Back Away From the Mailbox Sir… Slowly
June 20, 2003 by Ryan Livingston · Comments Off
And to think, there once was a day when I looked forward to the mailman coming. Ah yes, those were the days; days of the rare letter for a young kid; days of the odd subscribed magazine, greeting card or catalog (always full of the neatest/stupidest nonsense imagined).
Now comes dread, heightened, in part, by the last two days of mail:
The check
I tend to think the common response to receiving a check for a large sum of money is usually elation. However, when the source of the money is a certain former Alma Matter… well, the reaction dims.
Yesterday, I received one of Saint Peter’s College’s infamous “checks-unaccompanied-by-a-letter-explaining-the-situation.’ I’ve gotten these before, which is rather obvious if I have named the phenomena. However, in the prior cases I always had a slight inclining as to the reason, like a security deposit rebate or award of some such nonsense.
These usually are around a hundred bucks, so they get deposited merrily. But when a check for $1080.00 comes my way, fourteen months after I washed my hands of the school, I cried for no good will come of this… eventually.
To the best of my knowledge they owe me nothing; or nothing that I can legitimately call them on. I had already surprisingly received payment for the 4 issues of the Pauw Wow I did post-graduation. I figured that was a lost cause and, at $200.00 minus taxes (aye, I had to fill out forms), wasn’t too concerned.
I know it can’t be the punitive damages I keep mentally suing them for. All the pain and suffering from my junior year will, I’m afraid, be uncompensated for. (I know I have not gone into this error of my life; I’ll do so soon in some memoirs. For now let’s just leave it at “Hell hath no fury like an idiot-roommate stoned.”)
“Call them and ask,” you yell! Did that… and found they added a new tactic to their indiscriminate check issuing – the old mail-and-run trick. All their offices conveniently went on vacation today till August 15th.
>sigh< No wonder the college is in debt. 
So I’ll deposit this mysterious lucre in hopes I either get a reason for it, or they just forget about it entirely.
On to today…
Congratulations
Foolishly I went out to the mailbox expecting something from the college telling me, “since I was one of the only hundred and three students with common sense in the entire school, have some cash;” or at least some logical reason not to fret over the check.
Silly little man am I…
The only thing I got from SPC was an application for their newly issued credit card. >sigh again< But I'll leave that college aside for another.
A while back, when I was searching for a path out of the jobless jungle, I sent for brochures to all sorts of tech schools - just for info.
Well the Katherine Gibbs School went a little over zealous. Instead of sending me info, I received call after call from recruiters asking me about my plans for the future. Nice people the recruiters, a bit chatty and thick in the head, but nice.
After a while I told them I was no longer looking, since by that time I enrolled at CSI. The calls stopped, and they never sent the blasted pamphlet. Swipe cut to today, exterior my front porch… the mail sitting, harmless looking, in the box.
A letter from the Katherine Gibbs School (of what, I still don’t exactly know). “Are they still harassing me?” I asked myself quietly. “Egads, I’ve been drafted!!!”
So zealous and/or desperate they are in their recruiting, they’ve obviously misconstrued my request for an info packet as a full-blown application and accepted me. Isn’t that just dandy? It’s good to know that my name alone will get me places.
Hopefully this “acceptance” won’t lead to anything… like bills and crap like that. ‘Cause really, I don’t need anymore mailed aggravation.
To anyone from this “fine” institution who may be reading – I’m ignoring you. I ate the envelope. I’m burning your letter. Next step, I burn your mailer and eat your children. I don’t want you… and frankly you don’t want me. I’m a rabble-rouser. I cause pain and misery where ever I go… just ask the fine folks over at Atlantis Telemarketing Inc. Catch my drift?
Really, what ever happened to the good old-fashioned letter bomb?
Josie and the Pussycats (the movie)
June 4, 2003 by KaiserBlitzkrieg · Comments Off
What can I tell you other than, "Wow?" Suddenly, Martin Lawrence is a comic mastermind and Big Momma’s House is pure comedic gold. Gold I tell you! Gold I say!!!
Yes, such is the state of this pathetic atrocity thrust upon the film viewing public. Inserted somewhere in the midst of mindless banter, cheesy pep talks, and severely mutilated things they would like to call ‘jokes’, exists a plot.
Josie and the Pussy Cats‘ plotline revolves around the concept of subliminal messaging in popular music, being implemented by record labels and backed by the government for the sake of driving the economy. That’s right, the mindless drones of the teeny-bopper movement are being told things such as "orange is the new pink," for the sake of forcing them to shill out $60 on an ugly pair of orange heels so the economy doesn’t tank. All right, that’s plausible enough. Problem is, it seems the boss lady of this particular label is a neurotic lisping nerd girl who wants to be popular and plans on using the Josie crew upstarts as a means of conquering the world. Right…
A midst all of this is the heart warming, or more accurately, the brain-lesioning story of the friendship bonds between Josie her friends… um… the other ones, is the story of the softer side of the neurotic nerd bitch and her henchman; who oddly enough was a lisping nerd himself and how the ‘find’ each other at the end of the movie. In other words, Saddam was only half right: the eyes of Americans will squirt blood, but not because of his inept fighters, rather because of our own inept writers, directors, actors, etc. Surprisingly, there are actually a whole two or three "original" songs attributed to the alley cat band. Of course, I wouldn’t particularly call it music; I’d call it the cause of a mixture of brain fluid and blood streaming out of ears a good five feet in each direction. No friends, I didn’t see this in movie theaters, nor did I rent the blasted thing. This was on cable and I figured, hey how bad could it really be? Like I said before, wow.
On the whole, I’m not even going to defame the NWOt’s rating scale with this floater in the septic tank of Hollywood failures. The facts are, I don’t think I could give it a low enough score to adequately represent to you the truly horrendousness of this waste of perfectly good film. Also in retrospect, I think I was way, way, to hard on Martin Lawrence in the last badness report. Big Momma’s House is light years, no tens of billions of light years ahead of this Neanderthal cave painting. In light of this new found knowledge of badity, I’m going to re-rate Big Momma’s House, it deserves much better than what it got from me last time. I give it a 1 out of 6, a score Josie and the Pussy Cats can never achieve.
