So about 4 hours into the trip, as one might expect, we began getting to know each other quite well. So well, in fact, that one bitch decided it would be a great idea to reveal everything we never wanted to know about her.  We found out among other things, that she believed she could out drink all of us.  Despite her chunky 130lbs frame and my undisputable hollow legs which can only be filled with adult beverages, she challenged me.

Unexpectedly, I came prepared.  Prepared with two full bottles of alcohol.  I offered them some of my libation, without announcing that I had accepted the challenge.  Some friendly drinks one might call it.  Shortly after our endeavor I heard an unexpected sound coming from two seats down.  A sound that frightened me to the core, a sound I could not bare to accept. The sound of regret.

An eruption of rum, coke, and Mom’s leftover spaghetti flew all over the floor board of our perfect rental car.   It was official, this bitch had thrown up in the moving vehicle with 2 hours remaining in the trip.  My victory was bitter sweet, like winning a war, but losing a fallen comrade in the process.  Bits of spaghetti shrapnel covered the rear passenger side seating and “the girl who could out drink everyone” was to blame.  Any sign of sympathy could not be found – we hated her instantly.

Eventually we reached our destination.  The smell of leftovers and alcohol filled the air, the whole team could only feel hatred toward our horrible team mate.  We shunned her very existence.  Finding our way into the hotel room we could only attempt to enjoy the evening at this point.  I kicked of my shoes and decided to get some rest for our important meeting in the morning.

Long story short, I kicked ass at the meeting and the spewer sucked.  We still hate her.

What a place, America.  We spend Thanksgiving overeating and stuffing ourselves to the point we can literally hold no more.  Then we spend the next month filling our shopping carts with more shit than our houses can handle.  Then we complain about 10% unemployment rates and the poor economy.

We spent 595 million dollars this black Friday, that’s more than the total GDP for the bottom 20 countries in the world.  Next time you want to complain about the price of milk, count yourself fortunate that you aren’t being ass raped by your government in some dark corner of Liberia.  So finish your Fruit Loops and stop bitching about being underpaid and under appreciated.

Get off your ass, go to school, and read a book – most of the world would kill for the opportunity.

There are several theories, mostly amongst males, that attempt to explain this irrational behavior.

1. Fat friends are the previous thin friends who ate everyone’s leftovers.
It rings true that thin girls of average size and weight never finish their meal, but it is also true that this food does not go uneaten. The fat friend gobbles her meal as quickly as possible only to finish her friends nuggets, half eaten burger, and fries as well. However, the hole in this theory is that there seems to be a missing link in the evolution of once thin friend to fat friend. It appears the fat friend has always been the fat friend, not the once thin friend. (Not including newly married friends, newly pregnant friends, or friends subject to the freshman 15-45) So we can conclude this theory does not explain the majority of fat friend cases around the world.

2. Large friends are good for protection from predators.
They are also known as the dreaded “cock blocks”. The fat friends who protect the skinny friends from your relentless attempts at hooking up. Big girls can hold untold amounts of alcohol, so no matter how intoxicated everyone else is they are the sex police, but whether it is out of love or jealousy is unclear. Men also know this as “taking one for the team”. One friend (most likely the loser of paper, scissors, rock) has to sweep the one ton friend off her feet, leaving her unsuspecting friends free from the mother elephant. Meanwhile, Ben is basking in the smell of brisket and musk while Shamoo makes a man out of him – he should have picked scissors!

3. Fat friends boost self confidence.
The bottom line is, huge girls make small girls feel better about themselves. While I doubt you could ever get any group of decent looking women to admit it, the simple fact is they allow giant Birtha to be their friend because in the long run, she is a scape goat for their feelings of self doubt and anxiety about themselves. They can always pick up more guys, get more free drinks, and fit into a small dress than their dear friend, the fat ass. We all know it’s true – the big fat truth about big fat friends.

