Two follow-up videos to the one I posted yesterday. They’re done by the same guys and even better if that’s possible.
I’ve always loved stop motion videos. The only problem is 90% of the ones you find are beyond crap because the creators were too busy to take enough photos to make the video look realistic. You can’t have a stop motion chase scene with ten freaking photos, people!
I just got a phone call from a Nigerian prince asking to confirm my bank account information in order to facilitate moving some secret funds across the globe. Or as he put it, “Hello honorable Mr. Goob Shyzer, thank and bless you for aiding my struggle in moving the millions of dollars to your account.”
I shit you not. He called me Mister. Goob. Shyzer.
The conversation didn’t last long, as he didn’t appreciate the fact that I wouldn’t give him my correct info after telling him the info he had for me was incorrect. Apparently I was “struggling a old man who is dying and it’s not nice or kind.” Darn it, I hate to “struggle” senior citizens. It’s always hard to look yourself in the mirror after doing so.
I’m assuming he simply pulled my info from one of my domain WhoIs listings, which have my cell phone number and last name as Shyzer. I’m not sure if he sincerely believed my name was Goob Shyzer, but it took everything in me not to burst out laughing when I heard it come out of his mouth. If you’ve never heard a scammer call you by such a name with the seriousness of a doctor telling you a loved one has just died, then you haven’t lived.
I really hope he passes my number around to his buddies and I start getting more phone calls, because this could easily become my biggest source of entertainment.
Update 1: As much as I loath linking to a Fox News story, they’re thankfully reporting that the Marines are not only aware of the video, but are investigating. In years past, reaching this step alone would have taken days, if not weeks, of organized letter and phone protests. Now? The Internet plows it’s way to justice in a mere 24 hours. Rock on.
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While drinking my daily dose of one barrel of coffee this morning, I was perusing digg for some interesting reading material when I came across a link that read “US Soldier throws puppy off cliff (video).” I clicked it thinking it would be some humorous play on words or satirical video and…oh, oh…no. It’s a clip of some scumbag, named David Motari, launching a puppy off a cliff.
I’m not even going to link to the video from here, just trust me that you don’t want to see it. I sure wish I hadn’t. However, the video’s not why the Internet still rocks. What I love about this global mess of nothingness we’ve created is how everybody has reacted to said indefensible video! Within 12 hours, people on digg have found the guy’s myspace page, his wife’s page, their home phone number & address, his bebo page, copies of his marriage license, and more. They’ve started letter campaigns to his Senator and Representative, have secured copies of the video and stashed them all across the web for proof, (since he is now franctically trying to take it down), and contacted just about anybody with a higher rank than his.
It would suck if the video was instead some horribly twisted joke with computer animation and whatnot. But let this be a lesson - if you piss off nerds on the Internet, they not only won’t care if the infractions were legitimate or not, but they’ll make your life a bitch and a half. Vigilante justice for the win!
When most people think about Poland’s contribution to the Allied resistance against the Nazi, the usually recall something about the Germans kicking a bunch of Polish ass to start the war off and that’s about it. Some of you might even recount the tales of Polish cavalry gallantly being slaughtered against German tanks and how the entire Polish air force was destroyed on the first day then smile like an idiot. Hooray American education system!
I don’t get much quality time with you and your computer screen, therefore I can’t re-teach all of History to you. No, I must focus on only the greatest parts that you may have missed. Scratch that. I’m talking about the most awesome, existence-shattering, mind-blowing, not quite sure if you’ll be able to scoop your jaw off the floor types stories out there.
Honour Sought for ‘Soldier Bear’
A campaign has been launched to build a permanent memorial to a bear which spent much of its life in Scotland - after fighting in World War II. The bear - named Voytek - was adopted in the Middle East by Polish troops in 1943, becoming much more than a mascot. The large animal even helped their armed forces to carry ammunition at the Battle of Monte Cassino.
Voytek - known as the Soldier Bear - later lived near Hutton in the Borders and ended his days at Edinburgh Zoo. He was found wandering in the hills of Iran by Polish soldiers in 1943. They adopted him and as he grew he was trained to carry heavy mortar rounds. When Polish forces were deployed to Europe the only way to take the bear with them was to “enlist” him. So he was given a name, rank and number and took part in the Italian campaign. He saw action at Monte Cassino before being billeted - along with about 3,000 other Polish troops - at the army camp in the Scottish Borders. The soldiers who were stationed with him say that he was easy to get along with.
