SUBSTANTIATION

Okay, so I spent a little time describing a few t-shirt ideas in a recent post of mine. As a picture is worth way more words than however many words I used to describe it, I made up an illustration for my favorite, Idea #2.

Wanna see it?

Well, too bad, here it is anyway:




Now come on, that's some funny shit.

I'll make up images for the others after I return from New York. Piece!

P.S. The above graphic is Copyright 2006 by Kevin Savino-Riker. Go ahead, give me a reason to sue you... commie bastard.

EXULTANT

Wow, that didn't take long.

The homophone has done it again - I have now successfully merged my new Shaw Electric business cellphone number with my personal number, which makes my "The V" two distinct phones in one physical package.

So, the running tally of features is now:

• Cellphone
• All the standard cellphone auxiliary functions - Scheduler/Dayplanner, Calculator, Text Notepad, Audio Note Recorder, etc.
  
• Digital Still Camera
• Digital Movie Camera
• MP3 Player
• Portable Movie Player
• Spanish/English Translator and Dictionary
• Gaming Platform
• GPS Navigation System
• Another Cellphone

I tell you what burns me though. LG is about to release the VX9900, which will be a smaller and probably more capable version of this phone. It's like they knew they had something gay on their hands, and as soon as I bought one, they decided to correct the problem. Now watch Ray buy one this fall, just to spite me. He doesn't even have Verizon. Bastard. How could you?

DROLL II

So, I have a pal from college who is (1) Hysterical Or Maybe Insane, (2) Creative, (3) Entrepreneurial. One of the companies he and his partners run is BustedTees, a website which apparently sells t-shirts that are broken. Luckily (or is it peculiarly), every BustedTees shirt I've bought or received as a gift has been fully-functional. I guess they have a slacker in charge of quality control.

Anyway, the t-shirts invariably feature humorous graphics and captions, typically 'retro' and understatedly ironic. All of them are hilarious. Even cooler than that is that they accept suggestions from the populace for new shirt ideas, and it is on this note that I'd like to comment today.

I've had a few ideas rolling around in my head for a while for what I believe would be funny t-shirt ideas, even if they aren't busted. Since Prose Justice is back in business, and since I long ago pledged to make this place an additional repository for my creative gushings, I figure I'll put the ideas out in the open, see what people think, and when I get the chance, make a few illustrations to show a rough draft of what I think the shirts could look like.

The following are presented chronologically from date of conception.

Idea #1

A silhouette of a person tilting his head back, raising a bottle of liquor to pour it into his mouth.
Caption is something to the effect of "Drinking - lifts your spirits". I was going for the pun here, since while drinking alcohol can indeed elevate ones mood, the action of raising a liquor bottle over your head is quite literally lifting spirits. Not too funny, I know. I'm willing to put all ideas up here, not just the ones I think will get good reactions.


Idea #2

Posterized image of Castro, wearing a pair of old-school DJ-style headphones.
Caption is "Hi Fidelity". I feel this is funny because if we assume the headphones are of sufficiently high fidelity, then their being worn by a man named Fidel is an example of what is potentially the highest fidelity observable in the natural universe.


Idea #3

Communist Russian propaganda-poster styling, perhaps showing a statue, or at least a strong figure, holding a fork. Caption, written in a very Soviet-esque font, "Cannibalism - For the People". Play on words, self-explanitory. Oh, fine. It's a common sentiment that Communism is For the People. Cannibalism, which sounds (phonetically, not ideologically) an awful lot like Communism, is also, in fact, for the people.



The fact that both ideas #2 and #3 were rooted in, um, alternative governmental models, is entirely coincidental. I am as capitalist as they come; it's just hard to recognize me without all the money.

So, in self-critique, I think #2 is the best candidate for BustedTees, as its particular brand of humor is analogous to what is typically featured on the website, and in my opinion is the funniest of the three. #1 needs a little work. Okay, a lot of work. #3 Would maybe be better destined for a site like T-ShirtHell, but would need to be made even more tasteless (<--Unintentional Pun #1)*. All in all, it's a good exercise to try and be creative outside the scope of what you are used to. If anyone's reading this, let me know how I've done!