Next, I spent some time on Twitter and found that “New Moon” is the second most popular “tweeted about” topic right now.   In fact,  there were 437 tweets in less than a minute regarding “New Moon” while I was online.  Here are some of the most common tweets (actual tweets):

“how amazing is new moon :O :O :O i mean wow!! Xo”
“NEW MOON NEW MOON PLEASE NEW MOON NEW MOON”
“I loveNew Moon!!=)”
“Heading to see @twilightnew moon!!!!!”

Needless to say,  I am currently devastated due to my utter failure and inability to stop this latest craze of vampire fanatics.  I am unsure at this point if my futile post are even worth the keystrokes to have my opinion heard.  The only victory I could salvage during my research is that nearly 100% of discussion regarding vampires involved women (of all ages).  Men were definitely left out of the conversation, except for a few rogue defects, of course.

What is the proper course of action now?  I am unsure.  Maybe I should take a page from other men and just not talk about it.

Here are some other interesting research facts I discovered:

Google Blog search:

• 22,144,635 postings with the phrase “twilight new moon”
• 4,447,826 in the past month
• Over 100 and counting in the past hour

Whatthetrend.com:  Why is New Moon popular right now

• There are tweets on nearly every continent on the planet regarding “new moon”
• Examines popular tweets, news, and comments regarding New Moon
• Tweets in nearly every language regarding New Moon

Google Trends: On New Moon

• The U.S is only the 4th most popular place fro discussing New Moon (Philippines being the first)
• English is only the 2nd most popular language to talk about New Moon
• Richardson, TX, USA is the most popular New Moon region on Earth, followed by Sydney, Australia

I have ignored it for as long as I can.  Countless nights I have spent listening to the True Blood saga take place as annoying background “fuzz” while I eat dinner.  So many evenings I have laid in bed resting my eyes while my obsessed significant other reads Twilight, only wishing I was half the vampire the characters in the books are.  Even a couple of my so called “male” friends have grown a vagina and joined in on the fun, pathetic!

These shows and books remind me of bad 80’s porn, but without the porn!  My only hope is that the readers of Jackass Soapbox and all the true men of America stand up and fight this phenomena.  Fight it with the will of any testosterone filled member of mankind.  If we don’t – IF WE FAIL – you will come home soon to find your wife unsatisfied with your manly physique, tanned skin, and callused hands – only to desire a boy with a fair complexion, boyish eyes, and hands as soft as her’s.

You can let this 110lbs fourth grader take your manhood or you can stand and fight!  Refuse to buy all of this shit for the holidays, refuse to have it viewed on your new Sony 60″ HD television with full surround sound, and refuse to role play as a vampire on those dark passionate nights (unless upon your request of course).  If we stand together, united, we can defeat this plague upon popular media and your wife will love you again.

Back then Apple was a bit of a minor player in the consumer electronics world. Things have drastically changed. Today Apple is a super power in the industry. Their products are nothing short of spectacular and amazing. An iPhone is one of the few things you’ll hear a man call sexy that isn’t a woman or an exotic sports car.

Despite that sexiness that most all Apple devices have, I can not bring myself to buy anything the company produces. Why? Well… there are actually a few good reasons not to buy Apple products.

One, once you buy an Apple product, you’re handcuffed. In the world of Apple, you do things the way they want you to do them. While their interface is generally simple, elegant and easy to use, I like having the opportunity to do things differently if I wish. Still, I realize that for most people, the imposed simplicity is welcomed.

Two, Apple behaves like a totalitarian monopoly, plain and simple. They do everything they can to lock out virtually any form of competition. In reality, lots of companies try to act like this, and it’s actually not illegal (in the USA) to do so, until you in fact become a monopoly. So I can’t be too angry at them for that either, regardless of how much I despise it. In fact, I have bought many products from companies that behave just as badly. Still, it’s worth mentioning.

My reason for not buying Apple products and urging all of you to do the same is a little more fundamental. I call for a boycott for a much more serious offense.

