Sorry for the lack of updates these past couple of days, my intrepid readers; I’ve been swamped with work and Real Life^TM and haven’t had a chance to post. That changes now that I have a bit of breathing room.

Tonight was a very strange night at the karaoke show. Very different than usual. The crowd was different, the mood was different, and the antics were consistently annoying, stupid, and rude.

Let the Ranting Begin!

This is a hostility-laden rant. If you’re an unashamed man-whore, a proud slut, a rude idiot, or a redneck, you’d best move on, because I will piss you off with my commentary tonight.

“We Can’t Find Our Cook, But You Can’t Bring Your Own Food”

My night began with an annoyance — the bar couldn’t find their cook or tell me whether they could even serve me a burger, but when I finally got sick of waiting and told her “just forget it, I’ll run across the street to McFood to grab something,” the bartender told me “you can’t bring in outside food.”

As a result, I didn’t eat a bite tonight. Great job, you fucking morons. Cost yourself a good eight bucks in food sales, a good tip, and increased beverage consumption, and your actions didn’t get rid of your least-cost-effective customer (hell, if I don’t buy liquor or drinks or food but I stay anyway, I cost them money). That’s about as smart as your dumb $15 credit card minimum, which has cost you hundreds of dollars I would have otherwise spent on foodstuffs and drinks in the seven months I’ve lived in this town so far.

“I Will Unashamedly Attempt to Fuck Every Woman I Find Attractive Here Tonight”

There was actually plenty of this (and there always is, but tonight there were even more of these, and more of them focused on our table) tonight, enough to give me plenty to rant about for days. I’ll spare you, though, and just rant this once about it.

There were actually two different offenders tonight (at the very least), and it’s hard to accurately judge which of them was the scummier of the two. Keep in mind as I describe these antics that the subject of their attention was my friend S, who’s 16 years old (i.e. “jailbait”). Her father and aunt were there, along with myself and the KJ. These two morons did these things to try to get into her pants, with all of us around watching/listening to it all.

The Ignorant Redneck Cheater

He has hit on her before, of course, and completely ignored her complete lack of interest then (and now), but tonight was hilarious.

• He’s married. We all know this because he’s told us (and S).
• His wife was out of town this weekend, and he was “here to party!”
• He had another woman with him, that he claimed was his sister (while cuddling very intimately with her — if that’s really his sister, I think a law is being broken).
• He sat next to S, picked up her leg (without her permission) and rested it on his lap. Then he rested on her leg with his elbows and tried to be “charming and sweet” with her, despite her protests.
• He constantly touched her whenever he could, from “massaging her shoulders” to putting an arm around her to trying to kiss her on the cheek.
• He hovered around our table, trying to muscle in and find a seat, then sitting at the nearby bar when none was available. Any chance he could, he stared at her and watched her intensely.
• He was seriously annoyed when his “sister” got drunk enough that she needed babysitting, forcing him to abandon his “hunt”.
• He sang redneck songs to her that he hoped would impress her, such as “How Do You Like Me Now?”
• He ignored every cue, obvious and subtle, that his actions were entirely unwanted/unwelcome:
  • Her father, her aunt, and I all scowled at him and watched him very closely whenever he was nearby.
  • Her aunt physically intervened once she realized he was trying to touch her (getting in between them so he couldn’t actually touch his “target”).
  • She told him outright that he has no business touching her, but he persisted anyway.

I have so many problems with this asshole’s behavior I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll pick that he’s out cheating on his wife with another woman at a bar while she’s away on business, and trying to pick up another one while he’s out with his mistress.

Then we have the fact that he treated her as a piece of meat to be manhandled as desired (I am her good friend, and a good friend of her family’s, and they trust me much more than they trust this guy, and they would still all kick my ass if I ever just grabbed her leg and put it on my lap like he did). Then he ignored her protests (when she said “yeah, can I have my leg back now?” he replied “what, you don’t want to flirt with me anymore?” as if she’d done any flirting in the first place).

She’s sixteen. He is easily in his late thirties/early forties. Yuck.

The Shy Playboy

Around 11:00pm the “rose lady” was making her rounds (selling roses for $5 a pop to the morons at the bar who think an overpriced rose is the master key to any woman’s sexual locks) and came by to give S a rose. Someone had bought one for her.

