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Yet more IH 0051 religion presentations but this was without humorous mispronunciation.  Instead, I learned of SGI Meditation and about the religion’s founder Daisaku Ikeda.  A central practice of SGI meditation is the chanting a of a mantra numerous times during the day and the belief that doing so will bring peace and success.  The founder has received 200 honorary doctorates and 150 honorary citizenships.  While I appreciate the simplicity of the doctrine, I doubt its validity:  I’ve been yelling “w00t!” as a prayer unto the Lord a few times a day for the last few years and no divine gifts have befallen me.

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November 29th was going to be National Fail A Professional Exam Day.  I’d walk into the test site, sit down confidently, guess on most of the answers while looking like I knew what I was doing, make some impressive scribblings, and walk out arrogantly in 30 minutes or so making everyone think I finished 150 minutes early.   I arrived at the site and was sad to see that it was simply a generic test site with people taking all sorts of professional exams blowing my plans.  So instead I was forced to take the test legitimately and with repose…. Grrrrr…..

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In IH 0051, instead of doing a 2nd paper, someone could visit a church of a religion family he or she is not and write a report on their experience.  Two folks from the Indian subcontinent did such a project by visiting a Reformed Lutheran Church.  The presentation was going fine except every time the presenter tried to say “hymn” it came out much closer to “hymen”.  So, I got a few stares when ater hearing “going through hymn after hymn got repetative” and I said under my breath “not for me”.

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I went to the Post Office to send some cards to the Czech Republic and encountered an interminable list of Faulknerian Idiot Manchildren as listed below.1.  A women who had 45 Christmas letters, roughly half of which had to go international and 6 packages.  Each item had a single 39 cent stamp on it and roughly 10 minute elapsed in explaining that 39 cents would not send a bottle of Vodka to Kyrgyzstan and another 5 in her saying that the scale was innacurate and that a Christmas card couldn’t possibly weigh more than an oz.

2.  A profoundly fat woman who gave the stare of disgust while forcing her self around me through the double door.  I don’t think she thought the other of the french door was locked despite the fact that her massive ass was opening it as she revealed her idiocy to me.

3.  A man who looked suspiciously up and down the line while I swear he was just faking filling out a customs order and if you looked at him directly he’d stare at a poster of Holiday Stamps.

Whenever someone would reset their feet, the person behind them would shift forward and the whole line would contract.  I failed to observe this rite and was nearly shoved to fill in the 6″ void in front of me.  The line nearly halved its length despite not a single person having been served.

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I hate Black Friday.  It violates the sacred ideal of cooperation that applies to all non-cr4ck3r nerd (fuck (|24(|< 3|25).  It pits nerd vs. nerd in a pre-dawn bum rush.  Today, I arrived at Best Buy at 4 AM and saw few parking spots.  Frown.  I then saw the folks at the front of the line appeared not have shaved in a few days.  A nerd norm, but when I saw the same unshavenness 70 people back, I knew I would not get the unnecessarily discounted DVD player I sought.  Frown.  I went hope and bummed around on the internet and on eBay saw the DVD player I looked for being sold by USADVD4L3SS, and at a net price about the same as Best Buy.  Smile.

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Every Thanksgiving my father and I have a cullinary show down.  This year I won the battle between brining the turkey and serving a block of sawdust and was prepared to begin another battle: stuffing.  My father insisted on meat stuffing which I thought was just preparing the stuffing in the bird, but in this case it was preparing the stuffing with ground beef,  I was incensed.  Replacing sugars with high fructose corn syrup I can handle, using partially hydrogenated soybean oil instead of lard I can deal, using textural tricglycerides and monosodium glutimate as flavor-enhancers I will grow to accept, but stuffing one animal inside of another is going too far.  One day, he will be eaten by an elephant and know God’s cruel irony.

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Every Thanksgiving my father and I have a cullinary show down.  This year I won the battle between brining the turkey and serving a block of sawdust and was prepared to begin another battle: stuffing.  My father insisted on meat stuffing which I thought was just preparing the stuffing in the bird, but in this case it was preparing the stuffing with ground beef,  I was incensed.  Replacing sugars with high fructose corn syrup I can handle, using partially hydrogenated soybean oil instead of lard I can deal, using textural tricglycerides and monosodium glutimate as flavor-enhancers I will grow to accept, but stuffing one animal inside of another is going too far.  One day, he will be eaten by an elephant and know God’s cruel irony.

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Yesterday, due to lack of fridge space, I needed alternate storage for the turkey until Thanksgiving.  The weather channel forecasted reasonable temperatures for outdoor turkey storage for the next day so I placed it in a 5 gallon drink cooler and plopped the bird outside in the low 40°’s to thaw.  This morning I went outside to retrieve the turkey for Operation: Brine-the-Bird, I looked outside for the turkey but returned empty handed.  I asked my dad and he said he put it into his truck to keep the animals from opening the cooler.  Good thinking, except the cooler is screw-top, if a raccoon and the non-existent-thumb strength to get the top off, he’s a better mammal than I and can have the turkey.