get around people the first thing they'll say is "Why don't you go see the doctor?"

Well, I'll tell you why...

To begin with, I'm not sure I like the idea of actually having to go inside the doctor's office.  The waiting room is basically like a large leper colony in which every sick person who's been to see the doctor that day has spent a great deal of time.  You walk in and the first thing you have to do is figure out where you're going to sit.  The way you do this is by looking at all the people in there and trying to decide which ones are the least sick and the least contagious.  If you're lucky you can find a few people who are there because of broken bones or torn ligaments or pulled muscles - if you're not, you find yourself debating whether to sit next to the guy who's sweating profusely with a glazed over look in his eyes or the lady with a hacking cough who refuses to even attempt to cover her mouth.  This is germ hell, and you are about to get a guided tour.  I mean, the first thing you have to do to get in there is touch the door handle that every infected, disease-carrying sick person in the entire county has used that day. 

Maybe this is their attempt at guaranteeing themselves repeat business, because there's no way this is a healthy situation to be in.  You go to the doctor for a sinus infection, but in order to see him you have to spend at least 2 hours sitting in a small, poorly-ventilated room with people who are on the verge of death from some rare plague.  How is sitting next to someone with the flu going to help me get over my sinus infection?  How can this be something a doctor would recommend?  If I asked him whether or not I should go spend a few hours hanging out with a truckload of typhoid patients, he'd surely say no...but he has no problem with me chillin' in his waiting room for hours at a time amongst the living dead. 

Doctor's are always telling you to wash your hands, but what about the clothes you wear in the waiting room?  I can tell you that as soon as I get home from the doctor's office, I immediately strip down and isolate the clothes I was wearing...I'll leave them someplace for at least a week so that any microscopic organisms die off...and only then will I wash them, by themselves, at least once and with the extra rinse cycle. 

When you go to put your name on the waiting list, the receptionist working there has to treat you like a brand new patient who looks like they'll leave without paying.  How many times do you need to scan my freaking insurance card?  It's plastic and it's laminated, so it's not like the information is changing all that much.  They ask you on the sign-in sheet whether or not your insurance has changed, and you put "NO", and then they go "Sir I need to scan your insurance card."  At this point, once they see that you've stated that your insurance information has not changed, and once they look at your card for the 35th time to verify that it has not changed, they...get you to fill out paperwork to give them your insurance information again!  Sometimes I think they just throw that paperwork away and get you to fill it out each time to help make the hours you'll spend waiting to get treatment seem shorter.  It's a way to make you waste time, which they specialize in.

I'm not one to question the wisdom of my doctor, but is it really necessary for me to get an X-Ray every single visit?  It seems like no matter what is wrong, they always want to see my skeletal system up close and personal.  "Stuffy nose huh?  We better X-Ray your entire body to see exactly what is going on here."  "Sounds like you've sprained your ankle...but just to be sure lets get some X-Rays of your head and chest area."  If I walk in and I've got snot dripping from my nose and sound like I've got an entire washcloth stuffed up each nostril, do you really need an X-Ray to determine what the problem is?  THERE'S GREEN CRAP COMING OUT OF MY NOSE - MAYBE IT'S A FREAKING SINUS INFECTION YOU DOLT!  But no...let's do a series of X-Rays just to make sure that it's actually snot and not radioactive material leaking from the nuclear core hidden in my brain that's only visible via a CAT scan.

I long for the day when I can go to the pharmacy and buy antibiotics over the counter...

"Well Mr. Conner, it appears that you are completely unable to breathe due to copious amounts of thick, nasty-looking mucous in your nasal passages.  Just to be sure, I'd like to snake a tube up inside your colon and take a look around, and then assuming your paperwork is in order and the background check comes back ok  I'll give you some medicine."

Raw

For a variety of reasons, I'm really ticked off today.  I've decided to just rant about stuff in this blog and label it "raw" because that's what musicians and producers do when they want to sell you something that's had zero preparation put into it.  So after reading this, when you say to yourself "That blog sucked" just remember that it's "raw" and maybe you'll look at it differently and appreciate the behind-the-scenes look into the mind of the artist...or some crap like that.   

I am going to mount a 50 caliber machine gun to the rear of my car and blast the ever-loving daylights out of the next jackhole that tailgates me.  I've never understood the logic of tailgating...you want the person in front of you to go faster, so you threaten to wreck their car to make a point?  Do you freaking realize that if you rear-end someone that it's YOU who's at fault in that wreck and YOU who will have to pony up to fix the car and pay the medical bills and probably get your stupid self sued?  I wonder how people like this are able to dress themselves in the morning without a detailed instruction manual containing pictures.  I figure eliminating you from the gene pool will be doing everyone a favor and that you probably won't be missed.

