Shyzer.com

A while back, I bookmarked a page called Private Phone and promptly forgot all about it, but today I checked it out a bit more in detail and it’s pretty darn nifty!

It allows anybody to sign up for a brand spankin’ new phone number complete with voicemail that you can access on-line or via telephone. So let’s say somebody asks for your phone number, but you’re not comfortable giving out your home or cell number. Well, just give them your Private Phone number! Then, when they leave a message for you, you’ll be alerted via e-mail or text message telling you that you’ve got a new voicemail. You can then either call your Private Phone number and enter your pin or go to your on-line account and listen to it! It even comes with caller ID, so that if you decide you want to call the person back, their number is right there for you to see.

You can pick virtually any area code you want, which is nice in that you won’t look suspicious when giving out the number since you can pick your own area code. You can also record a custom message, so it sounds like your actual personal voicemail. Plus another cool little feature is that all of your voicemails are automatically recorded and uploaded to your on-line account, where you then can share them with your friends via e-mail or your blog or something! Stan used to have something similar called JerkMail, for those that remember. It sure would have been a lot easier had this service been around back then!

But this all leads me to this! I created a phone number (864-641-3866) just for my websites. I’m posting this on my other sites as well and asking people to call it and leave something funny! Heck, just call it if you’re bored and have nothing else better to do! If I get anything interesting or cool, I’ll post the audio recordings* of them up here on Shyzer to share with everybody else! In fact, leave your Private Phone number in the comments and I might even give ya a buzz

*None of your private info is said in the audio records, it’s just the voice message you leave. So you can trust that I won’t be posting your actual phone number on here for everybody to see!

The “word” pwned has grown quite the following here in the Goob household amongst the Gooblings. We tend to have a history of taking odd sounding words and running them straight into the ground by our repeated usage of them, but this one still appears to have some life in it despite the last few months. We say it any time we punch each other and given the fact that we tend the beat the crap out of our nearest sibling somewhere in the vicinity of 19 times a day, you can imagine how Goobrent Mom has grown annoyed with the word already.

But today, Goobrent Mom left for work and thus pwned was broken out once again. On the way home from school, in the post office, even in the kitchen as it was screeched from a streaking brother as he ran down the hallway, fleeing the scene of a recent dual Wet Willie / Wedgie attack. (I’ll give you a hint. I can run really fast.)

But here’s a little word of caution. If you’re sitting in the waiting area of your local barbershop and the other patrons are giving you weird looks as your seven year old brother says over and over, “I’m gonna pwn you,” it might be because that sounds awful similar to “I’m gonna bone you.” And that, my friends, is illegal in all states, pending the approval of a new law in Alabama.

I can’t seem to remember when I first started getting migraines. I can recall fragments of memories where I’m lying in a dark room at my godparent’s house when I was six or seven or ones where I’m wore a brand new Chicago Bears sweatshirt without having washed it (Thus, it that still had that weird, chemical smell that some new fabrics had back then) that ultimately led me to getting a migraine. But I’ve got no idea when these damn bastards first started or what causes them.

Over the years, I learned a few tricks in combating them. If I took some light headache medicine at the first sign of an onset, sometimes I’d get lucky and advert it. But chances are that it wouldn’t work and I’d be left with playing the waiting game until nighttime came, where I could fall asleep and hopefully wake up in peace. Dark rooms and quiet places were always helpful, but they were akin to giving a dying man a shot of morphine. Sure, they might help dull the pain, but they were by no means a solution to the problem at hand. No, I thought that pharmaceuticals would save me.

Back in my younger years, I can remember my grandma giving me Bayer’s to combat the problem. After a few years of taking two capsules once a week, they had about the same potency as Skittles. My mom stepped it up to Tylenol a few years later, then Extra Strength a few after that. By the time I started middle school, I arrived every Monday morning with a pocket full of pogs and two Excedrin pills to stash in my locker just in case one came that week. As I was leaving three years later, I emptied out the few Excedrin Extra Strength pills and slap bracelets that remained. In high school, they came out with Excedrin Migraine and I was excited, for finally I figured they’d invented something that my body wouldn’t grow immune to after only a few bottles. You can imagine my annoyance when even they had stopped being effective by the time I got my diploma. Finally, in college, I discovered Goody’s Powder, a magical elixir that not only cured migraines, but any other body pains you were having. In fact, not only were they amazing for curing all that ailed you, but they were excellent for fooling your friends into thinking that you were addicted to cocaine, but that’s for a different post.

