A poem.
Happy Happy Gerbils.
Don’t make them into stew.
‘Cause if you cook the gerbils whole,
you’ll be eating all their poo.
Happy, Happy Gerbils
January 15th, 2010 GaryMake Me Sick
April 19th, 2009 GarySplats of barf surround the empty Stanford Professional Bookstore building at 135 University Avenue, Palo Alto.
Anyone who has played RollerCoaster Tycoon knows that this is a clear sign of needing more janitors.
Also, food courts should not be placed near high-nausea rides like Miyake’s and Rudy’s.
Nerd Water
April 3rd, 2009 GaryI love that someone at Glacier was dorky enough to recursively apply the woman and child dispensing water on their dispenser signage.
It almost makes me want to stop urinating in their dispensers. If only Safeway had more accessible restrooms…
Please Don’t Eat The Soap
March 22nd, 2009 GaryOur Menlo Park Safeway has an identity crisis and a strange history. It started out as a reasonably-sized store that happened to span the great socioeconomic rifts of its surrounding neighborhoods. It wasn’t the nicest store around, but it brought a diverse crowd to the heart of Menlo Park by offering accessibility and family-priced groceries. Unfortunately it broke. One day—almost overnight—Safeway punctured a wall and leaked into the recently-evacuated bowels of the adjacent Rite-Aid. Suddenly their inventory was smeared across 150 meters of aisle-baffled wasteland. As patronage declined, Safeway underwent a series of incrementally crappier remodels in an attempt to maximize usage of their new real estate.
To perform some confusing and unnecessary operation on the ceiling, Safeway installed overhead scaffolding that created a troglodytic atmosphere. While we were all hunched over our shopping carts, trying to avoid a plank decking or a halogen burn, management aggressively rearranged inventory. I would head towards the popcorn and find it replaced by diapers and feminine hygiene products. I would head towards bread and find diapers and feminine hygiene products. I would head towards diapers and feminine hygiene products, where I would find cat food—and diapers and feminine hygiene products. Christopher Alexander would have had a horrific fit had he happened by at this hour hunting for hemorrhoid pads or such.
The remodeling continued in this manner for several years before they finally just gave up and tore the Safeway down.
A short while later, and a few paces to the right, a much larger Safeway sprung up. Covering more than 6,000 square meters, this store defines its own microclimate. Despite its mammoth size, Safeway’s inventory continues to suck. They have a Starbucks, a Jamba Juice, a sushi bar, and a nut bar but they allocated space for exactly 5 boxes of 100W light bulbs. If you swing by Safeway after about 8PM, you will not find any 100W light bulbs remaining, so you’ll have to return home to eat your sushi, latte, Jamba Juice, and sugared nuts in darkness or in the gloomy glow of the 20W decorative bulb you bought out of desperation.
Our braindead phoenix of a Safeway has tried to scale to an “up” for which it’s not prepared. Besides the sushi and nut bars (nut bars have nothing to do with tea-bagging, by the way), this store offers multimedia shopping cart rentals that look like cars and play edutaining videos to your children while you scald a fellow shopper with your latte so you can grab the last box of 100W light bulbs. These amenities are…interesting…but not conducive to efficient shopping. Safeway’s stab at the Whole Foods/Draeger’s/Andronico’s clientele seems to have missed its target and wound up in its own leg. Take, for instance, the all-natural, goat-derived ZUM BAR® soap. Whole Foods has a similar high-end, cut-it-yourself soap station, but they first mastered the art of containing the smell that such a product emits. Safeway’s ZUM BAR® station smells like someone discovered a lavender flower with an anus and poured lye into it. The militarized soap aerosol forms an alkali stench cloud that repels anyone with standard faculties. Unfortunately for Safeway, it also makes wrong-minded people hungry. This results in amusing afterthought signage that I’ve painstakingly photographed through a respirator after applying six jars of Vaseline to avoid chemical burns.
If you did not LOL at that sign, please read it again while keeping in mind that ZUM BAR® looks like this:
While you’re holding your sides and gasping for breath, please consider Dean Kamen’s hideous Segway for a moment.
