Is Jon Hispanic or Italian?

I think this video will shed some light on my true heritage….

when good jokes become websites…

For those of you who listen to the Semimodest Proposal, a weekly podcast I guest host with Justin and Jerame, you may have already heard this story. But I feel like telling it again, so I’m going to tell it again.

In August 2006, I was in Bruges, Belgium, the headquarters of my 10 week drunken tour of Western Europe. If memory serves me correctly, it was early afternoon, during what we always called Siesta (I’m unsure what the Flemish term is for “nap time”. Either way, a vast majority of the shops in town closed from the hours 2 pm to 5 pm.

We often spent those hours waking up from the previous night’s drinking excursion. Asher called it a ‘Belgian Morning’.

A Belgian Morning is similar to a hangover, in that, it’s an after effect of drinking all night. However, the similarities end there. A Belgian Morning doesn’t give you a headache or a stomach ache, because the beer is so clean and well made. It just makes you crave a sandwich between the hours of 2pm and 5pm…when you can’t get a sandwich.

Needless to say, there wasn’t a whole lot to do during Siesta, so we resorted to watching the only English channel on TV or screwing around on the internet.

One afternoon, we were looking up random stuff on Wikipedia, and we found this article on wet t-shirt contests.  We had a pretty good laugh about it, but Shane wanted to see more pictures of it, rather than just a stub on Wikipedia.

So I told Shane, if he really wanted to find more pictures and information on wet t-shirt contests, he should look at the most comprehensive site on the internet for such pictures, Wikiporn.

Walking right in to my trap, and without missing a beat, Shane chimed in with, “Is that .org or .com?” By this point, I was halfway down the stairs and laughing my ass off.

Turns out the joke was on me.

I mentioned at the top of this story that if you listened to the Semimodest podcast, then you may have already heard this story. It was the last time I told this story before now. It was also the last time I told the story as a punchline to a good joke…

And the last time I make a joke about an internet site with a catchy name without immediately trying to buy the domain, and selling it to the highest bidder….because when I made that joke, no such site existed. But when I told the story, Justin actually found it…

Check it out for yourself. I don’t want to link it to the site, but I’ll give you a hint….

It is .org.

 

Rednecks and Ringtones

In my 11 months at AT&T, I’ve learned a lot of things. About cell phones and people mostly. Nothing earth-shattering, really, just general things.

For some reason, and I can’t quite seem to get my head around it, rednecks go absolutely bat shit for ringtones.

To clarify:

I take between 30-60 calls a day, predominantly from Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas. In other words, the redneck states. And I kid you not, there’s a 50/50 shot they’re calling about ringtones.

What is the fascination with ringtones, honestly?

You pay $2.50 for 45 seconds of your favorite song, when you can buy the whole damn song on iTunes for 99 cents.

I talked to a lady today who was pissed off because her memory card wouldnt work with the warranty phone AT&T sent her to replace the old. What were the contents of her memory card?

183 ringtones. One hundred and eighty three ringtones.

That’s like $500 in ringtones. That’s absolutely absurd. And I know she didn’t have $500 to just throw around because she was from Seagoville.

(Side bar: For those of you who didn’t have the misfortune of growing up in Mesquite, a redneck town in its own right, and the butthole of the DFW Metroplex, Seagoville is the butthole of Mesquite. So, for those of you scoring at home, Seagoville is the butthole of the butthole of Dallas. Rednecks and speed freaks as far as the eye can see.)

Another lady I talked to spent 9 hours trying to get a ringtone. Now, I love to waste time, I can do it with the best of them, but nine hours is a really long time. She basically spent an entire work day trying to download, “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere”, which I found to be hilariously ironic.

I guess I just don’t get it. I work with cell phones all day and so these things piss me off.

Maybe AT&T should come up with a new line of ringtones specifically for rednecks. They could have a whole series called, “NASCAR sounds”, and it would just be one clip of a stock car going 900 miles an hour…

“wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh…..”

…and then list it 50 different times on the website as ‘Dale Jr. Engine tone’, ‘Tony Stewart Engine tone’or whatever..and sell it a million times over.

I can see the news report now.

A friendly game of, “Name that engine” gone horribly awry.

One dead, two injured. Tonight at 9.

this is why I don’t gamble…

About three weeks ago, my friend Brandon and I decided to put together an NCAA Tournament bracket for a handful of our friends. We decided everyone could buy in for $20, winner take all. As usual, I put off filling my bracket in until 4am the night before the tournament. It wasn’t till I had already finished it, that I realized Brandon and I were the only ones to fill out brackets.

The morning of the tournament Brandon texted me and asked if the bet was still on, even though no one bothered to participate. I told him I’d let him know in three weeks when the tournament ended and I’d know whether I’d won or lost.

The first day of the tournament treated me alright, but it really screwed Brandon. He picked UConn to go the Final Four, and they lost in the first round to San Diego. The next 3 rounds treated me just as well, and I picked 3 of the Final Four teams to Brandon’s one.

So all’s well, right? There’s no way I could lose.

I picked UCLA to beat Kansas.

Brandon picked Kansas to beat someone, UConn, maybe.

There were 32 points left on the table going into the championship game and I had a 20 point lead on Brandon.

The catch is this.

Here: I go to Brandon and his fiancee Emily’s place a couple of times a month to watch big boxing matches and basketball games (they have a badass flat screen HDTV). And they are always more than generous with their booze and pizza and what not, so I had no intention of collecting on my winnings.

And then Mario Chalmers hit that goddamned three-pointer.

So I’m out 20 bucks.

Maybe I’ll just buy the pizza next time I go over there…

 

well…

At the behest of a certain “Toph Miller”, I have decided to join the ranks. Fall in.  Sir, yes, sir.  I used to blog somewhat regularly on myspace, but it wasn’t very frequent, rarely topical and for the most part, ill-advised.

It is my intention with this blog to just write shit. You see, i’m one of those guys who likes to think of himself as a writer, but I don’t actually write. And I haven’t for sometime. I chalk it up to some sort of mental block or lack of creativity.

Both of those reasons are stupid.

My brain is generally on overdrive. Disecting situations. Replaying them in my head. Substituting much wittier comments into the replays. You should hear some of the things I’ve come up with the second time around…

Fucking hilarious.

Anyway, I plan on using this space as jumping off point. See if I can’t kick-start the ol’ noggin.

I’m buying a new computer tomorrow, which will be nice. I’ll be able to spend a little bit more time online.

Anyway, I plan on putting a bit more thought into future posts….

So…you know…give me a fucking break…

jon