Archive for the 'News' Category

03
Jul

40 things about turning 40

By Functionally ReTodded 5 Comments
Categories: 1Doh, 2Doh, 3Doh, Blog, Functionally ReTodded, GBD, News and Rant

I’m sure all of you are waiting to send me cards, presents and even cards filled with money, so I will go ahead and let you know the details. On July 3, 2008 I will be turning 40. Forty. Four Zero. I’m not upset about it. I’m not sad about it. I’m not anything about it. I genuinely stopped associating anything with the number of years I’ve been alive when I left my wife’s 30th birthday party. And as I have said many times over the past two and a half years, the alternative to getting older every year is a good deal more troubling.

Anyway, in honor of my birthday and in no particular order, here are 40 things about turning 40.

1) I have way more hair on my head than I thought I would.

2) I have way less hair anywhere else than I thought I would.

3) I feel way younger at 40 than I thought I would.

4) I feel way older than I think I should.

5) Now I can hold my head high when entering the clinic asking to have my prostate exam.

6) I should not ask for a prostate exam at the dentist’s office, the movie theater or The Home Depot.

7) If I were 400 years old, I STILL wouldn’t be able to watch The McNeil Lehrer show.

8) Ditto for NPR.

9) When my dad turned 40, I was almost 15. Fuck was HE old.

10) As I turn 40, my kids are six, two point five and one. I don’t think I’m old at all.

11) Maturity is CLEARLY not age based.

12) 40 sounds like a good age to focus on developing one’s career.

13) I feel like maybe I should feel ashamed rummaging thru the xbox 360 rental section at Blockbuster.

14) I don’t.

15) As much as I hated my job at 30, I LOVE my job at 40.

16) While I hoped I would be, I’m still pretty shocked that the wife and I are still the wife and I after 22 years.

17) I love my wife and kids more than I let on sometimes.

18) Will I ever NOT love pizza?

19) I don’t look like I’m getting older. Why the hell does everyone else?

20) Is there a forty year old on the planet that owns less tools and knows how to do less WITH those tools than me? I’m pretty sure 1doh could run circles around me building a birdhouse.

21) Same goes for cars and car maintenance. I’m pretty sure I could cure cancer before I could change my own oil. Is that healthy?

22) When does one begin taking Geritol? What does it do anyway?

23) Should I concern myself with the farm report, rainfall amounts or titty bars?

24) I am constantly surprised and yet not surprised at all by the stupidity AND the kindness of strangers.

25) I am more conservative politically than I was at 30.

26) I am more disgusted with the republican party than I was at 30.

27) I’d like to start taking my kids to early season Auburn Football games so they experience that in person.

28) I want to teach my kids to do more things than I was taught to do.

29) Is your 40th birthday literally the last day it’s remotely acceptable to drink beer(s) via a funnel and some rubber tubing?

30) I have far few friends at 40 than I had at 20 or 30.

31) I have far better friends at 40 than I do at 20 or 30, and I value them more than I did then as well.

32) I am far closer to my family than I thought I would ever be.

33) I regret the time lost in my life due to my stubborn nature and my short-sightedness.

34) I am about 70-75% comfortable in my own skin and about who I am.

35) I’d like to learn more about macro and global economics so I can be more educated when I vote, invest and bitch about stuff.

36) I always regretted not ending up with a cool nickname.

37) Despite being told for years that your taste buds change and that "someday you’ll like asparagus/broccoli/cauliflower/any bean that isn’t a green bean/any other awful vegetable," I don’t think I ever will.

38) I wonder how my parents (all of them) do what they do at 20+ years older than me. My knees and ankles hurt like fuck when I get up every day as it is.

39) I look forward to turning 50 WAY more than I did yesterday.

40) PAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTTTYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!

07
Apr

my own little 3 hour tour

By Functionally ReTodded 1 Comment
Categories: Blog, Functionally ReTodded, News, Pop Culture, Poppy and Rant

Yesterday I took the girls to spend the week with their Nanna. At pretty much the last second, my dad called and said "Hey, you want some company?"

