I don’t know why but today I found myself talking about wings, thinking about wings and in fact, wanting to shove a whole bunch of delicious spicy wings into my face. Maybe because football season is starting and really the only reason I watch football is so that I have an excuse to drink beer and eat like a jerk. Another reason I might be thinking may be due to recent diet and exercise regimens where wings have been a huge no-no along with all kinds of other things that I love to eat. I AM, however, able to use hot sauce as a condiment so maybe that’s what got me thinking not only about the angriest and spiciest wings but also the most tender and delicious wings. Now there are many factors by which someone can judge wings and in fact I participate with a group where those factors are calculated using theoretical physics, euclidean geometry and ranch dressing but I’m not here to talk about that today. I’m here to talk about another factor that is rarely overlooked in most wing discussions and it is quite simply, “Where can I get some cheap delicious wings?” I’ve found it. The holy grail of wing specials compendiums. http://milwaukeewings.com Now, if for some reason you don’t live in Milwaukee or for god’s sake at least some part of Wisconsin this link will do you little good. In that case I suggest you either a) cry yourself to sleep every night praying for crisp flavorful wings to come your way, b) abandon your current life and move to Milwaukee (don’t think this hasn’t happened before), or c) try using Google with a really creative search like “Best wing specials in…”.
Big crazy party? I’m too old for that shit! Exotic booze and premium beers? Get bent. You want wine that doesn’t have sediment floating in it? Tough shit, bring it yourself. That citrus flavored vodka you got me three years ago that nobody can use to make a proper drink? Well guess what, now it’s in your white Russian! Just try and drink that shit! Fancy personally prepared cuisine? What?! I don’t have any god damn money for that crap, I’ve got a kid! You’re getting some grilled bologna sandwiches! Hand written invitations in the mail? What are you retarded? Why do you think we invented the internet?! Invitations through e-vite?! What are you retarded? Who the hell still uses e-vite? Colossal theme party complete with festive decorations? How about I’m still wearing pants when you show up and there isn’t excrement smeared on the wall? How’s that for a theme?!
Drinks: BYOB
Food: The cheapest gas station pizza I can find, probably something that’s been sitting on hot rollers. That’s right mutha-fucking rollers.
Entertainment: You can all gather round me while I drink myself into oblivion in the corner of my basement. I’ll be staring at the pages of my high school yearbook trying to figure out where it all went wrong.
If you’re reading this and you didn’t get a real invite…
don’t worry,
YOU’RE NOT FUCKING INVITED.
Now I have to go delete this rant from my actual birthday invitations.
I ate no more than what I needed all day and had tea or water instead of coffee.
Then I went and ate like a total douchenozzle at a mexican restaurant for Cinco de Mayo (really just an excuse to be a douchenozzle).
To celebrate my rampant stupidity and total lack of dietary control I have replaced my garage door with this totally bitchin’ one designed by a fat loser.
I just need to cover the living room floor with shag carpeting and a polar bear rug.
6AM – Wife says she’s going to work. Listen for the baby.
7AM – Huh? What…what’s that noise. Not my alarm. Go back to sleep.
7:30AM – Huh…stupid alarm. Wait…that’s not my alarm…oh baby right dammit.
7:31AM – I should put on some clothes…something anyway and then go get the baby.
7:32AM – Okay, got him…buhhhhhhht, I forgot to go to the bathroom. Out of the crib into the playpen kid.
7:35AM – I gotta get this kid some breakfast before he goes ballistic.
8AM – Man can this kid eat.
8:15AM – Now Dad is gonna go crazy if he doesn’t eat.
8:30AM – Ok. now we should be cool for a while.
8:31AM – Holy crap he’s getting into everything.
8:35AM – Seriously…we want to teach him to walk???!!!
9:30AM – So when the kid is climbing on something precarious and trying to get his hands on breakables, the trick is to just grab the kid.
9:45AM – It’s like spinning plates right now.
10AM – Bottle and a nap…sounds great; too bad it’s for the kid.
10:10AM – I should probably try to get some exercise as long as I’m watching TV.
11AM – I’ve done soooo many pushups…I’m down to sets of ten. I’m going to stop when I fail 10.
11:20AM – Ok, I think I could do 10 at a time forever.
11:30AM – I cheated by doing shorter rest periods. I hate push ups.