I love signs. They offer a concise peek into the psyche of people tasked with conveying information they neither necessarily want nor are equipped to convey. I think signs are an accidental art medium—the artists: usually bureaucrats or blue-collar workers whose casual omissions or misplaced emphases can speak more to our zeitgeist than an entire decade of intentional expression. Stupid signs are also fun to giggle at because they’re fucking stupid. For example, a simple “inclement” or the more typographically-friendly “wet” might have given the following some climatic context—rescuing this field from abandonment due to deferred sign retrieval.
Some signs are so cerebral that they’re obtuse. Thankfully, this one included a reassuring “proceed ahead”, which most people correctly interpreted as “ignore this sign and keep driving.”
Others imply strange things like a unisex restroom season. Interestingly, the “i” in this sign appears to have been hurriedly inserted.
And speaking of insertion, did you know you should first remove all attachments?
And speaking of children, it turns out they’re quite handy to have around for mountain lion encounters.
It is okay to run from a mountain lion once you’ve fed it; however, iconography is a completely different subject. We will be sure to cover that some other night. For now, I’m off to Safeway as they began restocking 100W light bulbs at midnight.
New Year Miscellany
January 15th, 2009 GaryHappy New Year! This year, I resolve to create macaroni pictures for the Tron Moses Coconut. Four out of five seagulls think that the Tron Moses Coconut is more worshipable than the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This is largely because seagulls are self-conscious and can not reliably spell spagetthi.
Macaroni, on the other hand, is easy to spell and is captivating when glued to colored construction paper and dusted with glitter. Speaking of glitter, I would like to thank my sexy helper monkey for posing with the Tron Moses Coconut.
Having over-discussed glitter, let’s move on to Things that Suck. Today, the Thing that Sucks is Bistro 412 in downtown Palo Alto. Once again, this bar has lowered itself. While the rest of downtown was classing it up for the holidays—despite a weakened economy—B412 was tagging its windows with nasty-looking, ozone-depleting, penis-deflating fake snow.
I peeked in once, half expecting to see “bitches on poles”. Instead, the TopNotch ENT was only a frumpy-looking woman who we’ll call “Charrise” for the sake of conversation. Anyways, Charisse was standing next to “Edgar” at the bar and both were laughing, but looking around uncomfortably—as though they knew they’d made a bad choice and would make several more before morning. I shook my head sadly at Charisse and Edgar, but they couldn’t see me because B412’s windows are darker than an Escalade with really fucking dark, trashy windows.
Religion and society out of the way, let’s discuss economics. Like the rest of the world, I don’t understand economics. Maybe someone could explain to me the economy of free coffee with purchase of lotto.
Are retailers’ lotto margins especially high? Even if they are, this deal sounds backwards—it seems like you should throw in a free $1 lotto ticket with the purchase of a $4.95 mocha, where said mocha is really 2¢ of Chock full o’Nuts. You’ve burnt the crap out of the Chock full o’Nuts and frothed in some soy milk to make it taste strong & gourmet.
Of course, I don’t understand economics, which is why I’m not rich. I’m a poor seagull with a website. I make snarky comments about struggling bars and blaspheme the FSM. Oh, and I hate Prius drivers—but that’s really just a hobby…like emdash abuse.
It should be an interesting new year. May yours be full of free coffee and lotto.
On Gerbils and Hybrid Cars
December 5th, 2008 GaryIf you haven’t been reading the comments around here, you’re missing out. There are two threads that have been especially entertaining:
The “Napping” thread began as a discussion of the San Francisco Zoo, but quickly degraded into rants about how little I know of gerbils. Some highlights:
imani Says:
how big id thw gerbil it is for the prject for school i need to know asap
Gary Says:
imani,It’s approximately a sphere with a 4 foot radius. It weighs about 1/2 ton and eats nothing but nutritional yeast and the droppings of other animals. Unfortunately, its fur has fiber-optic qualities, which are valuable to high speed internet providers. They’re harvesting the poor gerbils and killing them by the thousands. We all must work together to stop the slaughter of these gentle creatures.