"Sure dood. Come on over."

On the way the kids watched Dora (with headphones on) so pops and I could talk.

I enjoy talking with him a lot because he doesn’t get heated or let hot-button issues pull him into fights. He is a mechanical engineer by education and a commodities broker / compliance guy by trade.

Since I’m functionally retarded and the political and stock market knowledge equivalent of an 8 year old, I like to pick his brain about stuff in the news.

Yesterday’s topics included:

Hillary and Barack’s claims that they will "take" the "record profits" of big oil.

Why gas prices are high.

Being an ACTUAL compassionate conservative (he really is), what factor(s) do you use to decide how you’re vote?

Me being the opposite of mein papa when it comes to media snippets and hot button issues and talking points, I was curious what he’d come up with for me.

As for the Democratic candidates saying they’d "TAKE" big oil’s excessive profits, his answer was "don’t worry about it."

I countered with "How could they anyway?"

He replied, "Well, if they wanted to make a contest out of it, congress could repeal the 28 or so percent tax break Big Oil gets for getting the stuff out of the ground. It’s a different way of taking but it’s taking nonetheless.

"But," he said "beyond that, it’ll never happen. There is zero chance of anything like that getting thru Congress. Ever. So even though you may find it deplorable or disgusting, you shouldn’t think about it twice. That stuff simply can’t get done. Congress is a big and expensive machine that moves INCREDIBLY slowly and carefully."

Additionally (I made this point and he agreed), I think one of the Big Oil guys should have stood up and pointed at the panel and said "Do ANY of you know the difference between profits and profit MARGIN?"

Exxon’s profits have grown immensely in the last 30 years. Their profit margin hasn’t wavered a tenth of a percent in those 30 years. Why? BECAUSE EVERYONE IS USING MORE GAS!!!

If folks really want gas prices to go down, walk or ride a fucking bike. Bitching while you’re driving does nothing. It’s simple economics. If you sell more widgets than you used to, you’re going to have bigger profits. Your margin can stay the same, but yelling at the provider for our consumption is retarded.

I brought up the issue of every state having different EPA regulations for gas and no new refineries built in 30 years as reasons for high gas costs.

Among his replies were these:

While no NEW refineries have been built, the existing refineries have been modified and reworked to increase productivity, so it’s not as bad as everyone thinks.

A bigger issue is that people think oil is oil and gas is gas. Neither of those things are true.

There are different oils, but the biggest two are the sour black nasty stuff and what’s called light sweet crude (the stuff traded on the commodities markets).

A plant built for refining light sweet crude can’t handle or process the other stuff, and vice versa. Also there is the issue of what a barrel of oil produces. There are a variety of products that come from a barrel of oil: crap for making roads, diesel, aviation fuel, motor oil type stuff, gas, and other junk.

If you are heavy into needing diesel but not road crap, you have an exce have to store it or not make it, and not making it results in higher prices for diesel like we’re seeing now.

As for how he decided upon which candidate to cast his vote, his answer was simpler than I expected and a little shocking:

"I vote for someone from the party that ISN’T running congress. Besides, there’s less difference between conservatives and liberals than ever before. Step a smidge outside of everyone’s comfort zone and you become unelectable. So every candidate drops a couple of never can pass ideas and a couple of ideological ones that are palatable, and the rest is basically the same."

That made me think too, so I asked "Then would it be smart to try to vote and take the possibility of putting supreme court nominees into consideration?"

He liked that, but repeated that candidates can’t get confirmed if they’re "too" anything (besides ugly like that Ruth Bader Ginsberg, whom he said reminded him of that lady on Laugh-in. I told him it was Ruth Buzzie and he laughed because they had the same name).