11:31AM – Yay for 60 rep curl sets. Maybe I need more than 5lb weights.
11:42AM – Annnnd he’s up.
11:45AM – Oh dear god. I shouldn’t be able to smell him before I get in the room.
11:47AM – I might need to phone a friend. This is a two man diaper.
12:00pm – Food time!
12:05PM – Um…he’s done?
12:10pm – Maybe his teeth hurt and he just needs some medicine.
12:15pm – He didn’t fight me on the medicine but now he still won’t eat his food.
12:20pm – Okay, maybe I’ll grab some lunch and by then he’ll be ready to eat.
12:21pm – Well now he’s going insane. I’ve had it. I’m going to choke down my lunch, he can stay in the high chair.
12:30pm – Out of the chair and now he’s fine.
1:10pm – Ok000000000000-agaeabh- it’s official, I can’t even pick up my laptop and get logged in before he has his hands on the keyboard.
1:11pm – That’s it. Sentenced to life in the pack and play with no possibility of parole.
1:40pm – I think I just zoned out for about 30 minutes.
1:45pm – Diaper change.
1:50pm – Logan goes for a walk around the house (assisted of course).
2:10pm – Mom’s home!!! Dad is off the hook!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Ray has gone bye-bye, Egon… what’ve you got left? Dr. Egon Spengler: Sorry, Venkman, I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.
Janine Melnitz: You’re very handy, I can tell. I bet you like to read a lot, too. Dr. Egon Spengler: Print is dead. Janine Melnitz: Oh, that’s very fascinating to me. I read a lot myself. Some people think I’m too intellectual but I think it’s a fabulous way to spend your spare time. I also play raquetball. Do you have any hobbies? Dr. Egon Spengler: I collect spores, molds, and fungus.
Dr. Egon Spengler: Oh good, you’re here! Dr. Peter Venkman: Yeah, what have you got? Dr. Egon Spengler: This is big, Peter, this is very big. There is definitely something here. Dr. Peter Venkman: Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole through your head. Remember that? Dr. Egon Spengler: That would have worked if you hadn’t stopped me
Dr. Egon Spengler: I’m worried, Ray. It’s getting crowded in there and all my data points to something big on the horizon. Winston Zeddemore: What do you mean, big? Dr. Egon Spengler: Well, let’s say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. Based on this morning’s sample, it would be a Twinkie… thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds.
Ray: You mean you never even had a Slinky? Egon: We had part of a Slinky. But I straightened it.
Ray: You think there’s a connection between this Vigo character and the… slime? Egon: Is the atomic weight of cobalt 58.9?
Egon: Let’s see what happens when we take away the puppy.
Harold Ramis plays Russell Ziskey in case you don’t remember. 🙂
John Winger: C’mon, it’s Czechoslovakia. We zip in, we pick ’em up, we zip right out again. We’re not going to Moscow. It’s Czechoslovakia. It’s like going into Wisconsin. Russell Ziskey: Well I got the shit kicked out of me in Wisconsin once. Forget it!
Recruiter: Now, are either of you homosexuals? John Winger: [John and Russell look at each other] You mean, like, flaming, or… Recruiter: Well, it’s a standard question we have to ask. Russell Ziskey: No, we’re not homosexual, but we are *willing to learn*. John Winger: Yeah, would they send us someplace special? Recruiter: I guess that’s “no” on both. Now if you could just give Uncle Sam your autograph…
Recruiter: Have you ever been convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor? That’s robbery, rape, car theft, that sort of thing. John Winger: Convicted? No. Russell Ziskey: Never convicted.
That’s all I have time for. It’s not much for a man that had a significant impact on me and my sense of humor. I’m sad we’ve lost him but glad we got to know him as well as we did. I hope you’re somewhere in the great beyond crossing the streams, Mr. Ramis.
Feel free to add your favorite quotes from any of his films whether it was spoken by Harold Ramis or not. 🙂
I was thinking today about successful people. I was thinking, how often are they not really who they pretend to be. It has been my experience that most of us play some kind of role, not just around friends and family but especially at work. In the old days (2013) it may have been a little more wild west but now we have to be careful about being PC and not offending anyone. This generally goes against my sensibilities as in my free time, my friends and I almost practically thrive on being offensive. I mean, we live for who can say the most ridiculously offensive thing.
