Can I just get a summary?

I'm really interested in this article about London politics. However, I'm not nearly interested in reading more than half a paragraph. Would somebody please read it and call me to tell me what it's about?

(This is the beginning of a five day weekend, so I need to save my energy for having fun)

Free Taxi? Seems like there's no end to my cleverness.

Monday evening my special lady was tired and didn't wanna go grocery shopping. I assumed she wouldn't want to wash dishes either, so I suggested pizza. Last time I brought pizza home it was not hot anymore, and the oven dries it out pretty quick, so after I ordered a large Hawaiian for the ladies and a spicy pizza for me (with added chicken, so I felt healthy) I asked them if they deliver:

So, do you guy, like deliver, to homes?
Yeah, for five lits on a one large order but two larges we deliver for free.
So, you could maybe deliver these pizzas, like to my house?
You want us to deliver these pizzas, like to your house?
Yeah, that'd be awesome.
Yeah, I guess we could do that.
Would they be delivered by car...?
Yeah...
Would it be possible for the delivery guy to give me a lift...?
Maybe, I'll ask the driver...

Then the driver came in and we had this conversation:

Hey you're the guy that wants a lift?
Yeah.
Well, it'll be five lits.
What?! The lady said you deliver two larges for free!
Yeah well we don't normally deliver people accompanying them. (normally a cab from there would cost 15 lits, so it still woulda been a good deal)
Well, I don't have five lits (I actually didn't cause of the ATM card problem I mentioned), so you take the pizzas, and I'll follow you by bus...
What?! Forget it, just come with me.

How cool is that??? Free ride and pizza still hot.

p.s. my special lady foolishly tasted my pizza before I tasted it to test the spiciness, which was impressive, and had to pound half a bambolis of my beer to cool down.

Fat Weekend

I had a very fun filled weekend; it's inspired me to have more fun. Usually I just have a little fun each weekend, but now that I've got a taste for it, I will try, through better planning, to have even more.

It came down to who was around. On Friday night I partied in town with Gedas and some of his coworkers, two of whom are quiet types, one normal one, one very talkative one who makes up for the normal one, and one crazy wild one who makes up for the two quiet types. It was one of their birthdays, so the good times were on.

After that three of us went to a casino, and I changed my only bank note into a 100 litas chip. Knowing that I didn't stand a chance of getting home if I lost it (my ATM card isn't working), I wondered around the tables pondering what to do until I just went back for my cash and got the hell out of there. I walked to the spot I always call a cab from; I get home for about 26 lits. I thought I should try to save a few lits because of my ATM card situation, so I told the cabby about some short cuts. I ended up paying him 32.

Saturday was BBQ day, awesome weather, but because Gedas and Juste couldn't make it, we met them for lunch instead, cause we had two birthday presents for him: a pitcher and another pitcher. Honestly, the man was living the life of a personal bartender (to himself) with no pitchers. I simply couldn't let it go on.

That evening Mindaugas and Egle swung by for BBQ, plus Siga came, who always insists on heating up the sauna, so it turned into hot shish-kebobs followed but an even hotter sauna. Egle and I played beirut on a coffee table with one coffee mug of beer each (I won 6-3, but that was pretty goof for her first game ever). Also, a certain couple of people broke a bed.

On Sunday, the day we usually just go home to Klaipeda, we did something awesome before that: BBQ again! Mindaugas had the brilliant foresight to bring ground beef and buns for burgers when we all woke up from the Saturday BBQ. Awesome. I mixed jalapeno peppers into the men's burgers. Awesome.

Doesn't anybody remember what happens in Atlas Shrugged?

"The plan would temporarily remove the tax drivers pay on gas for the summer, and shift that burden to oil companies that earn “enormous” profits. An average profit would be calculated for the oil companies, and anything over 10 percent higher than that average would be taxed 50 percent." (article here)

That's Clinton's idea, which anyone with a brain realizes discourages oil companies from being productive, i.e. from being able to keep the cost of gas from going up. What a fucking moron.

Let's get to the bottom of this

What are they called?

You know what you can use

instead of a flash light when you forget where you put it? You laptop screen!

Buffalo Wings Last Night Were Delicious!

More too much X-Files?

