Shyzer.com

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.

I’ve been saying for years and years that Bob Costas is a complete moron who should never be allowed near another microphone without the threat of being punched in the face. Preferably by me.

Thankfully, I now have proof of his idiocy.

I’ve been on a real “nobody understands the Internet” trip lately, what with this and the other posts I’ve made this weekend. Everywhere I turn, I keep seeing people who either simply don’t get how to use the Internet or people who view it as sometime trite. Thankfully, their ignorance is providing fodder for me here on Shyzer.

I’m just happy Mr. Dumbass Costas is on the other side of the fence, because I’m not sure what I would have done had I realized him and I actually agreed on something.

I really want to meet the heads of Warner Brothers and give them hearty pats on the back for delivering to us five outstanding Harry Potter films to date. They sure have been spectacular!

Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Oh, yes, I see where I screwed up. I accidentally typed “pats on the back” when I meant to type “kicks in the crotch.” Whoops. Rookie mistake. The keys are like right next to each other.

Honestly, by the time the 7th film rolls around, I fully expect that when you go into the theater or rent it from Blockbuster, you’ll be given a complementary tack hammer to bludgeon yourself with once you’ve finally become bored and/or disappointed. Which, judging by the track record of the recent films, should be somewhere around the 12 minute mark for the average fan.

I didn’t think there was any way imaginable to screw up such an amazing story, but you proved me wrong, WB! Thank you for reminding me that the impossible still happens every day! Fucking idiots…

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…)

EDIT: The link I originally pasted below now links to something stupid. Here’s the video of what I’m talking about.

I just wept a little.

Gotta love South Africa. And “the Iraq.” And maps!

Oh, and she won 3rd Runner Up. That sound you just heard was my head exploding.

[via Ally]

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.

Someday soon, I’ll probably be forced to own this cell phone, which has a built in breathalyzer function. Most people would probably get this in hopes of preventing themselves from getting behind the wheel of a car. Luckily for me though, I’ve never been interested in operating a blender, much less some other larger machinery like a car, whenever I get drunk. No, I’d be purchasing this little gadget for one thing and one thing only:

The LP4100 also allows users to set up the phone so on certain nights and after a certain time they do not call certain people in their phone book. Think ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend.

If you have a blood alcohol level over .08, the phone will not let you dial that person. So it not only promotes sobriety, but chastity - and probably your dignity, as well.

Ahhh, dignity. I wonder what it’s like to have some of that!

On second thought, a cell phone isn’t even my worst enemy when I’m drunk. The only people I call is Fellner and random numbers. No, what I need is to rig up the same type of device on my personal computer that will shut it down instead of allowing me to operate AIM, MSN, Shyzer, and Facebook while drunk. Because no matter how trashed I get, I never seem to forget how to use a mouse and keyboard…

NOTE: I recently found an old article I wrote for Circle of Jerks almost two years ago. It’s a bit mean, but then again it was for a site where the domain name proudly proclaims the authors are Jerks I found it funny, I remember it being pretty fun, if not a change in pace, to write and since it’s no longer on-line over on Stan’s site (slacker!), I thought I’d repost it here for any of you who missed it the first time around. Enjoy.

It would be great to say that I waited to write this post until the eve of the release of Star Wars III. It would also be great to say that I then decided to wait until the movie had been out for a week or two before writing this post. Alas, the truth is that Stan mentioned I should write something on this topic, so I decided to pull an Angela and ignore my responsibilities for at least three weeks. In fact, Stan finally got to the point where he no longer expected me to upload this story, so he took me off the “In The Works” list. That’s procrastination at its finest, my friends.

I’ve always viewed myself as a conveyor of information. Any time I’ve ever found something cool or interesting, I like to pass it along to others in an effort to spread around the Great Cup ‘O Knowledge. This is not one of those occasions.

By now, though, you should be saying to yourself, “Goob, just what in the hell are you talking about?” Glad you asked. With the latest release of a Star Wars movie, we’ve all been reminded of one of the most glaring stains on human civilization: the existence of Star Wars nerds, fans, and freaks alike. They come out in droves, shamelessly supporting their idiotic support for a series of movies that they claim “inspire” them to get out of bed every morning. They line up for hours, nay, days before the release of the movie, dressed in full regalia, just so that they can say they saw the first showing in their hometown of Crap Town, USA. They beam as news reporters interview them for their human interest stories on the 6 o’clock news, unwitting to the fact that their interviews remind each and every one of us normal people how lucky we are not to be one of them.