So it is my observation that we are generally expected to not be who we actually are. We are paid by our companies to be who we are not; not who we are. If you can find a job that pays you to be who you are, you could be a very successful person indeed. Provided that they were paying you to be a crude, vile, small minded caveman who mostly operates in grunts and violence. I think there might be a market for that actually.
I wasn’t sure what to say about the future. I mean…we sat down at one point and tried to understand what was important to us. “Us” means my wife and I, not me and the other fat loser, although I guess the two fat losers have also discussed that. So, the future…it really wasn’t anything too insanely creative. It was the usual: financial goals, vacations, time with family. No life altering revelations like, I want to go back to school to be an architect or I want to be a unicycle riding bear. I mean, truthfully I would like to alter my career path but at this stage I’d need a pretty god damn good plan and I don’t have one.
I have to take some kind of action.
I can at least plan for the things I can plan for. I can always change the plan later if I realize I had it wrong but without any plan at all I’m pretty much at the mercy of the universe.
Here’s an interesting trick. Take the laziest fucking thing you do.
I’m waiting.
Ok. I get it, you’re really fucking lazy.
I’m trying to make a point here and that point is that watching TV is about as fucking lazy as it gets. It’s lazier than playing video games (pretty obviously) and it’s even lazier than watching a movie. How is it lazier than watching a movie? Generally watching a movie either involves some preparation, maybe even a trip to the theater but at the very least for my friends and I there is always the post movie discussion. An often heated debate unfolds about why this was the best/worst in the series or why you’re stupid for liking/disliking certain parts of the film, e.g.
Friend 1 “I thought the ending was stupid”
Friend 2 “Oh? Well you’re stupid.”
See? A spirited debate weighing the pros and cons of the cinematic impact of this particular endeavor.
Where was I? Oh, right, tv = lazy.
So you take this super lazy thing you do and marketing being what it is, it’s not enough to sit their and stare blankly at the commercial for diet pop fizz, the companies that are paying millions of dollars in advertising want to know if you actually SAW their commercial for diet pop fizz.
Enter, the Nielsen company.
This is where the trouble started.
Actually, to be totally accurate the trouble started when they sent me a couple bucks in an envelope and asked me to fill out a simple survey. As I tried to figure out how I would go about returning $2 to them for a survey I wasn’t really interested in, a thought occurred to me. That thought was, “It’s probably easier to just fill out the damn survey and mail it back to them.” Now, I know what you’re thinking. I could have just kept the two dollars and thrown the survey out. Unfortunately there are a couple problems with that logic:
1) It’s not that hard to guilt me. I may have mostly shed my catholic background but the guilt remains.
2) This post would have been pretty boring if it ended with, “…and then I got $2 in the mail.”
3) Curiousity. Probably the deadliest and least discussed of all sins. Possibly a key ingredient to all sinning ever, now that I think about it.
So I agreed to participate and make my family and friends participate in whatever data collection Nielsen desired. “You write a couple of things down and get a few bucks every week,” I figured. Well, it isn’t that simple.
First off, there is a lot of data they want you to write down; enough to be annoying. Second, you are supposed to have a “TV Viewing Diary” for every TV in the house. Third, you are supposed to fill in each of those diaries whether you watched TV in there or not. It’s this third part that really sucks. We have 3 televisions, but we only watch TV on one of them. The basement TV is basically for movies and games and the bedroom TV is for making it look like we watch TV in there.
Not long ago we cut the cable and ditched the DVR. Our television viewing has nose dived between that and having a kid to watch. So now, we have to fill out the same rudimentary information in each fricking log, and it is significantly more data than our actual TV watching is providing. “No big deal, just do it,” I told my wife. Actually, I think I amended that with, “or do what I do and just avoid watching TV so you don’t have to fill out the guide.” Yeah, that was my solution. If I couldn’t laze about in front of the TV I wasn’t going to watch at all. No filling in paperwork for me.
One week and I’m over this already.
Maybe they could just screw something into my brain and send me $5 a week without me doing any paper work.
Well, I better finish up the TV diaries before I go to bed, because they need to be in the mail tomorrow. If they aren’t I may have to answer to Mr. Nielsen or be forced to figure out how to return my next $5.