While I'm at it, I'm going to shoot everyone who has one of the following on their car:

• A sticker on their back window with their last name on it in that stupid looking edgy font.  What is the point of this anyway?  Are you under the delusion that people will recognize you and be like, "Ohh, there goes a member of the Estevez family - those guys are important!"  If you're driving a jacked-up 88 Nissan Sentra with tinted windows and a spoiler you've pretty much relegated yourself to the bottom of the societal bin anyway...you would think you'd want to conceal your identity rather than announce it. 
• A sticker that says "Come to the dark side...we have cookies"  You're not going to want to eat those cookies after you see where I'm going to jam them you little goth wanna-be.  Don't you have a Widespread Panic concert to be attending? somewhere?  If you're late they might not save you any smoke...
• Gold chains around your license plate, simply because this indicates how out of touch you are with the times and because I hate it enough to want to punish the behavior

Recently my company gave the employees an 11% bonus, which is awesome.  When the check came, 40% of that money was taken by the government via taxes.  That is not a typo...it was 40%, almost half of the money.  

What the #$%^!@?

You greedy, unethical, power-hungry, ignorant, tyrannical windbag losers!  Our government provides worse service than Hardees, but is so inefficient that it requires heaps of our money to do it.  So we give tons and get jack squat in return...I won't even get anything out of social security once I retire because it'll be bankrupt!  I promise you this, if I had it within my power to do so I would fire every single politician in this country right now and condemn them to live under the system they've burdened us with (you realize they have their own retirement plan right?).  They should all receive the scorn of this entire nation for being such losers, but we're too busy worrying about ATM fees to realize the raping we get each time our checks come out.  They tax my company when it makes the dollar, tax me when that dollar is paid to me, tax it again when it's spent and tax the company that makes it...and this goes on and on.  Somewhere George Washington is rolling over in his freaking grave...

I still don't feel any better after ranting...I'll have to go kick a puppy or something I guess.

Please don't leave me comments like "Cheer up!" or "Smile!" - I hate feel good crap like that and it does not affect me one bit.  If you really want to cheer me up, send me some cash.

Oh, the memories we'll have!

My 5 yr. old daughter was goofing around instead of getting ready to go to church the other night when I told her that she needed to hustle up and get her shoes on or else she'd "miss the boat".  She replied, "Daddy, we ride to church in a car.  We don't have to take a boat!"  Isn't that cute?  Isn't it so cute when you're kids say things like that, especially when you are busting butt to leave and the baby is screaming and you can't find your keys?  Isn't it so cute to have that little sweet voice correcting you in the midst of all that?  And later when you find out that little dolly was playing with your keys and that's how they ended up in the bottom of the toy chest, don't you just want to give them a big 'ole squeeze?  Isn't it adorable how they took a fat crayon and wrote all over the walls of your house because the 4, 587 sheets of blank paper they had weren't ideal enough to draw a stick-figure Blues Clues treasure hunt map on?  Oh the memories we'll have of the time when the baby crapped himself so profusely that it spilled out of his diaper and into his car seat - I'll never forget the way he got it all over himself and almost made us puke and how we had to throw away the car seat and hose him down like he was the only known carrier of a fatal disease - so precious!  And if only we could forever capture the feelings we had the moment our daughter informed us that "somehow" her slice of pizza ended up face down on the carpet and then she accidentally stepped on it.  Who would ever want to experience life without having worked on your home printer for 3 hours before discovering the source of the problem to be a penny lodged in a spot that only a malicious little hand could have put it? 

Have you ever been at a friends house who had kids before you had kids yourself and experienced them changing a poop diaper?  The smell will bring tears to your eyes and you'll be fighting your gag reflex like crazy, but then your friends will say "Ah, it will be different when it's your own kids.  You won't mind it then."  BULLCRAP.  It stinks just as bad when it's your own kids!  You could submerge my 1 year old in a submarine and you'd still be keenly aware of the moment he grunted.  Yeah, I'll be sure to cherish the memory of those diapers for the rest of my life.

And who can forget the wonderful moments you spend playing with your kids?

"Daddy!  Let's play the Princess and the mean Prince!  You be the mean Prince and I'll be the Princess!"

"Ok, how do we play tha - "

(WHAM!  "Disney Princess Ariel Magic Wand" to the left testicle...)

Good times folks...good times!

How is it that my kids can't manage to get their trash into the trash can, which has a huge opening, but yet never fail to smack me directly in the eye or across the jewels with any small, whip-like toys they own?

Praise the Lord for my wonderful wife, who puts up with this sort of thing to a degree I cannot imagine so that my children can have a stay-at-home mom!