Three, Apple is guilty of blatant censorship. Apple wants to decide what we full grown adults can and can not see on our Apple devices that we paid HUNDREDS of dollars for. Just a few months ago Apple decided iPhone and iPod Touch owners were not allowed to see hot girls on their devices and they also work to pull anything else they deem as ‘adult’ content from their stores. But now they have gone yet another step further and decided you are not allowed to use a dictionary that features certain four letter words like Shit or Fuck either!

What’s next Apple? Will Websense be included in your next firmware update, or will you simply contract the Chinese government to bring the Great Firewall of China to your wonderful little devices?! I say you go for it! Apple obviously thinks all full grown adults need a rock solid proxy imposed on them to keep their moral compass centered.

Forget that they block you from using many great third party applications like Google voice. Forget that they make ridiculous claims like saying people with jailbroken iPhones could crash cell phone towers or worse! Boycott them for treating all us full grown, tax paying Americans who spent shit loads of money on their devices, like little children.

Hey Apple, if I wanted this kind of treatment, I’d join a religious cult!

Admittedly, I am a pretty big Microsoft Fanboy. I own an original Zune 30, I love Xbox and I think Windows 7 is the best thing since sliced bread. Bing is even my new default search engine! Yet right now, I type this post in Google Docs. I use Gmail to manage my personal domain email accounts, I adore Google Calendar and iGoogle is my web portal of choice.

Basically my point is, while I use a lot of Microsoft (among other companies) hardware and software, Google owns my web presence. I only switched to Bing search to change things up a bit. It was a chilling moment when I realized that nearly all of my online existence belonged to Google. They even house all the pictures I have taken of my daughter in my Picasa web album. Taking my searches away from them was the least that I could do.

Now we get news today of the new Google Chrome OS and I am floored. On one hand I am scared of letting Google also officially have my desktop but on the other, it is very interesting to see a major company like Google directly take aim at the giant mammoth of the OS world: Windows.

If you take a close look at Chrome, Google’s direction with the browser is extremely interesting.

• First, you can not block Ads in Chrome like you can in Firefox. This is very important for Google.
• Second, unless you make the effort to remove it, your entire search history and frequently visited sites are prominently on display and up for grabs. Data mining FTW! Another big plus for a company like Google.
• Third, the ironically “chromeless” application shortcuts you can create in Chrome give the appearance of locally installed apps when there are none. Google even goes as far as not letting you open up new tabs in their chromeless app viewers. Google has also gone the extra mile and made their most popular online apps (Gmail, Docs and Calendar) work seamlessly offline. So someone like my mom would never even realize that the neat Google Docs thing I installed on her computer is not actually installed at all.

The third point will essentially be the deal breaker with the new Google Chrome OS. If you are going to convince people like my mom and grandmother to use a new, non-familiar OS, it better work, especially when there is no Internet. Most non-avid computer users are not going to understand the concept of cloud computing, and even those of us embracing the cloud still need our apps when the net is unavailable.

Still, if anyone can pull it off, it’s Google. Consider this, by creating their own OS, Google gets to control everything. By using the Linux kernel there will be no viruses (for now), they will be able to ensure all the necessary drivers exist and the support will be there. Google will also ensure that unlike other Linux distros, this one will “just work”. I think we will see a lot of common Apple ideas being thrown out to describe the new Google Chrome OS:

It just works… There are no viruses… Its fast… Its simple and elegant… BUT ITS STILL A PC!

And it will be free.

What about issues of competition? One one hand if we start seeing most software design moving in the direction Google is pushing towards, programmers can create a single online web app and it will work on any platform, be it OSX, Windows, Chrome, Android or any flavor of Unix/Linux. That’s good for competition. But what about browser competition? As fast and sleek as Chrome is, I can not live without my Firefox plug ins. I am positive the new Chrome OS will not be supporting Firefox, Opera, IE or any other browser out there. We will see a monopoly of the desktop that trumps even Microsofts attempts at doing so.

