After learning of the death of Dick Clark, a group of Nigerian businessmen have been sending out numerous invitations via email to help the world deal with this unexpected loss through their latest endeavor “The $25,000 Pyramid Scheme.”
After learning of the death of Dick Clark, a group of Nigerian businessmen have been sending out numerous invitations via email to help the world deal with this unexpected loss through their latest endeavor “The $25,000 Pyramid Scheme.”
So I’ve been keeping up to date on this whole “CSU wants to build a new football stadium on campus even though they already have one a few miles off campus” ordeal. For everyone not up to speed on the matter, read the previous sentence. Now that everyone is caught up, one of the proposals is to tear down two of the freshman dormitories to make space for this new structure.
Of course everyone who watches half as many 1980’s B movies as I do knows exactly where I’m going with this: THIS IS THE EXACT SAME PLOT AS THE MOVIE “REVENGE OF THE NERDS!”
Anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, go watch it on Netflix. Now that everyone is caught up, how cool is that analogy? The football coach is played by the football coach (played wonderfully by a young and slimmer John Goodman), the President of CSU is played by the dean of Adams State College. I’m not sure who the nerds are going to be, but they will be walking up to their dorm only to see it blown up (for dramatic effect only– I don’t think dynamite would be the appropriate tool for the job) and John Goodman standing on top of a bobcat with a mega-phone telling all the new students to report to the gymnasium for their temporary housing.
Having no other choice, the nerds will band together and fight the new stadium constructions like most conflicts in life– in a college carnival setting. The nerds will eventually come out the winners. Lewis, the head nerd, will have sex with the hot head cheerleader (although he did the deed while pretending to be her boyfriend– I’m pretty sure that could be considered rape.) Gilbert will find work as a emergency room doctor until he dies of a brain tumor at the end of season seven on ER. As for the rest of the group, I think one of them was on an episode of Star Trek as an alien or something.
So just remember– don’t underestimate the nerds.
I truly believe that any sleep deprivation study needs to use 10 month old children who wake up a random intervals in the middle of the night. My second daughter, Samantha, is quite skilled at screaming at random intervals in the night for reasons completely unknown to me.
So I took her downstairs the other night to try and calm her down, but none of the usual tricks were doing me any good. Eventually I just sat down with her on the recliner and turned on the television. After randomly moving through channels we both dozed off in the chair. When I woke up I had a bunch of strange thoughts in my head such as:
Drug cartels from south of the boarder are funding conservative super PACs to keep funding for the war on drugs
The Rosetta Stone company is actively suppressing Esperanto for their own finical gain.
Jimmy Carter, at night when he isn’t working on being an international peace ambassador, is a super hero whose only goal is to get the United States to convert to the metric system.
So I’m not really sure what channel I was watching when I fell asleep, but I highly suspect it was one of those crazy 24 news channels. That, or I was watching the Colbert report commenting on these topics. The last alternative is that I’m just strange enough to think of these things on my own.
I was looking through my wordpress admin page and I noticed more than 1,000 spam responses in the comments section. By default I don’t post any of these to my site, but just for fun I looked through some of the stuff that people are trying to get on my site. About half of the comments were in, and I’m just kind of guessing here because there were a bunch of backwards Rs and other symbols I didn’t recognize, Russian or some similar language. If these spammers are so smart, can’t they figure out only to spam sites that at least use the same character set?
While I was messing around with my website setup, I thought I would give the “automagically post this to my facebook page” plugin another shot. I tried a few months ago but wasn’t able to get it to work. Here goes attempt number 2. Engage!
Mitt Romney is still working to clarify his statement, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” On an unplanned trip to chat with reporters in the rear of his campaign jet, the former Governor of Massachusetts worked to explain his intentions of the comment in question.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Romney proclaimed. “I was referring to the fact that the very poor have a safety net. Let me give you an example here– I was watching television up front and witnessed a story about a pretty young homeless woman who came into the emergency room with a mysterious illness. During her stay at the hospital she received top-notch care from the best doctors in the building and not once was refused treatment based on ability to pay. This reassures me that our safety net is working. Thank you Doctor House.”
Security screening in one major airport was completely closed today for the better part of an hour after experiencing another cupcake related incident. A senior administrator at the TSA explained. “While we feel that we have made every effort to explain our actions related to the ‘cupcake in a jar’ incident, we would also like to ask the general public not to bring a dozen cupcake jars through security– especially when their primary ingredient appeared to be chocolate flavored laxatives.”