Good luck with your school project,
Gary
comfycouchman Says:
haha, i wonder how imani’s gerbil project went.
bobby Says:
um…… Thats a kapibara……..you know worlds largest rodent. anakonda food. and how do you know its annoyed anyway?
capibera lover Says:
bobby is right it is a capibera, gary, get bent, ur webiste is shit
someone from england Says:
that isnt a gerbil its what the australian people call a wombat.gerbils dont grow that big only to the size of your palm.wombats are part of the vombatidae family and gerbils are part Muridae family
Gary Says:
No, “someone from england”. You’re wrong. It is the world’s largest gerbil.
someone from england Says:
ok then gary
but us normal people no that its a capibera.
and anyways im studying animals so your the one thats wrong
And it goes on like this for some time. I’m warned of potentially angering the “hundreds of pro breeders of gerbils” while being raked through coals for my insistence upon the gerbil’s gerbulence. If you look carefully, you’ll find a spatula.
The “Prius” thread reads similarly, but I’m not the only target of the aggression. It’s currently about twice as long as “Napping”, so skip to the loo before settling down with some popcorn.
Having acknowledged that I’m not the sole provider of original content on this blog, I’d like to thank all the internet weirdoes that glut my database.
Babies of the Night
November 30th, 2008 GaryNothing makes my skin crawl more than a crumpled doll under a sodium lamp at night.
That is all.
I’m Gay for GayGeekStore
October 9th, 2008 GaryYou long time readers may have noticed that I have a new sponsor, The Gay Geek Store. Do check them out. They’ve just launched a new line of bumper stickers that you can use to show your support for generally-liberal topics. If you’re self-satisfied, smug, or generally “gay for” things, you can now tell the world by slapping these all over your gay Prius.
You’re sure to get a laugh and possibly a rear-ending.
If you’re not that gay, you can go more conservative.
While you’re at the website, don’t forget to check out the poll and quiz. It’s free and you don’t even have to be gay to play. If you don’t play, you’re a bag into which one puts doosh. 
Fankenführer
October 6th, 2008 GaryIf a sentient mesohyll matrix in Dockers isn’t scary enough for you, try said sponge goose-stepping around a fruit snack box with an emphatic, double-armed salute.
Frikkin A. Doesn’t anyone step back and look at the design before sending millions of these boxes off to Target stores around the world? How could anyone with a 6th grade education not see this and instantly visualize classic scenes of a man who single-handedly caused a sharp decline in the number of babies named, “Adolf” during the late 1930’s?
Or maybe the schutzstaffel spongiform imagery is intentional? I always assumed that SpongeBob’s creators were sucking from the Ren & Stimpy crackpipe, but perhaps they were riding Walt Disney’s white horse all along. I’ll have to watch the program to see if they’ve been slipping in other anti-Semitic references.
Irrespective to the outcome of that viewing, we should probably protest this product. It’s bad to feed hydrogenated corn syrup (or whatever the hell is in these “fruit flavored snacks”) to children. But what’s really wrong is that these claim to be “trick or treat size”, which implies you’re supposed to give them to Trick-or-Treaters. You know they taste absolutely awful—just like all of the other cross-branded, fruit-flavored snacks out there. Handing these out for Halloween instead of proper candy is akin to handing out pennies or raisins or some other disappointing crap. Snickers Fun Size? Fun. SpongeDolf HitlerPants trick or treat sized fruit flavored snacks? Fascist.
Mutt Plug
September 28th, 2008 GaryI think I’ve read too much internet, because my first thought was not, “dog toy”:
If you can’t see anything but a dog toy, or maybe a weird caterpillar, then you need to read more internet—it’ll probably save your ass someday. You should start with the Folsom Street Fair’s web site if you live anywhere near the Bay Area. Then you’ll be informed when you, your 8 young children, and your Christian hairdo stumble upon a bunch of minimalists in leather straps. When little Peter asks, “what are those old men doing, mommy?”, you can inform him that they’re simply promoting diversity within the leather/alternative lifestyle.
Actually, today was the 25th anniversary of the Folsom Street Fair, so you’re safe for another year. As entertaining as it sounds, I did not go. I was stuck in Sacramento, eating Chex Mix®:
