Uncategorized
A Few Not So Obvious Ways To Save Money
What kind of laundry basket do you use? Round, rectangular, well whatever type it is I’m sure it has hundreds of tiny windows for your clothes to peek out. It will be brittle and broken within a year. Instead, you should use storage totes for your laundry like I do. I’ve been using a couple Rubbermaid and Sterilite brand storage totes that have no holes in the sides (sans lids of course), and haven’t had to replace them for over a decade. Really, the holes only make sense if you’re going to put clothes in the laundry basket when they aren’t fully dry and then forget about them.
The clothes get folded, and anything not fully dry goes on top for hanging in the bathroom at home.
While we’re on the subject of laundry, I don’t use fabric softener. It’s a scam, full of scents I’m likely allergic to (I’m allergic to whatever smellification chemical they put in perfumes/air fresheners), and many chemicals we really don’t need touching our skin. Opt out of the b.s. I haven’t noticed my nipples chafing or any other ill effects from this either. So give it a try, go three weeks/three washes without the needless additives and see if you notice any difference. If your really MUST have softening action, I think I read somewhere that 1/3 cup or so of white vinegar added during rinse cycle can have much of the same effect.
Another thing I’ve noticed that makes no sense is dish towels. If these thin, crappy cloths were supposed to dry more than 3 or 4 dishes at a go, I sure as hell can’t figure out how to do it! Which is why I bought fluffy bathroom hand towels for kitchen use. If you’re wiping grime off the stove, or cleaning out the microwave, you’re using a sponge, scrubber, or good old dish rag, not the thin dish towels. Really, the only things dish towels come into contact with is wet hands and wet (clean) dishes, so they should last almost forever! Why fall into the trap of buying thin, cheap, annoying dish towels that just smear water around and you have to give up and let them air-dry.. Maybe they have roosters or apples or a sunflower pattern, but are they for show or for WORK?
Well, that’s it for now. I’ve got a few more things I could add to this, but maybe they deserve their own post at a later date. Thanks for reading.
Pro Ductivity
‘m a lazy bastard. I’d rather soak up entertainment and read most of what passes in front of me than actually making stuff. Content. Pictures, words, video. Well, I decided I’m going to update at least one thing every day. To keep myself honest I’m hoping you’ll hold me accountable for this. Give me loads of shite if I don’t actually make something, post something, or accomplish something each day.
I’ve been posting over at my design blog http://wwww.sexcpotatotesdesigns.com with a bunch of awesome t-shirt designs I’ve come up with on http://www.bluecotton.com . I wrote a bit on my novel the other day at work, on breaks, so I’m probably going to start posting parts of that on my writing blog which I’ll link later sometime or it’s down in some corner of this page.
I plan on increasing my workload each day if possible and seeing how much good stuff I can produce. I’m also sort of tired of seeing all this stuff that gets put out and knowing ‘it could be done better.’
Pain Obsession Today
I feel the aches and pains of getting older, even at a mere 29 years of age.
So how does the pain stack up against pain throughout history? I mean, our pains are probably relatively weak sauce compared to what people had to deal with not 100 years ago.
The problem is that now everyone feels they have a license to complain about every splinter and now every stubbed toe is the end of the world.
Of course back before the regulation of hard drugs such as Opiates and such, one could buy liquid cough syrup with Opium in it, and give it to your kids to keep them doped out of their minds. Coke had cocaine in it, and as long as you had that 10 extra cents you could get rip-snorting high and wired off as many bottles as you could drink (at least I imagine, I’m too lazy to link or do any research at the moment).
In the past, most of America were farmers. They shut the fuck up and got the job done, regardless of if the backbreaking work of the previous day made them hurt in every joint and walk a little slow.
Back in the old west days, you could self-medicate with Alcohol. Of course if that made you short-tempered and hasty to duel, so be it. Get up, have a large snort from the whiskey bottle to steady yourself. Couple shots with breakfast. Go to work shoe-ing horses or whatever, finish the flask your wife packed with your lunch. Get off work, go home for dinner with a couple drinks, then head out to the saloon for some hell-raising with the boys and the serious drinking.
In further history, Beer was the safest thing to drink because they would boil the water used to make it. Water got you sick, beer was a health drink.
As things have gotten easier with the advances we have made as society, harder drugs have become criminalized and more controlled, and people have become less and less likely to lose life and limb at work. But we still do things our bodies were not designed to do, sitting in an office chair all day. As we age our bodies decline, we lose the cartilidge used to cushion our joints. Gravity bears down on us daily, and our spines try to decompress at night while we sleep.
