You Are Not Very Important

I don't mean to insult any of you with the title of this post. In fact I am sure that there are several people in the world who think that you are very important, if not the most important, person in the world. I'm just saying that in the grand scheme of things you don't mean all that much.

Which is why I am pretty sure that some of the bar owners (and managers) in Pittsburgh are dumber than a box of rocks, even if you add in the IQ of the box that the rocks came in.

You see, all over Pittsburgh, on almost every night of the week, these idiots are holding VIP parties.

I'm not sure that they know what a VIP is. It seems that if you can find, and read, their grammatically incorrect posts on Facebook or MySpace, that you too can become a VIP and be treated just like - well - everyone else who shows up on that particular night and pays the cover. Back when I started drinking that was what we called "being a customer."

I can only imagine what it would be like to be a real VIP. I mean sure I own a Nightlife / Community website that generated over 8.5 million page views last year (we beat wpxi.com) and I get treated pretty well almost everywhere I go. No cover, free drinks, all-access... But I am pretty damn positive that whenever a minor celebrity like Rumor Willis walks into a bar, that she (and her freaky mutant Rocky Dennis head) get actual VIP treatment.

I can picture it now. Rumor shuffles in, dragging her foot behind her. She sees the candles set out on the bar and starts screaming, "Gahhhhhh!" Three Jr. Assistant Shift Leaders run out and blow out every candle in the bar for her. Frankenstein's Monster is placated and orders her first drink. If she ordered braised puppy with fart sauce they would kill the dog, eat some beans and make it for her. She's not even a real celebrity! She's the product of Bruce Willis and that fake tittied girl who killed her career in the movie "Striptease."

So listen up Pittsburgh. Reading an invite on the internet, even if it was emailed directly to you via a bulk email list, does not make you a VIP. VIPs, even the lumpy headed Hulk Hogan lookalike above, get treated much better than you or I do. They don't pay for drinksm ever. They don't wait in line. They don't have to worry about the dress code. They don't have to do the fake-lesbian dance to get attention from the everyone in the bar.

"Hey, look over there!!!"
"What, beyond the two Mon-valley girls making out to try and get free drinks - say isn't that RUMOR WILLIS???"

I don't care if you paid $300 for a $40 bottle of vodka and have your own table. First off you can't buy VIP status. Second, you can buy bottle service, but you can't make yourself important. In fact I know for a fact that Ben Roethlisberger rarely pays for drinks, let alone $300 for some stinkin Rain Vodka.

So please Pittsburgh - patrons and owners - stop the stupidy.

You look dumber than Rumor Willis.

Delete Your Friends And Get Fat

As an individual who works in the advertising/marketing field I actually enjoy a good commerical. The company that came up with the songs for freecreditreport.com may have annoyed the hell out of you, but they really put the product out there in a very big way.

One company that has always had the wow factor going for them is Burger King.

They are the people who brought you the Subservient Chicken. They took their mascot and transformed him into a creepy plastic headed freak. Maybe that never struck you as a brave thing to do, but just think about it for a minute. Think about Wendy's taking their cute little redhead mascot and turning her into a evil undead zombie. "Where's the brains....."

I think that they do all of this in an effort to make you forget that there is no such thing as a clean looking Burger King. I've been in BK's all over this great nation and have yet to find a table that wasn't stickier than Traci Lords in the 80's.

Anyway - now BK has done it again with one of the most original marketing campaigns I've seen all year! Yes I am aware that it is only January...

http://www.whoppersacrifice.com/

Click this link, install the app, and delete 10 of your friends. Ta-Da! Free Whopper!

Think about it - all of the sudden your ex-boyfriend who added you on MySpace and then followed you to Facebook can finally have a use. That dude who used to work with you that keeps asking how things are going and telling you that you are stupid for staying can now have a pay off. That one night when you were drunk and thought it would be funny to add that annoying kid from the Encyclopedia Britannica Commericals... well, that's just fucked up, but you can delete his nerdy ass and get some free points towards your next cardiac arrest!

Porno...

Located on the border of New Eagle and Monongahela, Videos Unlimited, was the best video store in the entire Mon Valley. They always had the newest titles, they would often forget about late charges, the owner was a really nice guy and they had one hell of a good porno section!

I don't remember the title of the first porn I ever rented, but what I do remember is not having to worry about what I was about to watch. All I wanted, and all I saw, was good old American fucking.