It was around my sophomore year that I started hating both medication and the chiropractors. I’d been going to that latter for about 10 years at this point and I finally realized they were only hurting my case, not helping it. But the elimination of those body twisters didn’t solve the issue. The elimination of medications, however, was a big struggle. By this point, I probably only had a migraine a month, but I was still scared of growing immune to the only thing I knew that worked. Plus, I was only in my late teens and I didn’t want to end up like Bret Favre and become addicted to painkillers by the time I was 30.

So I started prepping myself. I tried to psych my mind into thinking meds were useless. I told myself that the people moving out west during the early 1800s didn’t Tylenol! I reminded myself that there weren’t any pharmacies or doctors in the remote mountains of Appalachia! Of course, a simply snake bite used to be fatal back then and they all used heroin as a treatment for everything anyway, but that’s beside the point. I finally started believing my body could beat most of the stuff out there. I got rid of my Nyquil and cough medicine. Gone was the Pepcid AC and throat lozenges. They were all useless in my mind and ever since, I’ve made my body fight off any of the illnesses that would have made me reach for them before.

That was three years ago. Today, my medicine cabinet is quite bare. There’s a jar of pills that I never finished off leftover from the great Poison Ivy debacle. A half-used stick of chap stick lies on it’s side, nudged between a tube of Neosporin and a box of Band Aids. A dusty box of floss lies in the corner behind my toothpaste, which means my dentist is surely going to yell at me the next time I see him.

Last night, after one of the easiest and stress free days I’ve had as substituting, I came home and felt “it” coming. For no fucking reason whatsoever. But I told myself I could beat it. I had a big dinner and drank a few cups of coke. I took a long, hot shower and let the water beat on my neck until the skin was practically numb. And yet shortly thereafter, despite the early warning, the food, the caffeine, and the added blood flow to my head, I was curled up in bed, with a hot rag draped over my forehead, cursing myself for what I knew I was about to do next.

An hour later, I was reached past the toothpaste and around the Band Aides and over the chap stick. My eyes were fixed on the little blue box hidden behind everything else. The one with fraying corners and marked with a fading “GOODY’S” on the cover. The one containing the supernatural concoction of powder held in tiny sheets of folded wax paper that I so desperately wanted. And had, just like every other time.

Sometimes my fleeting willpower shames me more than anything else.

If you’re horrible at driving and find yourself near my house, please stay away from any power poles. I don’t enjoy going without power for hours on end simply because you can’t turn the steering wheel fast enough to make it around that 10 degree curve. And so help me God if I find out a cell phone or Big Mac was involved somewhere in this equation.

I didn’t know what to do with myself. I flipped about 20 light switches and tried to turn on the TV four or five times before finally dusting off something called a “book” and “reading” it. It was like a page out of the 1920s! You know, without the speakeasies and floozy women showing their kneecaps.

Seeing as how all of the good shows are finally coming out of winter hiatus, I figured it’d be a good time to review the new shows in an attempt to find the next Battlestar Galactica or Scrubs. And thanks to RSS & torrents, the third best combination ever invented by man right behind rum & coke and beer & baseball, you can quickly download anything you haven’t watched so far and quickly catch up.

The Good: Jericho - Present day America. Major cities suddenly nuked by an unknown enemy. And a small town full of seemingly half genius, half dumbass citizens. Yeah, it’s a somewhat weak premise, and it’s a “family” show despite the nuclear holocaust, and some of the plot holes are so glaring, you have to wear sunglasses while watching. But if you can get past all that, it’s actually not a bad hour of television. We’ve all dreamed about what we’d do if the end of the world happened in out life time and so it’s fun in the sense that every step of the way, you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Man, I never would have thought to do that!” It won’t be winning any awards any time soon, but it’s not being canceled and people are tuning in, which says enough.

The Bad: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - I wanted this show to be good. I still do. The premise of a behind-the-scenes-of-SNL type comedy/drama from the creator of The West Wing sounded great. But if Aaron Sorkin doesn’t get off his high horse soon and immediately stop writing condescending episodes in between bad plot lines, myself and the other 28 viewers left will ultimately flip the channel. So why do I still keep coming back for more? Because of the actors. Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry have some of the best chemistry between each other, almost to the level of Scrubs’ Zach Braff and Donald Faison. It’s fun watching Perry finally be able to play the serious & witty role, and play it quite well I might add. It’s lucky (and rare) that despite his work on Friends, he managed to not get typecast as the goofy, sidekick guy only to watch his career go down the tube years later.