*I'm going to start keeping track of the unintended puns that appear in my writing. That is to say, I have to recognize that it's a pun only after I've written it. Oh, in the case of this one, the pun isn't in the sentence, it's because it's in reference to the shirt about eating people, which is in rather bad taste. P.S. That was the same pun right there.

WHEREWITHAL

Okay, two posts in one day... so it's a really slow day at work.

Actually, that's not at all true; I have a lot to do, in fact. I am, however, in a slump where I cannot continue my efforts until the battery recharges in my bomb-ass wire labeler. How better to pass the time than resume posting at the prolific pace I've set for myself since waking up this sleeping beast?

This post is a showcase for my cellphone, the LG VX9800. I'd take a picture of it, but my only accessible camera is on the phone itself. My reasoning behind this unabashed exhibition of material excess? Well, mainly it's a "screw you" to the people who make fun of the fact that the phone is quite a bit larger than they think it needs to be. I'm talking to Ray Ward, Darren Miles, and Joe Farnsworth here. Others may talk too, but I live with these three, so I get it on a regular basis primarily from them.

While my last few phones were sleek and streamlined, the "The V", as those cool cats from Verizon call it, is a little larger. See for yourself:


This thing is, according to my friends, so large as to exude a certain gayness, which lends it to being referred to as the Homophone.

Well, I'm going to come right out and say it: I'm rather proud of my homophone and I fully support its lifestyle. In a form of rebuttal to my gay-bashing hatemonger housemates, I will use Prose Justice to keep people updated on the growing capabilities of this remarkable piece of fruity hardware.

As of two days ago, my "The V" played the roles of:

• Cellphone
• All the standard cellphone auxiliary functions - Scheduler/Dayplanner, Calculator, Text Notepad, Audio Note Recorder, etc.
  
• Digital Still Camera
• Digital Movie Camera
• MP3 Player
• Portable Movie Player
• Spanish/English Translator and Dictionary
• Gaming Platform

As of yesterday, it gained the ability to become a:

• GPS Navigation System

And not just any, mind you. This thing will let me ask it to find the ten nearest titty bars to my present location, and it will list their addresses and phone numbers, then give me graphical and voice-prompt turn-by-turn directions with estimated ETAs that recalculate as I approach. It recalculates routes on the fly if I miss a turn or have to avoid construction.

So, the key question is this: Considering the vastly flexible and, well, vast capabilities of this device, is my homophone's larger size justified? In my case, totally. I'd much rather have all that functionality in a queerly large package than have to decide which of seven or so separate devices I'd want to have on my person in any given situation.

I plan to keep a running tally going on the blog as I download new apps to the homophone. With each new ability I will further evidence the coolness that is my "the V". Note that in technological paradigms I equate usefulness to coolness.

Of course, Ray and co. will quickly point out that coolness and gayness are not mutually exclusive, thus adding 'cool' to my phone will not subtract any homosexual attributes from it.

They will also agree that writing this post is the gayest thing I've ever done.

IDIOSYNCRATIC

Content Warning:

Okay, so I know I said I wasn't going to contribute anything worthwhile to the blog for some time now because I had all this rebuilding to do. I am not yet done with said rebuilding, yet here I am, ready to impart information. And dare I say it will be 'Content of Any DiscernAble Value to thE Reader' (first referred to in Post-Previous and with some creative capitalization and incorrect spelling, hereafter acronymized down to CADAVER). I'll just jump right in. Don't judge*.

JURY DUTY.

While oft-noted as a bane to we, the Busier Than Anyone Else of modern society, jury duty is a vital aspect of our legal system that has always fascinated me. I secretly longed for the day that I would receive my summons and be called upon to take active part in determining the legal fate of another.

Now, this romantic desire of mine was based upon what I now feel was an outdated and naive impression of what jury duty was, namely: being in a jury. How wrong I was.

You see, I finally got my summons and I have been entered into the system. The emerald curtain has been drawn and I have seen the mechanisms at work in this legal hodgepodge. That I have survived it yields a new desire to spread the truth to all you who don't know. If you don't want to know the truth, DO NOT read the following line, for it will tell you exactly what jury duty has become -





Answering Machine Practice.