We also discussed the Bear Stearns "non-bailout." What irked him was the invoking of the Federal loan program on the Monday AFTER the Bear imploded. If that had been done five days prior, not only would Bear Stearns still be in business, but much like JP Morgan, the note for the 30 billion probably would never have been called. I could see that didn’t make him very happy either.

So a three plus hour drive with Dora blaring that could have been miserable turned out to be educational, entertaining and it went by in a snap.

Thanks poppy.

18
Mar

Things aren’t always as they seem

By Functionally ReTodded 4 Comments
Categories: Blog, Functionally ReTodded, News and Rant

If you’ve come here to chuckle or guffaw during or after reading this post, don’t bother. It ain’t gonna be funny.

My dad retired a few months ago. My dad will be 65 this spring. He worked hard, saved, sacrificed, and at times was downright tight with benjamins. But he had a bigger plan. He wanted to be able to retire at an age that would allow him to enjoy his wife, his family and especially (or hopefully) his grandchildren.

He took a job with Bear Stearns, Inc. 29 years ago. He had the privilege of working for and with some great people and some not so great people. My dad working at Bear Stearns was really my only memory of his workplace. I mean, I remember some things about the Shearson days, but the Bear is where I met his peers and friends and where I worked some to put food on the table at home when things were tight.

I made friends at the Bear. One friend worked with my dad closely for seventeen years and they never had a single cross word for one another. I am positive that this friend would do anything, up to laying down his life, for my father. Through all of the ups and downs, that is the kind of thing that matters.

That and the company’s philosophy of employee ownership. The Bear was proud of the fact that over 30% of their common stock was held by employees. That too was unique.

By this point you all know what happened, or at least you know what the TV tells you happened. The Bear’s deep investment and exposure in the sub-prime home lending markets came home to roost.

But that’s not the whole story.

The events of the last 16 months, the last six months and the last six days are irrefutable. The Bear went from $170 a share in December of 2006 to $105 in December of 2007 to $75 in January to $30 last Friday to $2 on Monday with the announcement that the company was being sold to JP Morgan for $260 million. Half of their global staff of 14,000 will lose their jobs, if not more.

Mind you, Bear Stearns was valued at between three and four billion dollars on Friday. Hell, their Madison Avenue office building is valued at around one billion dollars.

Why am I writing this you might be asking yourself?

For this.  For two years now I’ve had to listen to this bullshit about how the subprime lending crisis hurt consumers and all of these poor poor people dumbasses that ignored apparently nearly every page of their lending papers at closing that said “YOUR MORTGAGE IS ADJUSTABLE AND YOUR PAYMENTS WILL GO UP AFTER X TERM” and just said “Fuck it.  I know I can’t afford this house.  But when the whole thing goes tits up, I’ll just say I got jobbed and that the government should fix it while I take no responsibility for my actions.”

Was it the borrowers or the shareholders faults that Bear Stearns was heavy into mortgage-related derivatives?  No.  But nevertheless, the idiots that took bad loans weren’t the people ultimately really hurt by the sub-prime lending nonsense.

Do you know who  was?  Guys like my dad and his friends that spent years working and building and saving and now have seen it disappear.

Luckily, my father was more diversified than some.  One man (whom I shall not name) comes to mind.

This man sat just a couple of offices away from my dad for years.  They’ve been friends for 30 years.  They’re both from the Midwest, both Lutherans, and both men of character.

This dear friend of my father and of our family was diagnosed with cancer this last year.  he’s fighting, but you know how that stuff goes.  He also had over 90% of his retirement tied to Bear Stearns stock.

My dad talked to him today, and he told my dad the following:

“Floyd, if you’d have told me that at  65 years old I’d be broke, unemployed and have cancer, I’d have told you that you were nuts.”

You don’t owe me anything, but if you could spare a nice thought for my Dad and his friends and family at the Bear who’ve had their lives turned over in less than 96 hours, I’d appreciate it.