Finally, what about privacy? In the new Google OS will they also track every mouse click I make, every web app I open and every keystroke I hit? Will their sophisticated algorithms piece together targeted ads based on phrases I use while chatting or typing up term papers for school? Why not, Gmail already kind of does that.

Regardless of the issues or trade offs, I think this marks the beginning of a paradigm shift in computing. A few weeks ago while I was taking a “staycation” I was watching Live with Regis and Kelly and at one point in the opening dialog, Kelly Ripa pulled out her iPhone and made the comment that she could do everything with it. That little phone was her primary PC. Consider that idea. A little phone is this persons primary personal computer. Google sees this and that is the market they are going after with Android and now the Chrome OS. Lightweight, simple and portable computing.

The OS wars are about to get interesting.

The Adam Carolla Show is gone, back to classic Loveline.

For the past few years I have woke up every morning, plugged my Zune in and hopped off the take a shower.  While in the shower, the Zune software would start up and automatically start downloading my favorite podcasts that would get me through the day.  I enjoy the sounds of Indiefeed, Skeptoid, The Onion Radio News, Clark Howard and most importantly, The Adam Carolla Show every day while sitting at my desk hammering keys and clicking away like a good little techie nerd.

Well, my days just became a little less entertaining after yesterday.   The radio station that hosted Carolla’s show, 97.1 FM Talk in Los Angeles, has gone the way of the Dodo and changed over to another Top 40 Hits station.

For a guy like me, who lives and works in and around Atlanta/Metro Atlanta, podcasts are my only source of decent and engaging radio. Here in the ATL it’s all either County or Hip Hop.  You’re either a cow boy or a gangsta around these parts!  Sure, there are a few rock stations, but they’d only satisfy the most brain dead, musically shallow of us.  If you want to envision what it’s like to listen to a typical, Atlanta FM rock station, you only need to load about 20 songs on your MP3 player and set it to shuffle. Heres a sample of what you’ll need to match their expansive catalog:

The 70’s: Stairway to Heaven,  Hotel California  and Free Bird. The 80’s: Welcome to the Jungle, Sweet Child of Mine and Back in Black. The 90’s: Jeremy, Interstate Love Song and maybe NIN’s Closer if it’s an edgy rock station.  And Today!: Something from 3 Doors down, Trapt or one of those other poser bands.

Why does every damn station in this damn town play music from “The 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and today”?  I am not exaggerating.  There are maybe four rock stations in this town and they all basically play the exact SAME THING! And the morning shows are simply abysmal.  You’d think Atlanta was home to some of the dumbest white honkey hicks and fat lipped negroes in the country! It’s almost as if the phone screeners just look for idiots to put on the phones. I simply can’t tolerate it. We really aren’t that stupid around here… I hope.

So I have turned to gathering my own tunes and talk radio off the net in the form of Podcasts and downloaded MP3s.  So far it’s been awesome. Screw traditional radio, I’ll listen to my shows when I want, pause and resume them at my leisure and skip the commercials in most cases.

Adam Carolla’s show being cancelled is simply another example of what’s wrong with the  music and radio industry. It’s all turned to crap. There are no more niche shows or programming. Now they all take the approach of throwing out a big net and nabbing as many ears as they can. Well, I think you guys have over fished the pond and more and more of us are going away and not coming back to listen. I can’t remember the last time I actually turned my radio on. Screw all of you.  When they shut down 99x here in Atlanta about a year ago, that was the last straw!  To hell with FM radio.

While I wait for Carolla to land on his feet and start up a new show, I’m going to start a podcast feed out of this site featuring classic Loveline from 1999 up until his departure from the show.  I’ve got 40 gigs of this stuff to burn through. I’ll upload more and more as I listen to it. Feel free to subscribe to the feed if you want to add it to your podcast software of choice. I don’t have many readers, so I don’t fear server overload too much. But if it does become an issue, I’ll expect all of you to start hitting up some of those google ads to help me out!