Yesterday I came down with a cold, so I left work an hour early and watched four episodes of the X-Files and went to sleep. I was sweating and tossing and turning, all night I was dreaming about evidence I had of aliens and trying to figure out how to interpret it and use it to prove it to everyone. All Night Long.

Two views I don't understand

This morning on the bus this lady was talking to the bus driver about how life is hard because prices are going up all over the place. She said, "Well, there's nothing I can do about it." Hopelessness infuriates me to the point of losing my appetite. I don't know her life story, maybe she's really doing all she can, but I actually don't know anybody in Lithuania besides myself and my wife who works two jobs (I'm not at the moment, but I do regulary find extra work, in small chunks or big ones). Are prices restricting your consumption? If you produce more, then you can consume more.

This brings me to a quotation from an article I read yesterday: "One thing is certain, the world has consumed more than it has produced" over the last three years, [U.N. Chief Ban] said.

That's a very interesting claim. Let's figure it out. One man cannot consume more than produced except by four ways: (1) credit from the bank or (2) charity, including government handouts, alms, help from friend and family, or (3) gambling, in which I include cashing in on insurance policies (gambling on your health), or (4) thievery. Besides these things, a man who earns $N can consume $N worth of goods, no more. A man of course has much access to those things, the proportions ranging throughout areas of the world: more credit in America, more government handouts in Europe, and more thievery elsewhere. So many people do consume more than they produce, a system I consider to be unnatural.

But how can the world consume more than it produced? The world is not getting any handouts, unless you consider solar power to be a handout, but we're not taking advantage of it anyway. We're not cashing in on insurance for sure, nor do we have the capability to gamble with or steal from (or tax) other planets or moons (yet). So what's the deal then? The only thing I can think of is that we consumed more by consuming everything we produced plus some of our saving from before three years ago. That's plausable, but entities with high savings are only goverments and only let's say 1% of people with significant savings; that's a liberal guestimate, since "currently, there are over 9 million residents around the globe classified as millionaires," which is just over 0.15% of the population. And if it's governments it only counts as "savings" if it was aquired more than three years ago: if it's from the past three years of tax revenues, then it's the producation of citizens which equals the consumtion of government handouts.

Am I missing something? Maybe I am, I haven't had a cup of coffee in ten months. If the world's been getting so much charity from governments and millionairs that we've been able to consume more than we produce for three years, we ought to be very grateful! I haven't noticed any movements, though, to celebrate and praise the rich and governments.

Family Guy

Anybody interested in everyday objects that remind people of Family Guy, click here!

I didn't even have to use my winter lining when I pulled out my trench coat for the rainy season

My DVD remote is broken, so I can't watch anything that requires navigating the menu: this includes all movies I've purchased in Lithuania, and most tv show dvds (if you want to watch more than the first episode). I watched X-Men 2, which I like, a few days ago. I thought maybe I'd been too hard on X-Men 3, so I decided to give it another try. Big mistake. Everything I wrote then was true, plus I notices many glaring inconsistencies. S t u p i d . . .

Vegetarian Day

Yesterday I ate no meat or fish all day, which is a first. This happened because my breakfast during the warm periods of the year is yoghurt, and lately I've been bringing my lunch from home, usually salad and black bread, I buy a liter of kefir every day at work. I had three tortillas left over from making quesadillas with Liepa that I had to use up for dinner. I didn't want to make beef ones again, and my special lady, who is not a bean fan, was not around. I decided to make them with beans, as most recipes suggest, even though I didn't have black beans; I used red. Very tasty.

Today I will eat the meat of two different kinds of animals to make up for yesterday's lapse.

Number One Guest At My Next Tea Party

Liepa was staying over for a couple days while participating in a conference in Klaipeda. Yesterday I went to make breakfast and she said she would make the tea. After we ate she tasted her brew and said, "Duh, I don't think you're gonna like it...tastes like soap. It was sposedta be orchid vanilla." So I took a look at the package she took it out of. The name of the product was written thusly:

O r c h i d V a n i l l a
Garment Fragrance Soap

Pop Quiz

Their homework for the past six days was to learn where the 50 states are (to fill state names and capitols into a U.S. map). I didn't expect anybody to get more than 10 or 20 correct, but I was surprised by one quiz. Just five states were filled in:

