Shyzer.com

No, seriously, what the hell is your Zombie Plan? This isn’t a joke, people, this is a matter of life and death. Why are you laughing?! You’ll be sorry!

Okay, maybe I should give you a little background here. Somewhere along the way, my brothers and I became addicted to apocalyptic type stories. Any book, movie, or show that dealt with the end of the world resulted in multiple Gooblings consuming said media and analyzing it. Some of it was pure crap (okay, most of it). But the truly brilliant ones, from The Stand to Battlestar Galactica to Jericho, have always sucked us in and thus every time we all three get together during the holidays, we get to talking about our Zombie Plan.

Zombies? What?

So what the hell is a Zombie Plan? Well, quite simply, it’s our plan for when zombies finally rise up and try to take over our planet by eating us alive. Clay has always been a zombie freak and I gotta say, while I’m not too keen on the idea of having to put a bullet between his eyes, I’d totally be cool with it if he was trying to munch on my delicious arm. Okay, so we don’t actually expect zombies to attack, but seeing as how everywhere you turn there’s the threat of nuclear holocaust or some super virus wiping out the population or hell, who knows, maybe aliens invading us - well, the end of the world could come in our lifetime, no? I’m mean, just maybe, right? So why not plan for it?

Now, I’m not about to give away our plan for all the see and study, because the last thing I want is people copying it. I hate to break it to ya, but if the apocalypse DOES come, it’s every family for themselves until things settle down a little. Sure, we want to be neighborly and friendly and civil and blah blah blah, but when there’s only one bag of rice left at the local Wal Mart, I don’t see a neighbor reaching for it, I see an obstacle to my family getting some much needed nourishment. But I don’t want to be put in that position in the first place! That’s for all you unprepared idiots out there to deal with. Thus, the first lesson of our Zombie Plan!

So let’s say the end of the world is here. What are the most important basic human needs? We’re not talking Maslow’s hierarchy of needs here, we’re talking daily survival in a suddenly alien environment. I don’t care if it’s a super virus or invading army, we’re going to need shelter, security, and food. For the most part, shelter is going to be readily available. With the mass extinction of humans, finding a roof to put over your head won’t be that hard. We lump clothing into this category as well, because finding ample clothing (even shoes, despite what Cormac McCarthy might think) are going to be easily gotten for generations to come. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had the same pair of jeans for years now and they still fit perfectly.

Fine, so what do I need?

Security is going to be a little tougher. Guns and ammunition are going to be immediately gobbled up, so you need to make sure you have access to enough to last you for at least a few years. In the meantime, it won’t hurt to brush up on your archery skills during your downtime, because once all the ammunition is spent, that’s going to be the next best option. You know how in real estate, the three rules are location, location, location? Yeah, that’s also the three rules in a zombie infested landscape when talking about security. You want to make sure you have ample locations picked out ahead of time that have easy access to clean water supplies and arable land while also being in moderate climates, defensible positions, and out of nuclear fallout areas. Actually, on second thought, don’t bother researching that stuff, because that means you’ll most likely succumb to it and die, thus making it easier for the Gooblings to survive. We thank you for your kindness and generosity.

Food is going to be the hardest to come by. Don’t expect to be able to leave the food in your local grocery store and just come grab some whenever your stomach rumbles. Food in a store is going to last against nature and animals for a maximum of one year; much less if there are a lot of humans around. You need to be able to get the food to a secure location (ie, your newly created fortress) and get it there fast. But even then, it’s only going to last for some time. If you track how much food you eat in a week, you’d be surprised how much and how quickly you go through it. Some canned food is obviously going to last a while, but even then, you’ve only got a few years at the most. You need to be able to grow your own fruit and vegetables, hunt your own meat, and create your own farm if you want things like dairy and eggs. Far too many people won’t think about this until they’re stomachs are grumbling and these are going to be the most dangerous people of all. Again, this is where the importance of finding a location comes into play. What happens if you need to move due to shifting radiation clouds or inadequate defenses against hungry hoards of ill-prepared people? There’s only so much food you can load up in the family SUV and even then, you’re hoping the roads aren’t clogged and you don’t run into any bandits or government personal who will “procure” your provisions. Plus, you’ll be hard-pressed to move any livestock or plants you’ve got growing, so make damn well sure you’re in the place you want to be before you start buttoning down the hatches!