A high level administrator at the Transportation Security Administration responded to criticism when an agent recently confiscated a cupcake from an airline passenger in December because the food product in question exceeded the maximum quantities for liquid, gels, and aerosols. A detailed explanation of the situation was posted on the official TSA blog, ending with:
“And really, nobody is going to care about this whole cupcake fiasco in a few months once we instruct all of our agents to feel up women if the agent suspects her bra is constructed with more than three ounces of gel enhancing material.”
An older man is sitting in an over-sized chair. “My name is Steve, and I am the product manager here at the Select Comfort’s Sleep Number bed product line. While our product line has been an amazing success over the years, we are always looking for new ways to improve our customer’s sleep experience. I recently received a letter in the mail that pointed out a way in which we can improve our award-winning beds.”
My husband and I both love our sleep number bed. I keep my side at 25 and he sets his side at 85. We both sleep well all the time. The only problem is that sometimes at night we like to play some “adult” games, and having both sides set to the same number for a short time would really help. Can you help us out here?
“I understand your problem. Suppose you are playing a game of ‘duck, duck, goose.’”
Switches to a shot of a man and a woman on their bed in their pajamas. The husband is sitting in the middle of the bed and the wife is behind him touching him on the head saying “duck” each time. Suddenly she yells “goose” and starts running in a small circle on the bed. The husband gets up to chase her, but once he steps on the soft side of the bed he losses his balance and flies off the bed at a 45 degree angle.
“Now who wants that to happen to them when they are getting goosed?” The man in the chair asked.
“To solve this problem we have added additional buttons to the sleep number controllers which we have called the ‘duck’ buttons. Once configured, the ‘duck on’ button will bring both sides of the bed to the same preset pressure.”
The woman and man are in bed. The man is asleep. The woman reaches over and touches him gently on the shoulder. He wakes up and looks at her. She smiles and ever so slightly raises her eyebrow. He smiles back at her. She reaches for something under the covers and pulls out a game of Jenga. They both jump out from under the covers and start setting up the game in the middle of the bed. They are about to start playing, and then she remembers to hit the ‘duck on’ button.
A different woman is sleeping in her bed. A man comes into the room. He is unshaven, has a significant pot belly, and has just finished a can of beer. The throws the empty can in the corner of the room and gets into bed. He looks over at his wife and grabs his controller to hit the ‘duck on’ button. The wife wakes up and realizes what is going on in the bed. She reaches over to her controller and hits the ‘duck off’ button. The bed returns to the original settings.
“Hitting the ‘duck off’ button can be used to express an unwillingness to play games in bed, in addition to resetting the bed at the end of the game.” the man in the chair explained. “So from everyone here at Sleep Number, have a good night sleep after you get ducked.”
So, it is New Year’s Eve and the clock says 9 PM (mountain standard time, for those who need to know) and I’m sure that everyone expects me to be heading out the door with the wife, kids, and dog out to experience the legendary Loveland clubbing scene. But no, I’ve got other plans. For example, just to get the evening ball rolling, I have upgraded WordPress on my newfunny.com website from version 3.2 to version 3.3. Next on the agenda, view the annual stats WordPress was nice enough to send me.
So, according to WordPress, my website was viewed roughly 8,200 times in 2011. Now don’t get me started about how to measure how many people visit your website in a given time period. OK, you talked me into it– you see, I could log onto my goDaddy account and download every single http request and tell you that number is how many people looked at my site, but that would count a whole bunch of stuff (like automated processes that are looking to index information on my site) that has nothing do with actual people looking at my site. As far as I can tell, WordPress seems to give a more accurate gauge of actual people. And really, there are more methods of calculating web traffic than there are ways to deep fry a Snickers bar, so take anything anyone says about it with a grain of salt. And then, of course, then you can try sprinkling it on your deep fried Snickers bar, which I hear is surprisingly tasty.
“Omar, what are the top viewed posts on your website in 2011?” you were probably just thinking to yourself. Well, here is the top 5:
1 The Dukes of Hazzard August 2009
2 Funny and Sexy– Is it possible? August 2009
3 Come on Holmes February 2010
4 Back to the Future, Part 4 October 2010
5 Thank you letters January 2011
I’m pretty happy with these results, but I do want to give a shout out to a few of my long time favorites that don’t get as much traffic as I think they deserve.