If you’re interested in the torrent, you can grab it here!

UPDATE! Carolla is about to launch his own personal podcast. Check it out here: http://carollaradio.com/.

Because the Loveline collection is so massive, I’m holding off on posting it from my server. Download the torrent if you want the recordings. I’ll be seeding it for months.

It is no secret that being a parent involves making a lot of sacrifices. I am cool with forfeiture of my gadget money, video game time and three hours of sleep every night. This little monster is carrying my gene pool into the next generation after all. In fact, it almost seems like a privileged to give things up for the little squirt. But something else has also been sacrificed, something I never really thought I would have to give up.

Since the birth of the new baby, my sex life has pretty much shriveled up like an old man’s testicles after taking a dip in a cool stream. There are earthworms out there getting more action than I have as of late. My wife has reduced our love making to a single session a week. ONE TIME A WEEK! And when we do “do it”, it’s usually shameful guilt sex. It’s almost like I asked her to fold a basket of laundry or wash a sink full of dishes. Her typical response to my requests is chiseled in my mind now: “Alright, we’ll do it….. GOSH!”

Sadly, since the beginning of my marriage there appears to have been a steady decline in intercourse. Check out this flow chart outlining said decline.

A steady decline, with the exception of a single, explianable outlier.

Not only has the sex been reduced, we now face hurdles when doing it. Usually the baby starts crying midway through. I talked her into screwing around today and she started leaking milk all over my chest. There I am laying on my back when suddenly, drip…. drip… drip… When my wife reached for her nursing bra, I nearly launched her into the air and off the bed with my awesome hip flex. I was suddenly hit with a super human strength inducing shot of adrenalin when faced with the possibility of having sex with the wrinkly, boob misshaping nursing bra in my face! These grotesque contraptions are some sort of evil, anti boner machine! I never thought that there existed such a thing that could turn me off to boobies, but these ugly, granny bras definitely do the trick.

So there we were, my wife making guilt fueled love to me and I had a towel covering my chest and half my face to soak up all the milk dripping all over place. After she got into the groove the sex was fine, but because I only have sex one time a week, my stamina is shot to hell. I feel like a former Olympiad who used to run marathons but now becomes winded while attempting a fifty yard sprint. I suddenly have the longevity of a 13 year old pleasuring himself to a hustler magazine for the first time. Before he can get his little lizard out of his pants, he’s glued the pages of the magazine together!

I tried resorting to porno movies to get me through the week and to help keep my sexual stamina up, but that didn’t go well at all. I downloaded a ton of stuff from various genres, waited until the wife went to bed, got the baby set in her crib then sneaked off into my little corner of shame. To my dismay, all I found were these crack whore, meth head looking bitches with these huge over sized boobs that wouldn’t even jiggle in an earthquake!

I don’t even understand porn these days. I grew up watching classic stuff from the 70’s. Hand picked masterpieces borrowed from one of my buddy’s father’s private collection cleverly hidden under his bed. Those were real women, with organic breasts, a moderate amount of pubic hair and seductive curves. If anyone knows of a classic pornographic bittorrent tracker, leave me a link in the comments.

The women in porn today all look so angry. Then there are the disgusting looking guys with their monstrous erections that the girls basically start screaming at and hitting them. Yes, in most of the films I previewed the whores literally started smacking the crap out of the guys wieners. Then the chick would usually start spitting everywhere. How do these women have spit that is so thick they can string it across the room? And what’s up with all the tattoos? I saw one girl with this gigantic tramp stamp across her back that actually had a word misspelled in it! I hope that was done on purpose.

Needless to say, the porn didn’t work out, though chicas123.com is nice. Top that off with the fact that I was so paranoid of getting caught the entire time, I really couldn’t get my mojo flowing anyway. So much for that.