Washington was filled in as "Washington"
New Mexico was filled in as "CA"
California was filled in as "Mexico"
Arizona was filled in as "Cuba"
Texas was filled in as "Tokio"

Sometimes I think to myself, wait, am I training these students to be class teachers or court jesters? Searching for the answer I found this page of funny town names in America. The winners are:

Monkey's Eyebrow, AZ
Why, AZ
Hygiene, CO
Two Egg, FL
Experiment, GA
Santa Claus, IN
Beebeetown, IA (that's even funnier in Lithuanian)
Krypton, KY
Mummie, KY
Mud Lick, KY
Petroleum, KY
Plain Dealing, LA
Waterproof, LA
Boring, MD
California, MD
Crappo, MD
Hell, MI
Hot Coffee, MS
Horseheads, NY(also even funnier in Lithuanian, that's a derogotive for Latvians)
Boston, TX
Old Boston, TX
New Boston, TX

Too much X-Files?

Last night I was deserted in my aunt's house in New Haven, which was currently on a desserted island. I knew I would be able to forage for food for a while until I was discovered, but first I would have to survive an attack by the worst student I ever had. I was looking frantically for a good weapon in the kitchen, but all the knives were too flimsy. I chose something like a scepter, but long, like a broomstick. Then I heard her coming. I ran out to the stairway, and saw her and her boyfriend coming up the stairs. I lunged at them in slow motion, still deciding how best to attack. He retreated a bid down the stairs, moving back under me, while she was frozen in place. I smashed the scepter into her face as I moved out of slow motion, and then smashed him and her again, and so forth in a croutching tiger fashion, until they were incapacitated and I made sure they were dead by smashing them further, conncurent with an episode of the X-Files I watched yesterday. And then I woke up.

April Fools Day Pranks

Both my pranks succeeded, one was stupid and the other one was good enough to merit a phone call.

Stupid: I went to meet my special lady after work, and I called her to come down way too early, obviously, since she knew I'd left work only two minutes ago. So she had to wait for me outside instead of in her office.

Good: I made up an email address with my special lady's boss's name and from it sent my special lady this joke of new office rules which was a pretty funny April fool's day joke in itself. So she and her colleague who share the work email address thought it was their boss writing and so wrote back very politely about how funny it was, and told all their friends at work about how funny it was that their boss sent them this thing. I wrote back inviting them for a drink towards the end of the work day. They then gossiped to all those friends about what a goof their boss must be, to not know that the school's emails are public, visible on all school computers!

Last night I left the cat out of the bag, but she still didn't get it when I said, "So why didn't you go for that drink with your boss?" She only got it when I yelled "APRIL FOOLS!!!" Then she immediately had to go call her colleague and laugh hysterically.

McCain is Ha Ha Funny

This was quite a good bit on the late show! I'm pretty sure McCain wrote the jokes himself.

New Job

Yesterday I spend the day in Vilnius because in the evening I had to attend an anniversary birthday party for my master's paper sponsor. I could only stay shortly, because I had to get back to my job that I hate in the city I'm tired of in the country that has an endless overabundance of laws the same night. But the great thing that happened was earlier...

During the day I met with my colleague Leif (pronounced "Life") from Denmark. I visited him and gave guest lectures a year and a half ago. We were talking about a project we've been working on, and I told him the person he wanted to coordinate the foreign language part of it is out on maternity leave. He told us that he also has an English teacher who will be on leave next year and that they've been having a very hard time finding a replacement, since according to their curriculum they need a native speaker. Jokingly I asked if my master's degree would qualify me for the job...he called his headmaster, who remembered me from last year, and, pending receipt of my CV, hired me! They've got a partner school where their students do practice where he said my special lady can probably get a job and my special baby can definitely go to kindergarten. And if she can't get a job there, I met somebody from the Language Center in Stockholm where they have Lithuanian language programs, so, I'm confident anybody fluent in Lithuanian/Russian/French/English will be able to get herself some income. And, he said I could pursue my doctoral studies there for free since I'll be working there, nice! I'm gonna try to do a degree in international education management, which will be a bit of a custom course, I hope I can pull it together.

Excellent pizza, here I come!


UPDATE: It took 19 days, but I finally fooled someone!
Rachel wrote me in an email, "that Denmark opportunity sounds amazing, I hope it works out for you guys :-)"
Well Rachel, April Fools!