Iron Chef Amsterdam
This Old Crack House
I Should Be an SNL Writer
That is the most interesting information from the WordPress report. A little known fact about the “Dukes of Hazzard” and “Iron Chef Amsterdam” is that I was approached by an editor of an out-of-state Marijuana magazine about republishing these stories due to their pro-pot themes. I gave them permission, but then they went out of business. As far as I know they weren’t ever published in any magazines, but since I wasn’t going to get any money for it either way I didn’t really look too hard.
That about wraps things up. One more thing now that I remember we are back to “standard time”: although I have decided that part of my 2024 Congressional campaign is going to include a push for moving to daylight savings time all year round. Mostly because I hate delivering packages at UPS in the dark in December when I see the sunrise an hour before I go to work. I think there is a better chance of getting Congress to change the system of time than to get UPS to change the times it flies all their planes around the country. Although now I think about it, maybe it seems like a 50/50 proposition. But in the end, the only people who benefit from the current system are peppy morning people, and nobody likes those types– especially when sunlight is in short supply. So full time daylight savings time it is!
Wow, it is that time of year again. It seems like just yesterday I started my first attempt to write my 2011 Christmas letter. Maybe it was, or maybe that was three months ago. You see I have two kiddos now, so I’ve kind of lost track of time for anything less pressing than someone screaming right next to my ears at the top of their lungs for reasons sometimes totally unapparent to me. And now that includes several people besides myself.
So the first place to start is the birth of my second daughter, Samantha Rose Lutfey. Born May 24, 2011, Samantha came into this world with 25% more hair than I had that day. The surgical team had to rush her off to the neonatal barbershop before they would let Katherine hold her newborn child. As was the case with Isabel’s birth, I looked stunning in the white sterile body suit I wore during the birthing procedure. To be honest, I think my perfect figure was a bit of a distraction to some of the nurses. Either that or they were worried I was going to pass out and topple over some vital and expensive piece of medical equipment. Who can know for sure? And for the record I came close to passing out zero times that day, which is one less than my first time around.
The next thing I can remember is competing in the annual Kinetics race. Held at Longmont’s Union reservoir, my team was named “The Prime Contenders.” The craft was a slight modification from previous attempts with Styrofoam wheels connected to a bicycle frame. This year marked a personal milestone in that I actually finished the race. And I had the support of pretty much nobody in the crowd. About 79% of the crowd didn’t think my craft would even float in the water. The remaining crowd watched me in the water and thought my right front wheel (which, to be honest, was hanging on to the rest of the craft in a rather precarious manner) was going to fall off any second now. And, really, the highlight of the event is witnessing a hastily assembled craft half sink in the middle of the water section. So to all of those people who keep telling me that PVC pipe is not a good structural material for a kinetics craft, I can now proudly yell out “PVC pipe can be a MARGINALLY ACCEPTABLE structural material, PROVIDED that I don’t hit any unexpected rocks, AND that I don’t make any sudden movements out of the exact center of gravity of the vehicle, AND, WELL OF COURSE IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING that the Kinetics Wizard doesn’t cast any spells of random destruction on any part of my team.” Or, in short, “Bite me– I made it!”
So I either had a very strange dream and/or was visited by aliens a few weeks back. To the best of my recollection, here is what went down.
So I’m standing around in a field for no particular reason, and a traditionally shaped alien saucer ship lands nearby. Two green creatures get out and move towards me.
“Greetings Omar,” one of the aliens proclaims. “We have some information which could be immensely useful to your spices regarding the nature of what you understand to be the cosmos.”
“Hold on,” I replied, “Should I be writing this down or recording this all on video?”
“No need for that, our message will be brief.” the other visitor explained. “First of all, your scientific community still can’t decide on the nature of light. Is it a particle or is it a wave? Nobody has come up with a good explanation that is consistent with real world observations. So here is the answer: Light is a particle that travels in a corkscrew pattern. Technically it is spinning around four dimensions– electical, magnetic, one space dimension, and another dimension you haven’t quite discovered yet.”
“OK, I’ll get the word out.” I answered. “Anything else?”
“One more thing,” the first alien spoke. “Most people in your scientific community believe in the Big Bang theory based on red shift patterns observed from extra-terrastial light sources. Did you ever think that the particles are getting slowed down by all the dark matter in the universe instead of everything expanding in every direction?”
“So why are you telling me all this?” I asked, “There are plenty of other humans who would be better equipped to pass on this information. I’m just a UPS driver.”