Beyond securing the three necessities though, what else do you need to keep an eye out for long term survival? Creating a medication supply is obvious, as is a supply of seeds, mechanical parts, tools, etc. The thing is, I don’t know about you, but I’m no doctor. Nor do I have any clue what the hell I’m doing when it comes to repairing simple engines, planting gardens, or figuring out which medicine to take for what symptoms. Thus enters the important area of books. A lot of people are going to overlook this key item at first, but you need to make sure you’re not part of that group. Raid the local library and bookstore for any survivalist, botanist, medical, etc. books. Any field you don’t have an expertise in right now needs to be a book that you acquire. Again, these are things you don’t want to just leave lying around in stores to be taken/destroyed before you!

Hell yeah, I’m set!

So you’ve got your books, your food, your guns, and fully protected in your new house. First, take a minute to congratulate yourself. You’ve survived the initial hoard of man-eating ghouls and managed not to perish in the second wave of deaths fueled by incompetence. Ok, stop patting yourself on the back now, because I’m pretty sure I see some zombies that need sniping. But while you’re off doing that, I’m going to be stealing some valuables from your stash. No, don’t go protecting your family safe, idiot! Money and credit cards aren’t valuable now! Think about it, cash is going to be obsolete for at least a decade and thus, you need to try and predict what will become luxury items on the trading market. I’m talking about booze, coffee, sweets, and salt to name a few. All of them will soon become a booming industry of currency and thus, you’re gonna want to have plenty of each item on hand.

There’s obviously tons more to the Goobling Zombie Plan that you might want to think about. Is your family spread out across the country, if not the globe? If so, how are you going to stay in touch and communicate? Don’t count on e-mail or cell phones. What about transportation? Do you know who you’ll include in your newly formed conclave? Heck, do you even have a BOB ready for the first 24 hours? No? You’re screwed.

Okay, how about I just join you guys?

Not a chance in hell! Well, actually, fine, anybody can come join the Gooblings in our secret hideout. However, you must agree to one simple condition. Once the newly formed nation of Goobtopia (or maybe Shyzeria?) rises from the ashes, you have to agree to vote for me as the first inaugural President. Also, you can’t blame me if my first act as Overlord President is to order you to sacrifice yourself for the good of our proud nation. Hey, somebody’s gotta do it and it sure as hell won’t be me!

Additional Reading

Zombie Hunters - One of the few sites on the net that combines realistic survivalist advise along with humor without all the crazy nutjobs talking about overthrowing the government and building a new nation out in Bumfuck, Idaho. Well worth the read, as is their forums.

If you’ve read Shyzer for a while, you know that I’m something of a commercial enthusiast. I love good commercials. Problem is, there aren’t many of them. If you think anything that airs during the Super Bowl is a good commercial, then you are retarded and should never voice an opinion again.

Below I’ve compiled a list of current commercials that are so horrible, I want to jab a dull spoon into my eyes whenever I see them come on. If given the option of watching each of these for ten consecutive hours or being dipped in a pit of molten lava, well, go ahead and get my casket ready. The first bunch of commercials are just random ones I hate, with the final three being the Top 3 worst current commercials. I’d say “enjoy” right about now, but I have a feeling that nobody will enjoy suffering through these visual pieces of shit.

And if you haven’t guessed by now, strong language below, mainly because I like to say fuck whenever I get angry and hate something.

(more…)

Hey, hey, looks who’s back!

Before some time I asked with you after signed photos - but
up to now I could’nt hear from you.
I would be therefore so happy if you could send me handwritten photos of you - you are a very beautiful man with a sympathically face and a great aura. The collecting of signed photos is my greatest hobby - and signed photos of you will get a special place in my collection. I would be happy if you could fulfill my wish. Thanks in advance for your kindness!

Hahaha. In case you don’t remember, I wrote about this crackpot last year and thought that would be the end of him. I assumed a little public humiliation would be just the correct dosage to getting him off my back, but apparently I was mistaken.

Buddy, look, I’m not sending you any signed photos of myself. Give it up. Yeah, I bet I’d hold a special place in your collection. And frankly, I don’t want to even think about what that place might be, especially if it involves you, my photo, and a little “special time.” Add to the fact that identity theft isn’t on my list of things I want for Christmas and I think you can see where I’m coming from.

Although I doubt you can even read any of this, as your English sounds about on par with my dogs. No, scratch that, she can communicate with me a little bit better than that crap you sent me. I bet you still pee on the rug, don’t you?