That’s right everybody, 2013 is over and it has been a hell of a year. I’m going to make sure that no matter how much 2014 bucks and screams it’s going to stay firmly planted over the saw horse.
We’ll probably need one of these…
…and one of these…
…might as well bring one of these too.
Well…maybe that’s just a bunch of crazy talk but I think you know better.
We might as well look back at 2013:
Okay, not too detailed a look. I don’t want you falling asleep reading this as badly as I am writing it.
My wife and I had a kid. This happened in June but I don’t think I did anything really worthwhile in 2013 prior to that. I could pretty much skip the whole rest of this post if I had to because this is by far the main event. I’ll sum up: I drove us to the hospital, I watched an epidural being inserted, I ran a vomit brigade, I cut the cord, I cried in amazement, I watched stitches and cleanup. It literally blew my mind when they left him alone with us and we didn’t have to pass some kind of written test combined with a physical challenge and a fight to death against a potential future bully’s father.
A bunch of friends and family got married. Seriously people, knock it off. We can’t make it to all of them and then we feel crappy about ourselves. If you’re going to go and fall in love just elope somewhere so nobody can be included and we non-attendees fall into the majority.
“We” started running/trying to get into shape. That’s right, the “Twofatlosers” started running shortly after my kid was born. I think the idea of being able to keep up with my kid as he grows up helped motivate me. Also, I was just sick of being fat and out of shape, which between my awesome diet and incredible lack of exercise was not a confusing place to find myself. This was also where I got the idea for this blog.
“We” started a blog. This was to be a blog with a significant focus on our transformation and experiences regarding diet and exercise. Well that bull shit is hilarious because in reality we, well I, didn’t even start the blog until we had essentially stopped our regular exercise. I think a poor performance at somebody’s first 5K and recurring shin splint issues kind of sidelined our momentum. Whatever, these things happen.
I bought a new car. You don’t need any details here, just know that it was to replace my no good, piece of crap Jeep that…well, that has actually served me well considering how much I actually paid for it and how long I’ve been driving it. Actually it just needs a few minor repairs really. Anybody need a Jeep?
I installed landscape lighting. You don’t really care about that but it was a year in the making so it was a big deal to me. I also thought it would be a much better way to light my property than running extension cords and flood lights all over the place every winter, still not having enough light and pulling thousands of watts a day.
My house got vandalized by some worthless puke(s). This wasn’t really an accomplishment but getting egged and having some of my lawn ornaments destroyed was a first so I put it on the list. I hope that whoever was involved grows up to be relatively successful so that some worthless jerk can ruin a lot of hard work they put into building a nice holiday display or vandalizes their house so that they have to nervously keep watch the next few nights. It’s not like I was dreaming of chasing them down the driveway with a baseball bat, sword, or my bare hands.
I think that’s the 2013 highlight reel. Oh sure, I glossed over a lot of great times with friends, family etc. but who wants to really hear about those good things. Maybe I’ll pepper some of that in over the next few weeks but just in case I don’t, know that if you were involved I cherished those activities and wish I could have a transcript of most of what took place.
In any case, it’s time to get serious with 2014 and I’ll let you know what the plan is soon. Until I figure that out, these will have to serve as my primary course indicators.
This post is obviously only to fulfill my obligation of posting something on Frida…god dammit.
Why am I doing this to myself?
Well, there goes that shit.
Why am I tired?
I work a full time job
I was working on home improvement shit
We started watching boring shit on YouTube
I’ve been drinking Mike’s hard root beer for the last few hours
Yeah, it looked something like that.
Oh my god, I just fell asleep in the middle of writing this blog post. This is really bad. Where was I? Oh yeah, decided to use plastic sheeting to create a vapor barrier in my basement. I think we got some serious bang for our buck R value. Man, it’s cozy down here now…in the 70’s and we shut one of the space heaters off.
I’d be almost finished right now if my basement even remotely resembled this.
Also decided to build a bar height game table out of plywood and PVC. Why? Well, because we’re big freaking nerds and we like to play board games. I wanted to be able to play them standing because it takes up less space and it’s easier for people to move around.
See, wouldn’t this be better standing up? Not us but what we really aspire to.
Dude! We were talking about Dead Space sssssssssssssss earlier. That game is crazy and I want to play the third. I’m crazy for still typing right now…must go to bed goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
