Friday, July 21, 2006

Pawn Shopper Profile #1

Name: Unknown
Age: late 20s to early 30s
Ethnicity: Arabic
This fellow can only be described as an Arab hippie, his hair long and unkempt, held back in a white do-rag.
Our friend entered the store around closing time today to get a portable cd player. I showed him the case where we keep them. He wanted one fairly cheap, and with a radio in it. The ones with radios cost more than he wanted to spend, so I grabbed one without that was pretty cheap. At the counter, after paying, he asked if it had a radio. After establishing that he really needed the radio, we got him a couple more. Only the radio worked on one, and the other didn't work at all. So, he ended up taking the working cd player and the working radio, totalling the price that was marked originally on the working sans-radio cd. All along, he kept asking if we had any Madonna cds. He didn't seem interested in looking himself. We only had a Madonna single, and he wasn't interested in that. Before he left, he asked about our firearms.

An odd cat.

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Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The Question of the Day is "Why?"

So, I'm back. I'll try to write more frequently now.

So, I quit my soul-sucking corporate pigsty of a job. The job where I was sent home one day to shave. The job where they made drivers throw packets of ads into peoples yards -- customer and non-customer alike. You know, the bullshit job.

Now I work at a pawn shop three blocks from my house. It's pretty awesome. The coworkers are cool, the customers are a little less pushy (usually), there's a lot more autonomy. One weird part though: Now I'm selling guns.

That's fucking weird.

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Tuesday, July 04, 2006

230 and Still Sexy

Today is the 230th anniversary of a bunch of American politicians gathering in a room somewhere on the east coast and discussing Thomas Jefferson's recent retooling of a Thomas Paine pamphlet to serve as a way to goad the British, with whom they were squabbling. Though most of them had no particular part in writing it, they all put their names on it, just because they agreed with what the two Thomases, who were much smarter than them, had written. John Hancock was a real asshole about it and took up way too much space with his signature, but he would die before he reached the age of 50, the bastard. One signer had the unfortunate name of Button Gwinett.

The document's signing is considered the founding of a country that stands for freedom of speech, as long as you don't bother anyone, freedom of your choice of Protestant sects, freedom of being given due process sometimes, and calling sports that other countries play whatever we feel like calling them, and then making fun of them because we don't play them.

All brilliant satire aside, happy birthday America, though you've seen better ones. If we don't blow up the world, we can make sure that the best is yet to come.

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Sunday, July 02, 2006

Corpse Painting the White House

A first season episode of The West Wing I watched today really showed off how well the show's producers/writers did their homework by talking about neo-nazis and mentioning Graveland, although they made a slight mistake in citing "Following the Voice of Blood as their second album, when it is in fact their fourth (although maybe I misheard). Either way, I went nuts for that. The only thing that would have made it better is if it had been Det Som En Gang Var, but as they would probably have to say the title in English and explain the meaning more, it would have been a bit too awkward for the fast flow of the show.

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