13
Mar

And another thing

By Functionally ReTodded 2 Comments
Categories: Functionally ReTodded, News, Pop Culture and Rant

Since I’m on a roll today, I’d like to ask a few questions and say a few words about the story of the Governor of New York and his whore.

First, this is just the billionth example of a politician getting the job, swearing to get tough and passing judgement on the shortcomings of others, but ultimately stepping in shit themselves.

Examples? Sure.

Newt Gingrich trying to impeach Clinton and berating Clinton for infidelities, and all the while Newtie was banging someone that wasn’t his wife. Oh but he solved that by having his actual wife served with divorce papers in a hospital bed where she was resting while being treated FOR CANCER!

Jesse Jackson offering to “counsel” said President Clinton through his marital woes. Jesse had to make special time for this since he was busy faking a marriage and preparing for the birth of his bastard child by way of one of his staffer’s vaginas.

Anyway, if you’ve been living under a rock, the governor of New York (who was elected on a platform of ending corruption on Wall Street and many other places) has now resigned as a direct result of seeing himself linked to some internet whorehouse and paying up to $80,000 on hookers.

Oh. Did I mention that Le Guv is married and the father of three teenage daughters?

So here are my questions, and some of these have come from other people so thanks for letting me plagiarize.

If you are a governor in the United States, you’re one of the, I don’t know, 200 most powerful people in the US. Shouldn’t you just be able to wander up to some slut from New Jersey and say “Hey baby…have you ever blown a governor?”

I mean, I have a friend that won a couple of gold medals in the Seoul Olympics, and after he got home from Korea, he took the semester off from school.

Why?

So he could go out to bars, wear his gold medal and say “Hey baby. You ever blown a gold medal winner?”

You laugh, but I assure you that he got more ass than a bus station toilet seat during that semester.

You notice I didn’t say that he came home and picked up the phone, called a high priced hooker and paid for sex.

So here’s a guy. He’s married for forever. He’s got THREE teenage daughters. And instead of picking up some homeless woman for a gum-job (a homeless woman that he could have killed, by the way), he went on the internet (you know, that place where you have no privacy anymore thanks to all things Homeland Security) and signed up for an e-whore house. He picked some runaway New Jersey girl who was “in the city for her music career.”

Right honey. Last I checked, there aren’t CD release parties just because you let a guy put his fist up your ass for four grand.

So anyway, the Governor decides to start shuffling money between accounts in large sums, drawing the attention of the IRS.  And it’s extra funny that Governor “no more hootinanny, there’s a new sheriff in town and I’m gonna clean up this state AND this city” is the one that can’t find a more creative way to bust a nut than to find a tramp on the internet.   You know, one he can take to a hotel IN MANHATTAN and have to sneak past his security detail in order to get his pecker wet.

A side note here.  What does it say about your security detail if you, the governor, can sneak past them to another room in someone else’s name that you paid for, in order to get a little?  These clowns are “protecting” the governor of one of the three biggest states in the US…a guy who had pretty big aspirations to change his address to a street that had 1600 in its range.

And again, he was willing to throw away marriage, family, career (current and future) all for this Paris Hilton / Lindsay Lohan wannabe.  Seriously…who elected this complete fucktard?

And now, we have a young woman who ran away from home and decided that selling her juice box to strangers for money by way of the internet was somehow less pathetic and retarded if  she did it on a website with a fancy name like The Emporer’s Club.

Hey honey.  I’ve got a website called The Golden Diamond Platinum Club.  Will you toss my salad for eight bucks and some string cheese?

And now, thanks to the media and our starfucker mentality, this life support system for a used up vagina is going to be famous.  Not John F. Kennedy famous or Martin Luther King Jr. famous.  More like William Hung famous or Lorena Bobbitt famous.  And I’m already tired of you.

So please.  For our sakes.  Please please please climb on to some guys joint who’s hitting 140mph an the New Jersey turnpike in his Ferarri and then you can both pile into a bridge abutment and give me some peace.