“He was just like a dog - nobody was scared of him,” said Polish veteran Augustyn Karolewski, who still lives near the site of the camp. “He liked a cigarette, he liked a bottle of beer - he drank a bottle of beer like any man.”
When the troops were demobilised, Voytek spent his last days at Edinburgh Zoo. Mr Karolewski went back to see him on a couple of occasions and found he still responded to the Polish language.
“I went to Edinburgh Zoo once or twice when Voytek was there,” he said. “And as soon as I mentioned his name he would sit on his backside and shake his head wanting a cigarette. It wasn’t easy to throw a cigarette to him - all the attempts I made until he eventually got one.”
Voytek was a major attraction at the zoo until his death in 1963. Eyemouth High School teacher Garry Paulin is now writing a new book, telling the bear’s remarkable story.
‘Totally amazing’
Local campaigner Aileen Orr would like to see a memorial created at Holyrood to the bear she says was part of both the community and the area’s history. She first heard about Voytek as a child from her grandfather, who served with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.
“I thought he had made it up to be quite honest but it was only when I got married and came here that I knew in fact he was here, Voytek was here,” she said. “When I heard from the community that so few people knew about him I began to actually research the facts. It is just amazing, the story is totally amazing.”
Holy. Christ.
So a group of Polish soldiers, after recuperating from their captivity in Russian, finds an Iranian bear and takes it with them through Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Italy to help them kill German Nazis before finally letting the bear live out his days in a Scottish zoo.
And people say History is boring.
But the story doesn’t just end at “OMG! A crazy bear killed Germans!” Oh no, there’s an even more in depth story about Voytek and his crazy-ass owners, which has some tidbits about this seemingly mythical beast that frankly I wish I had been able to make up myself.
During the most crucial phase of the battle, when pockets of men were cut off on the mountainside desperately in need of supplies, Voytek, who all this time had been watching his comrades frantically loading heavy boxes of ammunition, came over to the trucks, stood on his hind legs in front of the supervising officer and stretched out his paws toward him. It was as if he was saying: “I can do this. Let me help you”. The officer handed the animal the heavy box and watched in wonder as Voytek loaded it effortlessly onto the truck.
Backwards and forwards he continued, time and time again, carrying heavy shells, artillery boxes and food sacks from truck to truck, from one waiting man to another, effortlessly. The deafening noise of the explosions and gunfire did not seem to worry him. Each artillery box held four 23 lbs live shells; some even weighed more than a hundred. He never dropped a single one. And still he went on repeatedly, all day and every day until the monastery was finally taken.
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Although he was world-famous, the bear of Monte Cassino was forced to spent his last years behind bars in Edinburgh’s Zoological gardens. Artists came to sketch him and sculptors to make statues of him. Sometimes his old army friends arrived to visit him, leaping over the barriers to wrestle and play with him in the bear enclosure (to the utter horror of all the visitors and zoo officials).
The farthest I’ve gotten my dogs to helping me in a real battle is when they’ll lick Colton’s face as I hold him down and tickle him for hours on end.
Oh screw it, there’s not a single thing I could write that would make this story any more awesome or entertaining, so I’ll just stop trying. I should be referencing Stephen Colbert or the hilarity of men having enough confidence to get a wild bear drunk in their midst, yet I’m still stuck on the fact that A FUCKING BEAR HELPED BEAT THE NAZIS. Eat it, Hitler.
All in all, a hell of a time 
You can’t get more American than this. Only a guy from the south would sit on his back porch with some friends, have a few beers, then decide to borrow a bulldozer and spend 72 hours and three thousand bucks constructing a giant slip ‘n slide. Additional info about the Jesus Slide and how they built it can be found throughout the thread. But here are some more pictures to tide you over.
Hey Favre and Ichiro, make room. This guy is joining you in the Goob Parthenon of Awesomeness.
Yeah, so Jericho’s back. Officially. They’ve got it slated as a seven or eight episode mid-season replacement, but if the initial Fall schedule goes poorly, it could be back as soon as October. If the ratings are good, CBS has promised to pick it up for a full season and yet if the ratings are bad, the show’s main writer has said they’ll be able to wrap it up and end it instead of leaving us with yet another unbearable cliffhanger.
But this post isn’t meant to bask in the glow of the awesomeness that is the Internet grassroots campaign that saved one of my favorite shows. No, wait…yeah. Yeah, it is. But because I love you, I’ll just keep this short and funny. So, you can either click the more link below or go directly to the source in order to read two of the best “could have happened” conversations ever.