I wasn't a regular but I'm sure I rented a good 20 titles during my Monongahela years. Every single video had a weak plot, too much oral, and some average looking sex acts. Nothing over the top, except perhaps an anal scene, and that was that.

Now I find it practically impossible to rent a porn - and here is why:

• Spitting - Every single porn you rent these days will have a scene with someone spitting on someone else's genitals. I even saw one porn where a girl spit on her own junk. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind a little saliva here and there, but these people are spitting up several ouces of throat-juice and hocking them at perfectly nice reproductive organs.
  
• Editing - I understand that porn is a fairly low-budget thing, but I get bored quickly while looking at the same scene for 20 minutes. It's like they have only one guy with one camera and no ability to edit out the boring stuff. Granted, this wasn't too different in the 80's, but now that they can edit the entire movie on a $500 Mac Mini there is no excuse.
  
• Slappy Slappy - I've been with my fair share of women and I have yet to see a girl, in real life, slap herself on the clit in an attempt to make herself, or me, hot. Just - just - OUCH! Stop it. I don't care if the "actress" is numb down there from years of cock pounding abuse. This is about the customer, not her. She can go bash herself in the cookie with a frying pan after the filming stops.
  
• Plot & Acting - Back in the 80's the plot usually consisted of 3 sentences before the fucking got started. Now they actually take 10 minute breaks between the sex scenes - which is fine. Just stop giving these types of jobs to "actors" who can't act. One non-sex scene involved an actressing talking about the philosophy of love and I couldn't help but think what idiot was behind the camera thinking, "Oh yes, very good!"
  
• Shutup - Shutup - Shutup - Hearing a girl moan the same thing over and over again 3000 times is not hot. Actually hearing a girl moan during an entire sex act is annoying. The last movie I watched had a girl make a hungry growing noise when she went down on a guy. Hey cool... but she did it the entire time she was on him. SHUT UP. (Worse is when they overdub the moaning so it's twice as loud, and the audio doesn't come close to matching the video.)
• Music - Again, back in the 80's there was some sort of excuse for horrible music but at least they didn't play the same 20 second loop over and over again. This is 2009 and we have an entire MySpace full of bands who would love to get paid $100 to have their music used in a porno.
• Licking The Toys - If a girl is using a toy on herself or on someone else she must lick it. Before, during and after. She does this as if the toy is a real penis and she is giving it pleasure. To me it comes off as mentally defective. "Mmm toy, must lick rubber toy.... yum!!"

My Predictions For 2009

1. Jesus will not show up, again, in 2009. However his cousin Ernie will come to Earth and give to mankind the gift of an all new type of french fry. Christianity will be safe from nay-sayers for another thousand years.
   
2. Aliens will finally make themselves known. At first we will greet them with open arms, but by the end of the year they will reveal themselves to be more annoying than our one uncle at the xmas party this year who kept talking about his new job and how much more money he makes now. In December we will pretend that we forgot to text our alien "friends" before going to the bar with everyone else.
3. Being forced to ditch his Blackberry, Barack Obama will have a device created especially for him. It will historically known as the first half-blackberry in the White House.
4. Amy Winehouse will overdose on drugs and die. The media will take, and publish, photos of her corpse for weeks before anyone notices that she is dead.
5. There will be some big storms that will kill people who do not leave when the police order them to evacuate. The news will report on a saddened nation, when in reality, the nation is pretty happy to be rid of it's genetic drift.
6. Your toothbrush will be obsolete. There will be a new toothbrush with a bit of plastic on it that does something your old brush could never have done. Holy shit were you dumb for buying that piece of crap. You should buy this new toothbrush. It's the best ever!!!
7. KISS vocalist Paul Stanley will come out of the closet and admit that he is gay. KISS fans everywhere will be shocked. Elton John will remind the world he was once married to a woman too.
   
8. The world will rise up as a united people and track down, and hen kill, the handful of people who actually buy hard-on pills because a SPAM email message told them to do so.
9. Apple will release a new phone called the f-uPhone. It will work just like a regular iPhone only it will be able to detect whenever someone calls you from a non-Apple phone and instead of putting them through to you it will berate them for being second-class citizens.
   
10. The most popular diet craze of 2009 will be having your jaw broken every time you mention that you need to go on a diet. So, on January 1st, when you have convincingly lied to yourself about getting in shape, the first person you mention this fact to will punch you so hard in the face that you will have to eat Jell-o through a straw. Right around the time you get you jaw unwired it will be time to trim up for swimsuit season, earning you another broken jaw, which should carry you right through to Thanksgiving.
    