Sadly enough, every man knows that his mother in law is probably a good indicator of what his wife will some day become, and my mother in law probably hasn’t given up the pootie tang since the late 80’s! I always adhered to the sad delusion that my wife would be different, but now I see the foreshadowing of what will probably be a sad sexual future for myself.

Here’s to hoping some pharmaceutical company develops a clear, odorless, and tasteless female libido enhancing drug soon. If that doesn’t work out, I guess I can always resort to slipping my wife the roofie.

Let's get fit in 2009!

Another year is nearing its end and all around me people are lively and excited with their hopes and aspirations for the New Year to come.  Resolutions are bountiful as usual.  I hear one over weight friend vow to lose weight, another vow to quit smoking and a few fellow coworkers vow to get more exercise.  One fellow down the hall plans to finish his college degree and another in the office next to him even jokingly muses about dumping his hag of a wife.

Everybody seems to be having a great time declaring these exciting, life changing plans for the next year to come. Personally, I think making plans are fun too. It gives you something to live for and aspire to.  It’s healthy to set goals and work towards them in life.  But frankly, all of you and your New Year resolutions make me want to puke.  If you were not motivated enough to work towards any given goal during any other time of the year, why would you suddenly start now?

New Year resolutions are a joke. They are another marketing gimmick used to swindle away a few more of the hopelessly hopeful’s dollars by creating the prospect of easily losing a few extra pounds or sculpting an abdominal muscle out of their chubby mid-section.  They are an excuse for the lethargic glutton to have another helping of fried chicken at the local hog trough (otherwise known as a buffet) while telling those around him that this is the last meal of fried food he’s eating before starting his New Years diet!  And New Year resolutions are the excuses every other underachiever out there uses to put off all the great things they are going to do… UNTIL THE NEW YEAR!

New Year resolutions don’t just annoy me, they intrude on my life.  Already my local fitness club is becoming over crowded in the evenings.  Dozens of new faces suddenly pop up, pumping and sweating away with their dream of looking like a movie star glistening in their eyes.  They’ll all be gone by Valentine’s Day. Infomercials promoting miracle diets, total body transformations and promises to help you instantly quit smoking (or any other bad habit you might have) pollute  some of my favorite deep cable television channel’s time slots and my ears bleed from the endless speech I have to endure day in and out about all these new, wonderful plans. It’s maddening.

Instead of wasting your money on the next miracle diet, gym membership or that next wonderful panacea that promises to make all your problems go away, why don’t you just give your money to me! Empty your wallets jackasses!

And don’t assume I am some holier than thou, super motivated, over achiever who grabs everything I want in life by the horns and forcefully take what’s theirs. I’m not above making resolutions, I’m just not self delusional to actually make them.  I look at myself in the mirror every morning and think two things: #1. Holy crap my eyebrows are bushy and #2:  I’m a loser, a totally awesome loser but a loser none the less.  I’m no better than any of you… well most of you.

This year for fun, every time I hear a coworker, acquaintance or friend announce a new resolution, I offer up one of my own.  These are the resolutions of a real man, a truly awesome beast of a human being! Enjoy.

My resolutions:

1. Eat more pork fried rice.  (Simply because it’s delicious!)
2. Eat tacos for lunch every day in February, covered in cheese dip (Offered to an overweight acquaintance vowing to lose weight while dining on fattening Mexican food).
3. Stop peeing in the sink in men’s restrooms (Announced in a crowded mall restroom, while casually talking on the phone to someone and taking a pee.)
4. Find a more rewarding job (Offered in response to my boss’ announcement that he plans to lose weight next year. It was a joke by the way).
5. Forward more mind numbing, inbox cluttering, SPAM email. (Sent as a reply-to-all in an email listing great ideas for New Year resolutions. Easily four hundred people got that message!)
6. Stop wasting so much of my life on a blog no one reads.  (Because no one really cares what you have to say.)

That’s it! Happy New Year!