"Jury duty" entails the folowing:

• Receive a document in the mail with the words 'JURY SUMMONS' in large print and a phone number buried in a sea of small print.
• Call the number on the instructed date (weeks after you receive the summons).
• Listen to the "entire message" - this was explicitly commanded at the beginning of the message.
• The "entire message" is a very long way of saying, "If you've called today, please call back tomorrow after 5pm."
• I'll let you get away with thinking this will only happen once; I did.
• Call back the next day after 5pm. Listen to the new message.
• The "new message" is the same as the last message, with the distinct difference that it now tells you to call back the next day.
• After my second callback I came to the insight that this was answering machine practice.
• After my fifth callback I realized, "You don't even get to leave a message! It's just Listening to Answering Machine Practice!"

I'd go on, but such recursion has no place in this blog. I'm here to warn you, not beat you to death with it.

That there are people out there who think we need answering machine practice, and that they are the same people who filter the innocent from the guilty, almost hurts my brain to think about.

I've used phones longer than I've had mastery of (or even an introduction to) the english language. Who hasn't been on the phone with a proud mother who loves to put her naturally incoherent infant on the line to share the babbling? We've all heard it. We at that age were likely to have been forced to do it by our parents. Some of us have done it with our (read: their) own children (implies: to me, grr.). What's my point? Phones are as natural to gens X and Y as are toilets, and toilets are as natural as butts in this part of the world. We understand phones already. We understand their associated technologies as easily. Even the complicated ones like automated customer service. We hate that one, but we certainly understand it.


I don't know how long Orange County is going to need my valuable services, and I don't know how they intend to compensate me. I just hope the poor guy, guilty or otherwise, got through this quirky little system and got what he deserves. And in the end, I'm glad I could be of help.


*If you found a cadaver in your house... go ahead, tell me you wouldn't show it to anyone.

REQUISITE

Well, I know I'm "blogging", as long as you care to define "blogging" as "making noticeable changes to the blog" and not as "adding content with any discernable value to the reader". I just don't feel like I'm "blogging" right now, because I need to use the second definition. Unfortunately, it will still be a little while before I can do anything of value. Right now I'm in Phase: Dusting Off Occluded Internals.

Buffing out the wear marks of dormancy takes a little more work than I thought it would have. Turns out lots of image links are invalid; I have to figure out the new urls for files on the server out here in Cali. I also have a few new blog features to which I need to get accustomed.

What it amounts to, is that this entry is actually one more piece of filler, necessary because I need to post a picture into the entry. This will determine the location of my new profile photo. I could just put it up temporarily and remove the pic after I find out where Blogger hosted it, but why bother? There's nothing wrong with a little redundant representation.

Regardless, here's the pic, the new poster-child face of Prose Justice. This picture really sums up how I feel right now.


Really, I promise I'm almost done returning the blog to seaworthiness. Just a little more tweaking and I'll be ready to jump in head first. Maybe typing-fingers first.

BEGUILING

It seems that blogger now supports full sensory immersion, with the addition of pix blogging from mobile devices. This of course ignores the senses of smell, taste, touch, and psychokinesis. Nerd. Oh well, here's a snippet of what's keeping me occupied at work.

ORATORY 6

Mediocrity Warning:
The following link plays an audio clip which is in no way entertaining. I just needed to make sure AudioBlogger was still a viable means of dumping cerebral payload upon request.

REVELATION

Apparently I didn't give a shit.

In fact, I seem to have not given a shit WAY harder than I ever gave a shit during the active life of the blog. My last post was to celebrate Prose Justice's 1st birthday, one year and sixteen days ago. Over half my blog's life, spent in hibernation. Since I last posted, I've moved to southern California and gotten a new job, a new car, and a wicked tan.

Well, work has been slow enough lately to indicate an upcoming trend that might just allow me to instill some new zest into this dormant beast. What was once a budding berth of infant literary genius has become a comatose and malnurished toddler, which may now become a once-upon-a-time-budding-berth-of-infant-literary-genius-has-become-a-comatose-and-malnurished toddler-with-the-will-to-overcome-its-past.*

On an absolutely-unrelated note,

Here's to the good intentions of today: May they flourish and grow into the good of tommorow.

See you next year!**

*Because, I'll be writing posts again. Now that I think about it, that's an awfully long description. Sorry, little rusty.
**Not to say I won't see you before then. Just covering my bases.