The Ugly: Daybreak - What do you get when you mix Groundhog Day, 24, and a sack full of shit together? Daybreak. ABC couldn’t have pimped this show any more than they did and it still flopped pitifully. The only thing missing from making this the ultimate crapfest were the writers of LOST - oh wait, that’s right, this aired in the same time spot as LOST did. No wonder.

The Great: Heroes - I’ll be completely honest here. I hated this show at first. Had I written this post back in October, Heroes would have enjoyed the spot above all to itself. But thankfully, I watched more than just the first two episodes and soon fell in love with the whole show. We all grew up with X-Men comics and cartoons. But even outside of X-Men, we all have a favorite superhero and the one thing they each have in common is the fact that they have some sort of cool super power! But for most of us, we fell in love with a character who had already mastered their powers and who was using them against the forces of evil in the world. Never has there been a story where we actually get to follow these heroes transforming right before our eyes - until now. Few of the characters in Heroes have even come close to harnessing their powers, much less mastering them. We’re able to watch as they struggle to fit their newfound changes into their normal life. At the same time, we get to watch as a few of them discover that the dark side might be a more lucrative path. Will the good guys band together? Will they learn to mesh their powers together in order to stop the impending nuclear blast? Chances are they will, but it’s still fun as hell to watch.

So go fire up your favorite downloading program and catch a few episodes of these days, minus the craptacular one mentioned above. Hopefully you won’t be too disappointed.

One of the classes I’ve been subbing in recently is reading Flat Stanley. In fact, the entire grade is reading it and this is a wonderful fact for me, seeing as how most of the hot and/or cool teachers in the school teach that grade. Stan was kind enough to record a Flat Stanley Song a few years back, which thanks to the wonderful inventions of the Internet and iPod, I have downloaded and passed off as my own.

Not only did the kids eat it up, but the fellow teachers loved it as well. Thanks Stan!

Whenever I’ve had enough of screaming kids and I want an easy day or I’m in a bit of a drought and haven’t been getting any calls to sub, I’ll pick up a kindergarten aide job. Even though the pay isn’t that spectacular, it’s super easy, as my only responsibilities consist of helping a handful of 5-year olds color in the boxes, cut on the dotted lines, and handing their asses to them in trashcan basketball.

But the best part has to be spending the majority of the day sitting at my desk and chatting with the actual teacher all day long while the kids sit mere feet away, blissfully unaware of anything going on around them other than “Oh look, there’s a picture of a pink cat!” on the wall. I love it, because it’s such a different change of pace from subbing as you actually get to spend the day with ANOTHER ADULT! How novel of a concept!

And the topics of discussion! They certainly make for some enjoyable stories! Let’s just say after subbing down in the kiddy wing a few times, it made me wonder if my kindergarten teachers had talked about sex toy selling teachers, the escapades of the tramp down the hall, and the events they saw behind the local pub last night while I was coloring my picture of Martin Luther King Jr as well. If only I had had the same interests back then as I do now.

In the past year, visitors from 99 different countries have visited Shyzer. I was hoping to hit the 100 mark, but alas, twas not to be as we fell short by one mere country. Afghanistan joined the party on December 30th, 2006, making it the most recent to arrive to the party thanks to a bored American GI on a base in who knows where. To you, Unknown Soldier, I salute you. And to everybody else across the world, whether you be the Pakistani looking for breast orgies or the German wanting a handwritten photo of my great aura, I’m glad you’re here. It certainly makes writing this pointless drivel every day more fun.

Now somebody go to Cuba or Tanzania and visit Shyzer so that we can get over the double digit mark!

AWESOMELY COOL EDIT: Would you effing believe that not 30 minutes after making this post, I had visitors from Brunei and Syria visit Shyzer almost back-to-back, thereby putting us up to 101? Way to go Shyzerians in representing!

As this 60 degree weather will attest to. Part of the joy of living in Virginia is the relatively cold weather during the winter, but these past few months have been ridiculous. Somebody call up Al Gore (hopefully he hasn’t eaten his phone) and tell him to make a boring movie about this or something…..oh wait….

As a kid, I used to love Martin Luther King Jr. Day for the main reason every other did - no freaking school!

Now? Double whammy. Not only are the gooblings home all day when they should be in school, but I can’t even work. And the substitute teaching gig is already drying up a bit. Damn teachers and their healthy bodies. Is it wrong that I want to pull out a few history books and teach myself how to pull off a modern version of the infected British chickenpox blankets? On second though, don’t answer that.

Yeah, this was a totally pointless post. Hooray New Year’s resolutions!…