Mr. McFeely

Six months ago I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be for Halloween this year. Over the years I have not had very many stand-out costumes, so this year I really wanted to wear something that nobody else would think of, and I also wanted to be someone that everyone at the party would recognize. I had several ideas, some I may even use some day, but late one night while falling asleep it hit me, Mr. McFeely.


I mean think about it - not only could I pull that off, but it would be comfortable, people would recognize me and as a bonus the name "McFeely" opened me up for a few perverted jokes right?

The costume was a hit. Almost everyone seemed to love the it. A few were too young perhaps to really identify with the character the way I could, but it didn't matter. McFeely was a winner!

Flash forward to this past Saturday... I was out Christmas shopping with the wife. As we walked past the bookstore I saw a sign up for some local sports writer selling yet-another-Pittsburgh-sports-book. (One of my favorite things to see are these guys out for a book signing only to find out that next to nobody cares to meet them or have them sign a book.) So, when I noticed there were a few people crowded around the table I was a little confused... that was until my wife said, "Look, it's Mr. McFeely."

I felt like a dork but I had to stand in line. I dressed up as this guy for Halloween and god dammit I was gonna shake his hand and tell him that he was a hit at my party. When my turn came he looked up at me and. I don't know if it was him, or if it were all the memories pouring back in my head, but I swear to god I felt like a little kid again.

He seemed geniunely happy to meet me. He loved hearing about how I chose to be him this year and insisted we take a picture of the two of us together. He looked at the picture on my iPhone, said we needed a better one and Jamie took a second picture. He asked me to email him pictures of me in my Mr. McFeely costume. He was just one of the warmest, coolest guys you could ever imagine. He didn't even really ask me to buy his children's book, but I did and he signed it for me. I walked into the bookstore, allowing the people behind me to have their time alone with a legend.
But it didn't end there. I was listening to people all over the bookstore talking about this moment in their lives, their voices just filled with excitment. Couples were exchanging childhood memories, and parents were talling their children how this old guy was cooler than Bratz and Ben 10.

I couldn't help but think that Santa Claus was downstairs for the little kids and Mr. McFeely was up here for the adults who did not always remember that they were still children to somebody.

Yes, Nathaniel, there really is a Mr. McFeely.

Outing Pittgirl - Full Name and Pictures

As many of you know, Pittgirl quit posting her amazingly popular blog, The Burgh Blog. Why? Because she found out that if someone searched hard enough that they could piece together enough clues and find out who she was - which could then endanger her job, and likely force her to water down her articles into the low-end pablum you see in print media today. (Oh my god you can really save money with coupons? Do we need to see that fucking story again???)

Then I thought to myself, "She quit so what do we have to lose?" In thinking further I also remembered that she never bought me a single beer, so fuck it. Since I like a good puzzle I thought I would put on my Sherlock Cap and sleuth out the info before City Paper decided to turn it into another shitty cover story with a lame pun inspired headline. "Cyberspaced! We ID The Anonymous Blogger"

I knew the first thing that I had to do was to go through her entire archive of posts and to pick apart every detail on her personal life that I could find. Unfortunately, she took down every post on the site... so I have to go with what the genius "legit" press is saying about her. Reading every article that I could find, I managed to dig up some key facts. 1 - Pittgirl is a she. 2 - Pittgirl hates pidgeons. 3 - Pittgirl loves Pittsburgh. 4 - Pittgirl wrote blogs about stuff and then quit. 5 - Pittgirl had a more fans than Bubba's Shitty Morning Show on B94 (tm). Really, who the fuck listens to that moron?

Ok - Let's stick with facts 1. Pittgirl is a female. Being female I can deduce that her name is unlikely to be Bruce, Timmy or Arthur. Applying some higher thinking than most men, and applying Occam's Razor, I have come to the conclusion that her first name is Rachel. Why Rachel you may ask? Because Friend's was a really popular show and most chicks I know want to be, if they had a choice of the 3 females on that show, Rachel.

Now I need to worry about the last name... Pittgirl lives in Pittsburgh. That rules out nice sounding last names like McDermot, Jeremy and Obama. No, if she's a true Pittsburgher her last name has to be something fucked up like Wizenjowski. In fact, after a solid 5 minutes of medatation and consulting my Magic 8 Ball - I'm positive her last name really is Wizenjowski.

Rachel Ray Wizenjowski.

I don't need any more of the facts now do I?