“We know– won’t it be funny that you know the truth about the nature of the universe but nobody will believe you due to your chosen vocation?” the first alien explained. They both started laughing uncontrollably as they moved back into their spaceship and flew away.
Maybe this is what I get for watching the Simpsons’ “Tree House of Horror” and “How the Universe Was Made” right before going to bed.
So now that I think about it, I did get quite a bit done this year. So here is a list of things I didn’t finish:
Steet performance: Rounded to the nearest integer, I can safely say I achieved 0% of my goal to create a trumpet, baritone, and tuba comedy street performing group. Besides a lot of random ideas floating around in my head I still need to acquire all the musical instruments and at least two musically inclined individuals for my team. And, of course someone who can arrange music would be helpful. Maybe I’ll make more progress on this in the future.
My 2024 run for congress is another area in which I did not make much progress. The first step I’m going to take is to shoot Botox into one side of my forehead so that I can do that cool eyebrow raising thing just like Stephen Colbert on “The Colbert Report.” The next item on the list is to decide my stance on critical issues such as deceptive bacon packaging, Tupperware lid standardization, and, of course, synchronizing with the rest of the world by switching over to the metric system and possibly Esperanto.
So that is about it for 2011. I’ll leave you with the age old saying from my favorite novelty Christmas song: What Can You Get a Wookiee for Christmas (When He Already Owns a Comb)?
Wow, I was just looking back at my latest posts, and I realized that I haven’t posted any real updates about my personal life in a very long time. So here goes.
We recently added a +1 to our family: Samatha Rose Lutfey. So now we have a total of one husband, one wife, two kiddos, and one crazy dog. Pretty typical family lineup.
Having never done this before, I am very much learning how to be a father as I go. Of course pretty much everyone has to start out from scratch, so I’m not really special in my situation. The easiest way to categorize activities in this area is “things I was reasonably expecting to happen” and “what? did that really just happen? You must be kidding me!”
So in the first category I put things like changing diapers, feeding, and playing with my children. To a large degree I’ve had experience with this by having taken care of my dog Maury for several years now. The key here, as much as I understand things, is to understand the desire of the dog/child and things will go smoothly. If someone is making an unpleasant sound, or error code as I like to say, then resolving the situation is just a matter of finding the cause of the error code and fixing the underlying problem. To start out, babies generally have a small set of error codes– my diaper’s full, my stomach is empty, and someone isn’t giving me their full attention. So debugging small children is a pretty simple process.
The only situations to look out for are false positives and false negatives. For example, my oldest child Isabel doesn’t seem to mind running around with a diaper full of poop. And to make things more fun she likes to run and hide when we try and change her diaper. Don’t forget that kids can just start crying for no known reason. This is the most frustrating of all the error codes since there is no corresponding resolution action. The key to this situation is to identify it as a “Kobayashi Maru.” For anyone not intimately familiar with Star Trek terminology, this is a no win situation used to train Star Fleet officers. So just think, “What would Captain Kirk do?” And the correct answer isn’t “make more cheesy Priceline commercials.”
So now we come to the next group of activities. These are things that you will in no way be able to see coming. My personal favorite example of this is having Isabel on my chest fall asleep. Since I can’t really do anything else without waking up, I soon fell asleep myself. Then, for really no reason I could understand, Isabel emptied the entire contents of her stomach onto my face and chest. Very unpleasant I must say. But my point here is that I couldn’t have seen it coming.
So this is all I’ve learned in my two years or so of being a father. That, and if you want to get anything done on the computer your kids better be asleep or at grandmas for the weekend.
Here is the transcript of our parade skit:
You may address me as number 2– the number one prime number. Behind me is number 3, the number 2 prime, and also with me is numbers 5 and 7, the third and fourth primes.
We represent the prime numbers– positive integers evenly divisible by only ourselves and one. We are tired of being treated as freaks and second hand citizens on the number line.
Welcome to prime time– when all numbers are treated equally. To make this dream a reality, we will now present our organizations prime directive:
We the primes, an infinite subset of the positive integers, are demanding equal rights to composite numbers. The time has come to elect one of our own to the position of prime minister.
Don’t forget that we prime numbers hold the keys to your most important encryption programs. And who do you think controls the prime rate? Remember this the next time your are in your house built on prime real estate while eating a wonderfully cooked piece of prime rib.
If our demands for equality are not met, we will not hesitate to call on one of our strongest military allies, optimus prime.
That is all.