Oh, and one more thing.  Governor, you are beyond shameful and disgusting.  You sold the state of New York your “I’m up here and I want to get rid of everyone that’s down there,” and despite your efforts to end some crime, you ended up committing the crime that’s one of the oldest on the planet.  Actually the two oldest:  infidelity and whoredom.

Congrats.  You’re not only dumb.  You’re dumber than almost any of us.

p.s. Fuck you and stay off my television.

13
Mar

By Functionally ReTodded 3 Comments
Categories: Blog, Food, Functionally ReTodded and News

Here’s a story for ya:

Enjoy.

I have many questions.

1) How does someone sit on a toilet for two years?  If I stay in there for 30 minutes my ass, legs and feet go to sleep.

2) How many bathrooms did this place have?  I mean, was this guy hammering beers and when he went to pee remembered his girlfriend was stuck to the toilet so he’d just pee in the tub or the sink?

3) Who was doing all of the cooking and cleaning during these two years?

4) If they wanted to have “relations,” did he just walk up, drop trau and let it happen? (I just finished Tucker Max’s book “I hope they serve beer in hell,” and he told a story of getting a smoothie whilst dropping the deuce).

5) What did she eat?  I can’t comprehend eating or drinking anything while I’m on the can.  I have friends that take coffee and / or cigarettes in with them, but I’ve never been able to do that.

6) Did she change clothes?  I mean, not full outfits, but for Easter would should have someone bring her a nice dress, which she’d carefully place in a pile around her ankles?  Or maybe at Christmas her boyfriend would bring her a Santa hat or something.

7) How exactly does one sit so still for so long that their skin grows around the toilet seat?   I have to fidget more than a cat trying to get comfortable for a nap when I’m doing work.  This chick couldn’t have been kept on the can against her will, right?

8) For holidays, did they bring the kids table into the bathroom and put three chairs on the other sides of the table and then serve everybody Thanksgiving dinner or something?  Or did they just bring her a tv tray.

9) Did she watch any tv while she was in there?  I find that time moves relatively slowly when I’m on the can.  Wouldn’t you go crazy if you sat on the toilet with no mental or visual stimulus for a week or two, let alone two years?

10)It said in the story that her boyfriend would ask her to come out of  the bathroom and she’d say “Maybe tomorrow?”  What the hell?  When 2doh is wiggling her fingers under the door whilst I poop, I implore her to give me “a few more minutes.”  And this guy just took “Maybe tomorrow” as an answer and went about his day of masturbating and killing mexican hookers in the kitchen?

11)Who paid the bills?  Was the government involved in supporting this lazy bitch?  And if so, did her boyfriend forge her name on the disability checks or did she endorse them and assume he would deposit them correctly?

12)does anyone else want to see pictures of this place (without her of course)?  I was shocked that this story didn’t include the phrases “Feral Cats,” “rooms full of rotting garbage” or “Last girlfriend’s dead body found in freezer.”  These people should be studied, not prosecuted.

13)what does it say about people or your town when the local law enforcement’s response to this story is “”It really doesn’t surprise me,” What surprises me is somebody wasn’t called in a bit earlier.”?

Why wasn’t someone called a bit earlier!?!?!?!?  If I’m a half hour late coming home from work or to my parents house or something, someone calls me.  who outside of the house didn’t bother to wonder a single bit where this woman was for TWO YEARS?

Then again, maybe it was accidental.  You know, like those really fat people that have to be saved by Geraldo Rivera or Richard Simmons, a crew of firemen, a flatbed tow truck and the jaws of life.  Maybe after a weekend binge of beer, hot wings and all you can eat thai food, this chick went in the WC to really get herself right, and after a while she was just a little stuck, but then before she knew it, her fast growing skin had sealed itself to / around the toilet and then she was stuck, but she was so embarassed that she tried to play it off  as nothing and her boyfriend, being mostly retarded or something just figured “Hey, as long as I bring her food and water, everything should be fine.”

Anybody else have any questions about this story?

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