So, too, has it gotten easier and more socially acceptable to complain about our ailments. From the beginnings of human commerce, it’s been potions and chemicals and foods and pills sold to cure what ails ye.
Fraud and quackery are alive and well today, and there’s plenty of gullible souls that buy into stupid crap and pyramid schemes such as Amway and Quixtar (whatever they are called this week).
Eventually, you’ll get to some serious pain, but no one will take you seriously because you’ve been complaining for so long and so hard. Hurting means you’re alive. So be glad for it because 1. It’s not near as bad as your ancestors had it. & 2. All that suffering you do sitting through church services doesn’t guarantee that there actually is any ‘life after death.’
Is your belly full? Do you have safe shelter for the night? Then you’re ahead of many people in the world.
Of course you know, this means NERF WAR!
When my brother and I were growing up, we kind of invented the best game ever, NERF WAR!
Now it wasn’t necessary to have the ultra-expensive nerf GUNS to play this game, any foam football or playground or inflatable ball would do.
Basically, the entire game was running around in the yard pummeling the hell out of each other (and all the other kids) all day.
See, my mom was kind of the neighborhood babysitter, and even the kids she didn’t watch for money were always at our house to play outside. So we always had a stash of balls to choose from.
The rules of the game were simple:
1. You can only use your weapon (ball). No touching, kicking, etc, balls lying on the ground.
2. You can only attack someone who is armed.
3. No ganging up on someone, nor “guarding” their weapon (ball lying on ground) and waiting for them to go to pick it up and then nailing them.
4. Stay in the yard.
With these simple rules in place, we had the most fun ever, running dodging and smacking the hell out of each other with foam/inflatable balls. Nerf footballs were the most versatile of the bunch, but I had my favorite, a medium sized pinkish marbled playball that stung if you threw it hard enough. The blue Nerf Football was also a good choice when I wanted more accuracy, but only one weapon per person.
Anyway, as kids will be kids, I quickly developed this ‘uncanny ability’ or if you want to call it, a destructive aim to (not on purpose, I swear!) nail my brother in the balls. Let me just say that “center mass” was the juiciest target, and maybe I subconsciously left my release a little late.
So the ball would fly true, and smack him right in the cojones, and he’d crumple to the ground with tears forming in his eyes. Then I’d run. Because as soon as he recovered enough, he was after me to chase me down and get some payback, of the hitting kind. So he’d run me down, and I’d cringe/hunch over, knowing what was coming, and he’d THUMP! me right in the back.
Decades later and my brother has three gorgeous kids, which my sister-in-law says are a miracle because of all the hits my brother took to the groin. But could claim I was just killing all the ugly kid making swimmy cells. Seriously, these kids are C-U-T-E.
I kind of want to introduce the kids to the joys of “NERF War” soon, but I think it can wait until I buy a cup.
Spider Jerusalem
I’ve been working on my Spider Jerusalem Quote Page(s), which there’s a list of over to the right. I’m being more discerning on quotes and trying not to just copy descriptions of the action and dialogue in the TPBs. The only thing I have to worry about is a C&D, so I’m trying to limit them a bit and hopefully it will spur interest in the Transmetropolitan comic book series.
Webcomic Ho!
Just started updating my webcomic in earnest, which is what you see when you go to SexCpotatoes.com.
I will do my best to update it whenever I get a day off, and I will soon begin work on more fun drawing and design that will be put up at SexCpotatoes Designs.
I’ve been drawing a lot of shoes lately.
Nothing Fancy, Moving On
No ironic picture, and no fancy ‘I told you so’ here. This is just a simple post to bring everything down to a simmer with the Redflex situation in the City of Canton.
I am still itching to start the petition to outlaw photo enforcement in Canton, Ohio. I suppose though, I can promise not to embarrass the Mayor further by rubbing salt in the open wound. The citizens have spoken, and the words are “no cameras.” Let’s hope he’s got the listening hat on.
Steve McKinney has been invaluable in getting the facts about the way Redflex (and other system operators’ schemes work, and how they fail). You should check out his in-depth coverage @ http://www.cantonredlightcameras.com if you haven’t already.
I’ve been a little busy, so I didn’t know about the March 17th meeting that the City Council Members (and Mayor apparently) had. I’m happy the citizens turned out in such numbers and voiced their opinions against the Red Light Camera scheme.