And with the influx of the Internet into our everyday lives, us Normal people are now bombarded with Their websites. You know the types. The ones that carry on twenty page conversations over why Han Solo should have never been able to use a lightsaber in Episode 5. The ones that try to follow Princess Amidala’s wardrobe in an effort to see what kind of “mood” she’s in throughout the movies. Or the ones that try and explain just how a lightsaber works.

I wish I was making this up. However, in the interest of science and making fun of Star Wars Nerds throughout the world, I ventured through the above site and meticulously made fun of it each step of the way. Join me, if you will, in doing the same.

The opening page contains the following introduction: “Chances are that you have seen a lightsaber at one time or another, whether on the evening news or down at the local cantina.” Chances also are that whoever wrote that is still living in his or her - ok, let’s be real here, his - parent’s basement with George Lucas posters on the wall. I spend many a hours at the local cantina and I have seen a drunk 400 pound man eat an entire jar of pickled eggs, a drunk girl make out with four guys at once in the back alley, and this one guy who could swallow a shot glass and regurgitate it with the liquid still in it! Yet I have never seen a lightsaber. Not once.

Buried at the bottom of page 2 is the following: “Lightsabers are only a figment of George Lucas’ imagination, of course. This is an entirely fictional article, based on information in Star Wars movies and books.”

You don’t say! Really!? Nooooooo. I’m shocked, honestly, I am. You mean to tell me they’re not real?! You mean to tell me that hundreds and thousands of thousands of people worldwide devote their time, energy, and lives to studying and writing Internet How Stuff Works Guides about a fictitious movie? I’m flabbergasted. Now if only these people would do the same in realizing that they are wasting their lives and do something productive! I’m sure there are some homeless people down the street that could use some food. Why don’t you people go use The Force and feed them? Or if you want a bigger challenge, I think the continent of Africa could even use some food. Put down that twentieth Twinkie you’re about to eat and airmail it to Rwanda, you loser!

On page three, we are treated to the following image:

Aside from the fact that it looks like the chick is about to be mugged in broad daylight by a Mexican biker, my favorite part of the photo has to his weapon of choice. A tire iron? How does that lady know he was about to mug her? He could have been offering to fix her flat. Stupid whore. Somebody take that fictional lightsaber away from her and banish her from ever appearing on the Internet again. While you do that, I’m gonna go find that Mexican biker because my left rear tire looks a little low on air.

I’m not ever going to talk about the 4th page, which has a detailed picture of the “inner workings” of a lightsaber. I’ll just leave it at this. Somebody, somewhere, actually took the time to not only learn how this made up product “works,” but they also created a photoshop picture of it to share with others. Somebody get this man a Life.

Page 5 greets us with a collection of high tech sounding phrases to make us Normal people feel overwhelmed. Diatium power cells, power vortex rings, crystal energy chambers, arc waves, activation matrixes, virgins who will never be laid, etc. Okay, so maybe I made up that last one, but it should be somewhere on that page, describing those who actually believe in this shit.

Later in the article, I found myself reading that, “A lightsaber completely blows away a can of pepper spray as a deterrent in muggings or robberies.” Really? Because trust me, the next time I go to rob somebody and they pull out a lightsaber to protect them, I’m going to swat away their little PlaySkool toy and get on with my thievery and evilness. A blast of pepper spray might actually put a halt to me trying to steal somebody’s valuables, but a glow-in-the-dark plastic sword is going to only stop me if I fall on the floor laughing at the person.

And humor me here, if you will. Take a look at this picture:

Does this not look exactly like our favorite Mexican Christ Puncher’s member?! This only leads me to believe that he not only felt threatened enough by our overzealous bitch in the first photo to not change her tire, but that he used his tire iron to beat her and steal her lightsaber. Thankfully, he’s putting it to good use trimming hedges and not attacking other would be Good Samaritans, but it makes me wonder. If these lightsabers are so powerful, how come it couldn’t beat an illegal immigrant with a freaking tire iron? Seriously, these Star Wars nerds will spend years pointing out continuity errors in movies, but won’t even take the time to proof read one of their lame articles.

Thankfully, the last page has finally arrived. On it are more “uses” for a lightsaber, but sadly, all I could focus on were the continuity errors they all contained, especially the one where no shadow was displayed on the back wall while the guy heats up his coffee. Oh no - I’ve already started to become one of Them. First off I’m bitching about a poor photoshop job of a lightsaber and the next minute I’ll find myself whining over how Obi-wan Kenobi’s outfit changed from one scene to another in the latest movie. Thankfully, I caught myself in time and can now go back to beating up Star Wars Fans and stealing their lunch money.

They still believe The Force can protect them when in reality, the force from my fist ensures that I’ll be eating this afternoon. On second thought, let’s keep these morons around.

My mom needs to figure out which airline is offering the following job position and then seriously consider switching over to them