Apparently the post I made late last month has been attracting a lot of traffic from a British sex fetish search engine all thanks to my usage of the word “spanking” in the title. (If you want to see the site in question, you’ll have to find it on your own.)
Which leads to the obvious question. There’s a British search engine dedicated just to sexual fetishes?! Is there really that big of a market of people out there who are unable to find a proper smack around that a search engine has to be created for them? Seriously?
You know, I’m not even surprised such a site exists, which I think is an even bigger issue. Hell, I bet this post is just gonna keep ‘em coming now. Well, I might as well welcome you crazy Brits! The tea and crumpets are over in the corner and I’ve got old reruns of The Office on the telly. Oh, and there are plenty iPods around here to be spanked if the mood feels so.
The next time Microsoft decides to film another round of these commercials, they need to call me up.
There’s not many times my breath has truly been stolen away from me. We’re talking maybe five times in my entire life and that one time I fell from the monkey bars as a kid and had the wind knocked out of me doesn’t count. But this past week, when I strolled up to the Coliseum in Rome, Italy added a tick mark to the tally.
United recently added a direct route from D.C. to Rome and after a little persuasion on my part, my mom picked up a trip to work the flight and we headed over…for a day. It’s funny when I tell people this, because no matter how many times I explain it to them, they still can’t seem to grasp that I fly all around the world for a grand total of one day, if even that. You almost spend more time on the plane (17 hours round trip to Rome) than you do at the destination (a hair over 27 hours). But trust me, there’s no better way to see a city then to simply hit the ground running full speed for just a short period of time.
We landed around 8:30AM local time and the first thing that grabbed my attention was how easy it was to clear customs. Two jumbo jets had landed at the same time and yet all of us were through customs in about 15 minutes, whereas had we all been in Sydney, it would have taken closer to an hour and a half. The “inspection” involved A) Asking if we had anything to declare and then B) Looking at our passport. Not scanning it. Not making sure it was even a real passport. All I had to do was walk past the agent and flash him my passport. He probably saw it for a grand total of one second.
I loved it.
It was also my first inclination that maybe this old Europe and Italians video might contain more truth than I first suspected.
I decided to take the train into the city on my own since I love trying to navigate my way around new places. If you thought most guys hate asking for directions, then you’ll really feel sorry for my future wife. I find it funny that people get so nervous when they don’t know where to go or think they’re lost. With me, it’s the exact opposite. I know in the end I’ll wind up in the right place and once I finally get there, there’s no other feeling of accomplishment quite like it. So why not just hunker down and figure it out for your damn self?
On the ride into the city, I sat in a room with six other people. The man across from me was clearly Italian, as were most of the other folks riding with us. However, when it came time for him to ask if he had gotten on the right train, he glanced at everybody in a clear effort to see who might best look like a local before settling on me and blurting a long string of sounds I can only guess to be Italian or noise dolphins use to communicate. I’m still not sure which it was.
I really don’t get it. In Argentina, cab drivers would eye my mom and Jeff before looking at me and asking in Spanish how I got stuck with the Americans. The same thing happened in Australia, Germany, and basically everywhere else I’ve ever been. Locals will just start talking to me, asking for directions or if I know the time or whatever and then they stare at me in amazement when I respond with, “Uhhh…yeah, I got no idea what you just said, pal.” And again, here I was in Italy, being mistaken for a local, all the while having no idea what exactly made me look like I fit in more than any of the other yahoos around me. It’s a phenomenon I’ve yet to figure out, albeit one I’m not too keen on trying to correct. Let’s just say it comes in handy from time to time.
After making my way to the hotel, hooking up with my mom, and sneaking into the hotel room to drop off my bags (Italian law requires all hotel guests to drop off their passport at the front desk and pay a fee to stay there…yeah, like that was actually gonna happen), it was close to 10:00. We grabbed our cameras, a few bottles of water, and we were off. We stopped at a little cafe for some Iced Coffee, which I think I enjoyed way more than my mom did. Apparently ice cubes and the strongest pure coffee you’ve ever let flow past your lips is an acquired taste I somehow ended up with. She, however, made a great call by buying two tickets for a tour bus company where they have 12 stops or so throughout the city and run umpteen buses, so that you can basically get off at any stop, stay for as long as you want, and then hop on the next one that passes through.
Of course, when my mom left it up to me to pick our first destination, it took all of 3 nanoseconds for me to say “The Coliseum.”