I was all set to help join all the anti-photo enforcement groups together to stop HB 2 or get it repealed because our State Legislature was trying to put Photo Enforcement Radar Speed Cameras out in construction zones all over Ohio. At $300 a pop, that’s an expensive reminder not to speed in construction zones, and unnecessary too! People do slow down in construction zones, many times they are empty, but with that scheme, it wouldn’t cost them anything to sit someone in a vehicle doing paperwork and call the construction zone “occupied” so they could rack up the fines.
Anyway, since that looks like it’s a dead issue (so far), I’ve decided to move on to a series of posts with ideas of what could really be done to help improve the City of Canton. I could have gone negative and reported on all the shenanigans and political fighting and such that’s going on with the Mayor, Council, etc, but I feel that The Stark County Political Report is doing an excellent job thoroughly covering those stories, as well as reporting on the conflict of interest and The Repository’s kinda sorta softball coverage of anything to do with Mayor Healy. I alluded to having suspicions about their coverage of the Redflex issues in my previous blog post, but I didn’t expect the truth to out so quickly!
Anyway, I’ve got a minimum of five good blog posts about how A Mayor could help to turn the City of Canton around. Maybe more than that, so check back later to read some zany common sense ideas from yours truly, Nicholas Cincinat.
Thanks for reading, hope to see you back here soon (no I am not spying on you! I only know how many views my blog gets in a month! That’s all).
From the Streets, Yo
Just a list of street suffixes. Did you know them all? What kind of “street” do you live on?
Alley
Avenue
Boulevard
Center
Circle
Court
Cresent
Dale
Drive
Expressway
Freeway
Garden
Grove
Heights
Highway
Hill
Knoll
Lane
Loop
Mall
Oval
Park
Parkway
Path
Pike
Place
Plaza
Point
Road
Route
Row
Run
Square
Street
Terrace
Thruway
Trail
Turnpike
Viaduct
Walk
Way
I wanna ratchet up the vitriol…
I wanna ratchet up the vitriol… I want my words to sear the flesh of my enemies, real or imagined, dialed down so tight they burn with the white hot fury of my very own brand of genius.
Stamp. Stamp. Stamp.
Read anything written by H.L. Mencken, The words of comic book character Spider Jerusalem, this is what I wish I could turn out every day, and I hope that I’m working towards it as I type. I’m sure it’s going slowly, but as long as progress is continually made, I guess I have nothing to complain about.
Don’t suffer the demagogues and boondoggles, call everyone out, including yourself, on half-truths, and destroy the bald-faced liars.
How To Stop Chain Emails and Chain Letters
Okay, this is your all purpose nullifier. This will stop dead any curse chain letter that you may ever recieve. You read this, and if you feel like it, then post it in your blog or journal, and you are forever protected. Nothing can ever harm you again unless you are weak minded enough to believe it. Even if a letter or list CLAIMS to supercede THIS statement, it will not. Seriously people, there is no point in messing with my voodoo unless you want an infinite duration of pain.
That being said, this statement also gives you free rein to turn a curse back on the person who was enough of an asshole to post one of those chain letters in your comments, or to send you the email, letter, etc. To do this, you must send the idiot who sent you the original chain letter, the precise number of copies of the email or comment or chain letter you were meant to distribute (or more). Any retaliation on their part will have no effect, as you are protected by this nullification statement. Besides, if you send them 10-15 emails or notes that state they have to send out an additional 10-15 MORE emails or comments per every copy you’ve sent them and they’ll bug the fuck out. I had some girl I had talked to back in the AOL days literally break down in tears, well, I got an email from her begging me to stop sending her the chain letters, the email was desperate/weepy.
Anywho, please do not distribute this without giving credit to me, but feel free to post it to your own blog, website, or comments wherever, that’s how the immunity works. Refer people to the original post here, or to read the post in your blog or journal. There is no sense in having a protective nullification statement if you’re just going to turn it into another fucking chain spam email.
So there we go:
Thank you for your time. -SexCpotatoes
P.S. and those goddamn question lists give you cancer, stop it or your genitals will most certainly fall off, then come back to life, and screw you until you bleed from all of your orifices. Good day.
Tags: All, All Purpose, Chain, Chain Comments, Chain Email, Chain Letter, Chain Letters, Cry, Email, Immunity, Letter, Nullification, Payback, Purpose, Retaliation, Return, Return To Sender, Sender, Spam, Sugar Chain, Sugar Chain Picture, Superstition, Tears, To