What I do need, however, is a picture!

Thank you google image search. One quick search, letting google correct my spelling, and scolling down 1/2 a page, I found the face of Pittgirl!!!



Not the pretties girl, I admit, but what did you expect of a nerd girl yinzer? Cummon, look at that face! Can't you see it grinning evilly as it directs a foot towards a pidgeon? I can. It's pretty fucking scary actually.

Ok, seriously, I mostly wrote this blog to fuck with the idiots out there who are actually going to search for info that they now lknow is out there. With any luck I just entertained a few friends and fucked with a bunch of retards that needed fucking with. You shitmules should be ashamed of yourselves.

I hates me the winter...

My good friend Art recently posted a blog... http://pheh.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/the-weather-may-be-frightful that got my brain ticking.

I fucking hate winter. I hate the cold. I hate cold fingers, cold ears, a cold nose and shivering. I really fucking hate fucking shivering. I hate going to bed at night in my chilly little bedroom and taking my cloths off and shivering for 5 minutes under the covers to pay for the 3 seconds I spent naked without clothes or blankets.

I hate shoveling my walk. I hate digging my car out from the snow. I really hate digging my car out from the snow that the plow guy humorously piled up over top of my hood. HE HE YOU FUCKING PRICK!

I hate those ugly grey days when everything, and I mean everything, is grey and shitty and bland and boring.

But Art reminded me that as a kid winter was something else, wasn't it?

I mean first off, when I was a kid I'd pray for snow. I wasn't even picky about the god I'd pray too either. I'm sure I made up a snow god and prayed to him and offered him human sacrifice if only he could make it snow long enough so that a) school would get canceled and b) I could build snow tunnels all over the neighborhood like some secret underground military base.

The first prayer was sometimes answered! Not often enough for me, but on occasion we could get a 5 day weekend. What did we do with our 5 days off? We played out in the snow... all day, every day. If we weren't sledding down Sullivan's back yard, we were building snow forts and planning snow battles.

I remember one winter I was determined to build an igloo. Of course the snow wasn't good enough for the kind of igloo you see on TV, but it was good enough to roll up 4 massive snowman-base sized balls, push them near each other and then pack in the empty space until it looked like an igloo. The rest of the day was spent hollowing out the giant snow dome... and you know, once it was done, it was actually pretty damn warm in side. (So warm in fact, I made another one a few years later and my GF at the time (you read about her) and I can now say we had sex in an igloo.)

However I still remember there was something about the snow in my childhood that I really hated...


It was this particular brand of snow boot that looked a lot like the one above, only there were no laces - just this weird metal clasps that rarely stayed closed. The insulation wasn't furry looking, in fact, it looked a lot like old carpet padding. They weren't really waterproof either, so I had to first put my feet into bread bags and then into the boot.

Those things sucked sooo bad that when moon boots came out, I thought they were a gift from the Snow God. "You have suffered long enough Young Nathaniel, here - Moon Boots!"

But even with the sucky boots - it was a good time.... just a blur of memories.

The neighbors small pond freezing over, 3 of us barely fitting on it to "skate" in our sneakers, until Brian Stoddard pushed me and I broke the ice with my face. Which was fine because when I got home Buck Rogers had a new episode on that night anyway.

Coming home at like 10:00 at night and noticing the absolute silence. No birds. No cars anywhere. No kids out playing and screaming. Nobody in the world but me.

My brothers and I helping to push cars up Riverhill Rd where a fire hydrant was leaking and freezing out on to the road. When my brother started to collect tips from the people we helped, I remembered his grabbing the monkey wrench from my dads tools earlier in the evening.

Leaving the first foot print somewhere... or better yet leaving tracks that would confuse people by walking backwards in my own tracks, or jumping back into an area where there was no snow to leave tracks in.

That smell... sometimes the smell of nothing. Sometimes the smell of wood fireplaces, sometimes the smell of coal. Ya know, this is something most people don't even know they miss, but coming home the other day someone must have had a coal fired stove and I caught a whiff and remember that's how ALL winters used to smell before they closed up every factory in the Mon Valley.

But hey - we get older don't we? Soon the snow becomes a reason your parents won't take you to the mall to hang out with your buddies, or the threat of snow becomes the reason you can't borrow the car. Snow becomes a hindrance and more and more of your friends would rather stay in alone rather than get together and play a game of AD&D over some hot chocolate.

Maybe I don't hate winter as much as I hate being an adult.