There aren’t many items in the world that are of “historical” significance that I actually give a rat’s ass about. I mean, seeing the Declaration of Independence was cool and all, but my initial thought upon setting eyes on it wasn’t about how old or important the document was, but of how the room smelled. To me, something that’s only a few hundred years old isn’t that big of a deal. There are trees out there older than that and you don’t see me gawking at them.
But the Coliseum…man. I kinda just stared at it for a while before finally moving to head inside. To say it’s old and has withstood the test of time is like saying I’m devilishly handsome. It’s just an understood given that doesn’t even need to be talked about.
Once inside, I took what amounted to forty-eight million photos. I was rattling off the story behind everything I saw to my mom (hey, that’s the first time my History degree’s come in handy!) before I think I finally talked even her ears off. I can’t even put into words what it felt like to stand in the middle of a structure that’s been around longer than the legacy of Christ. You can have your Eiffle Tower, your Statue of Liberty, and your Taj Mahal. I’ll take my Pyramids of Giza, my Tombs of Petra, my Acropolis. And my Coliseum, no doubt.
We tried to squeeze in the Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City, but realized we weren’t gonna have much time to see the castle I wanted to check out next if we stayed there too long. Some people might scoff at the thought of skipping over the Vatican for a castle. But giant, old fortresses beat churches in my book any day of the week. No surprise there, really.
I will say this though. The inside of the Basilica itself was like one giant color buffet. You could spend three weeks inside of there and I still don’t think your eyes would have adjusted to the vividness of it all. Everything - the walls, the floor, the ceiling, everything looked like a million dollars. You’d glance down at the floor and not help but wonder how much the one small foot of black marble you were standing on cost. It was quite an experience to say the least.
Anyway, after catching one of the last buses to the castle, we ended up taking our time hiking all the way to the top (for which my mom complained after every 10th set of stairs we took :)) while taking in all the art that’s littered throughout the building. Massive portraits painted by Rafael himself adorn the walls as if they were nothing more than a window shade. It was almost as if there was so much history in the place, they didn’t know what to do with it all. After a while though, we finally reaching the peak of the fortress and could see over the entire city.
I’ve always had a thing both for skyline views and castles. I love looking out over a city sprawl just to try and swallow how massive the area actually is and I love walking through old castles trying to recreate in my head what it must have been like for soldiers way back when. But to combine the two…well, I can’t say I’ve ever done that before. Though trying to get a photo of us up there was a bit hard, what with my mom trying to communicate in English and probably offensive sign language what we wanted and me trying to explain that we’re actually mother and son, not boyfriend and girlfriend. After a few photographed thumbs and one what I believe to be an zoomed in show of my nose, we got a pretty good picture.
Not long after that, we were back on a bus headed for our hotel. It was actually just fun riding around on the open aired bus, as the weather could not have been any more gorgeous. We’re talking sunny, 70 degrees, light breeze here. In fact, my mom’s been back since and happily reported that on her second trip, her and a bunch of other flight attendants just bought a few bottles of wine, crackers, and cheese and then rode around on a single bus all day long. You get to see some pretty funny things while riding around, like businessmen in suits flying past you on what looks like a hyped up Moped. Or how there are so many fountains and statues around the city, you stop noticing them after only a few minutes. Or even how there might be two painted lanes on the road, six actual lanes of cars, and yet not a single wreck let alone fender bender in sight. I tell ya, if you were to airdrop a bunch of Americans and their SUVs in the middle of Rome, they’d survive for a maximum of 14 minutes.
Before long, we were standing outside the hotel and since our last decent meal had been two giant Starbucks coffees back stateside, we figured it was time to eat. Almost three hours, two real pizzas, and a few dozen Peronas (they taste even better than their similar sounding, Mexican counterpart) later, we were back in the hotel ready for bed. Well, actually I was ready for bed, but my mom was keen on watching Italian Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, which apparently takes a break after every three or four questions so that, and I shit you not, the host can appear in an infomercial that I suspect is used to help raise the prize money.
See? These are the kind of things you need to travel for.
One night’s sleep and a Business class seat later, I was back in Virginia teaching a bunch of 3rd graders the differences between topsoil and clay. Hell, had I not made this post, you and even the people I work with would have never even known I’d gone.
I wouldn’t travel any other way.
He told him he wasn’t gonna slide!
I didn’t realize Willie Mays Hays actually existed in real life. I also didn’t realize that high school baseball was so pathetic that they’d call this kid out over breaking some asinine rule about momentarily breaking free of the Earth’s gravitational pull or something.
And with that, today is King Felix day. If you own mlb.tv or Extra Innings on Direct TV, tune in to Seattle’s game tonight and prepare to be impressed.