Pointless Update #1: Gotta love it you look at your referral logs and see that a few hours after making this post and sending an e-mail to UmpBump pointing out the “coincidence,” Shyzer got a few hits from archive.org. Gee, whatever could they have been searching to find!? Don’t worry though, because I’m a gentleman and love helping people find what they’re looking for. Maybe this snapshot of my archives taken in September 2005 is what they needed to see. Or how about this one taken in November of 2005? Different designs, different formatting that looks like crap in archive.org, same post that was swiped!

Hang with me through this post and I promise you’ll be rewarded with extremely tame and bland photos of some random chick!

This is going to seem like an incredibly ironic post once I finally get around to finishing another post I’ve had in the works for a while where I talk about how I’ve almost stolen stuff from the Internet and passed it off as my own. But today, I came across something that I feel like sharing for no other reason than I’m bored.

One of my favorite daily reads is With Leather, which is basically a site where guys sit around making fun of sports and posting pictures of hot chicks. Fun times all around. Today they had a post linking to another website where a Top 20 Hottest Sports Wives list was recently created. Like I said, this isn’t groundbreaking news or reporting we’ve got going on here.

So I’m perusing through the list when I stumble across #9. HOLY CHRIST! It’s visual evidence of Jamie Kotsay! Cool!

Now I’m sure you’re sitting there wondering just what in the hell I’m getting at, so let me cut to the chase. Almost three years ago, I wrote this post mocking how if you write about popular, and albeit stupid, topics then Google and other search engines will reward you with random traffic. And in that post, I wrote about Mark Kotsay’s wife and how everybody on the Internet swore that she was the hottest chick in the world, despite the fact that A) nobody even knew her effing first name and 2) there wasn’t a single picture of her on the net. I hadn’t really given it much thought since I wrote that, but today I was suddenly staring at a few harmless photos of said hot chick. Yeah, ok, I can see it. Cool, whatever.

But then I remembered that out of all the terms I used in that post three years ago, the one about Jamie Kotsay was the only one to get picked up and drive tons of traffic to Shyzer. And I got to wondering if I was even still on the first page of Google for “Mark Kotsay’s Wife.” Turns out I’m not, but clocking in at #4 is a website called Ump Bump and… Wait a minute, the post on their site looks familiar…

Below are two quotes, the first being what I wrote back in January 2005 and the second being what was written on Ump Bump back in May 2007.

Big Foot. The Lock Ness Monster. The Phantom of the Opera. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Jessica Simpson’s high IQ. None of these are more mysterious or cloaked then the infamous wife of Mark Kotsay. It’s a well-known fact that men who play professional sports tend to have smoking hot wives. It’s a lesser-known fact that Mark Kotsay has the hottest wife of them all. Except there’s a small problem. There ceases to be a single picture of her on the Internet. You see, for every team Mark Kotsay has played for, his wife has joined the team’s corresponding player’s wives association. They do small public services for the community and basically are used as a public relations tool by the team. Now most teams have jumbotrons or huge televisions or something along those lines in their stadiums. At random times during random games, most teams like to tout that they too have a soft and caring side for the community, so they run announcements for some of the public services they offer, which is where Mark Kotsay’s Wife comes in. For every team that Kotsay has played for, his wife has not only joined the association, but has been the main spokeswoman for their jumbotron commercials. Over time, more and more people have had a chance to see Mrs. Kotsay’s commercial and there’s a general consensus among all those who saw her; she is the most gorgeous woman they have ever seen. Message boards have thousand-page threads dedicated solely to her. Websites are repeatedly spammed in search of a single picture of her. She has become a living legend amongst baseball fans and those who have reportedly caught a glimpse of her swear by their lives that she is easily the most breathtaking female they have ever laid eyes on.

And then theirs:

Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. The Yeti. A Devil Rays fan.

Yes, the world is full of myths and legends about shadowy, elusive, one-of-a-kind creatures who may or may not even exist.

But now you can cross Jamie Kotsay off that list, for we here at umpbump can attest to the fact that she does exist and pretty much everything that has been said about her is true.

It has been well documented that many famous athletes, and baseball players in particular, often have scorching hot wives. But what has been harder to prove was the contention that Mark Kotsay just may have the hottest wife of them all…

You see, it all started back in the late 1990s when Mark Kotsay first made it to The Show. At each city Mark played in, fans of that team would begin to report sightings of his incredibly, unbelievably, scorching hot wife. They said her name was “Jamie.” They claimed that this one time, at the fan convention, they caught a brief glimpse of her between a gap in the crowd, but when they got closer she had vanished. Or that this other time, at this one game, in the 6th inning, she flashed briefly on the jumbotron screen to make a public service announcement or something.

And pretty much everyone agreed she was the hottest baseball wife they had ever seen.

But the problem was, try as everyone might, nobody could find a picture of her! The claims could not be corroborated! Soon message boards with thousands of threads grew up around her legend. Search engines were bombarded with her name. Cults grew up around the fervent belief that she really did exist, and that she really was the hottest wife in the game. And still no picture could be found!

But then finally, last summer, this shot appeared on an Athletics blog!

I’m reminded of when I was in the 8th or 9th grade and we were learning about paraphrasing. During the first few assignments, everybody basically sat down with the text we were quoting and a thesaurus. Twenty minutes later, the quote had been changed to “our words,” but it was still in the exact same structure and format and the teacher was shaking her head saying how moronic we were.

But fine, I can overlook that. The sincerest form of flattery is being copied or something like that. No, what pisses me off isn’t that I had something ripped off, it’s these two things:

First, what the fuck?! That’s what you rip off from me? That wasn’t even a good paragraph! That sucked ass! Why would you copy, of all things here on Shyzer, that? Come on guys, copy my hostage standoff post or the one about The Stand or any other number of halfway decent posts I’ve made here on Shyzer. Don’t copy something I slapped together in 20 minutes while half asleep at 3AM one night…

But even more importantly, I’m pissed off that somebody found photos of Mrs. Kotsay, knew that I wanted to see them myself, copied what I’d written about wanting to see them, and then didn’t even send me an anonymous e-mail about where I could find them! What’s up with that?! If you’re going to be a plagiarizer, at least be a polite plagiarizer!

People today; they have no manners!

Of course, momma taught me well, so click the link below if you want to finally see what the hell Jamie Kotsay looks like. And let this be a lesson to everybody out there who puts things they create out there on the Internet. If it’s even remotely comprehendible and carries with it at least one coherent thought, it will be stolen. In fact, I fully expect this very post to be stolen and copied by somebody else within 12 minutes.

(more…)

At least, I don’t want them to think otherwise because I would hate it if they started signing me up for gay dating sites.

Here’s just a little tip to any of you employed by a company where Internet access is available while on the job. It’s 2007. Anything you do can be traced right back to you. Easily. Come on people, I thought we’d been over this by now. That chapter can be found right between the “don’t pass on chain e-mails” lesson and the “yes, Wikipedia can have false information on it” section. Get with the program.

Scene: Goob and two fellow teachers are outside with four full classes of kindergarten kids. What was meant to be an exercise where the kids could run around flying their recently made “kites” suddenly turned awry.

Teacher 1: You know, this didn’t really work out that well.
Goob: Yeah, I think we royally screwed this one up. Did you freaking hear the screams those three girls made when they all slammed into each other? Christ, I thought somebody had lost an eye or something.

Teacher 2 comes strolling up the nearby hill.

Teacher 2: Well that was a general clusterfuck. Did you see that boy run into the back of that truck?
Goob: What?!
Teacher 2: Yeah, that little boy in the red right there! He was just running around the field, strayed over near the farm, and slammed right into the farmers truck.
Goob: Wow. You know, I think I lost one of my kids
Teacher 1: Eh, we’re in the middle of nowhere, they’ll figure out soon enough we went inside. Let’s get the hell back inside.

A bus horn blares from behind the school building.

Goob: Ah! I just found my last kid.

In my never ending quest for stupidity on the Internet, I was happy to open up my Hey, It’s Free! e-mail account and read this:

This is LoveU2Toleda@yahoo.com Your confirmation: #873890 Is a fake I check with WalMart about the $500 gift card, and quest what there is none. Now should I report you to the web and email address companies about you bigmama ? Or should we say Cynthia Gibbson. If you can\’t show me this $500 card by say March 1st,2007. My email should be ringing off the hook. Thanks for listening.

There’s so much to dissect in this short paragraph (and I use that word lightly), that it’s almost overwhelming. But what’s my favorite part? It’s not how guess somehow morphed into quest. Or how I caused her e-mail to “be ringing off the hook.” Or even how I might soon be reported “to the web?”

No, my favorite is that somewhere along the line I, Goob, master of awesomeness, somehow became Big Mama. And that alone totally made this e-mail worth publishing, complete with senders address and all.

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.

Call me demanding, but I expect my coffee to be pesticide free by default. To me, you’re in bad shape if your favorite local eatery has to go out of their way to let you know there aren’t any added chemicals in your coffee that might cause a third arm to grow out of your chest. Yet there I sat in Uno’s pizzeria, laughing my ass off, and wondering why those family members who were accompanying me did not find this as funny as I did.