That someone appeared about twenty minutes later and asked me the most hilarious question I’ve heard in a long time. Straight-faced, he asked me (without ever once making eye contact with me or even looking at S) if he could have my permission to “buy [my] woman a drink and sing a duet with her.” I played dumb a bit, and asked “who are you talking about?” “Uh, the blonde.” “Which one? There are two.” “Uh, the young one, your wife. I thought you were married or she was your fiancé or something.”

Without laughing too much, I said “uh, dude, she’s sixteen. That’s her father behind me. Talk to him, or go ask her … if you want to sing with her, ask her about it.”

From that moment on he ignored me (i.e. I was not, in his mind, an obstacle in his conquest) and jumped straight to her father. I’m not privy to that entire conversation, but her father had a silly grin on his face after the guy walked away.

At no time did he approach her directly to ask her to sing a duet with him, either, until much later on. He walked away, then a few minutes later the bartender came by and told S’s father that someone had bought him two beers, one for him, and one for his beautiful daughter (again, she’s sixteen, folks — liquor + sixteen == bad/illegal). He then went to the KJ to ask him to set up the duet, and tipped the KJ thirty dollars for the privilege.

Finally, he sheepishly came over to ask S herself if she’d sing Summer Nights with him, and she said “sure.” Then, before it was his turn to sing that very duet, he left the bar. He had to have blown at least $45 on the whole thing and didn’t even bother waiting around to actually sing with her.

What frustrated me most about this whole thing is how distance/detached he was from her. He obviously fancied her, but apparently he only admired her from afar; he never once made eye contact with her (or with any of us, actually), and kept acting as though she were a piece of property that he just had to negotiate his way through the competition to claim. First he thought I was in his way, then he figured “oh, I should win the father over first.”

To him, she was just property. Not even equipped with her own opinions or personality — just a walking bit of eye candy.

I know the answer to this question already, but I have to ask it anyway: does this shit ever work?

The answer? Of course it does. And I have this to say to any woman who has ever let an obviously womanizing redneck with tired, pathetic “faux courtesy” tricks and unbearable persistence actually get anywhere with her: fuck you for setting back the women’s rights movement thirty years.

If you let someone this cheesy, this corny, and this scummy (remember, one was married and actively cheating on his wife while trying to score a second piece of ass on the side, and the other felt it more appropriate to bribe S’s friends and family for a shot at her than to just approach her directly) even get to first base, you’re part of the problem and you’re the reason assholes like this can reproduce.

Come For the Idiots, Stay For the Smoke

An acquaintance of ours (I chose that word very carefully, by the way), is rather well-known for being high as a fucking kite most of the time. He’s about as subtle about it as an elephant with the screaming shits — his eyes are consistently bloodshot, he sweats profusely when he shouldn’t (i.e. no physical activity, air-conditioned environment, etc.), he’s seriously wiry, and he’s paranoid. Oh, that, and he’s got to be the dumbest person I’ve met in a long time. We’re talking functionally damaged … as in, it’s amazing he can feed and bathe himself sometimes.

He drinks and smokes, too — no vice is too good for him.

Towards the middle of the evening, S, the KJ and I all decided we needed a break from the cigarette smoke (which was quite potent tonight). The three of us walked out the back door of the place and stood outside, basking in the relatively clean air. Up walks our “favorite” tweaker, from outside, cigarette in hand.

He even commented on “hey, you guys getting away from the smoke for a bit?” and we replied “yeah, the smoke in there is just too much to deal with so we’re taking a break.” He then teased us for wanting to get away from the smoke and puffed a lung full of smoke at us. When I said “uh, yeah, we’re trying to get away from the smoke,” he actually got offended and shouted at me “what, you’re gonna assault me for walking up to you with a cigarette in my hand?”

That’s when I lost my normal, polite, calm demeanor. I asked him in a pretty nasty tone, “assault? What are you talking about? We came out here to get away from the cigarette smoke and you walk up to tease us about it with a lit cigarette. What the fuck did you think we’d do?” This of course pissed him off, and he walked away to loudly rant about our “rude” behavior to … nobody.

Just a hint: if I don’t like cigarette smoke, I try to get away from it instead of trying to stop the smokers in the first place. If you fucking follow me with a lit cigarette to tease me about it, expect an unpleasant response.

Tip the KJ, Dammit!

Someone decided to take it upon herself tonight to make a complete ass of herself by walking around with the KJ’s tip jar and demanding that people tip him. She got pushy enough that some people actually got up and left the bar because of her antics.

With friends like that, who needs any enemies?

Crashing at the Speed of Java

Of additional irritation this evening was the astounding instability of my damned Treo 650. I’m realizing why Opera Mini is free — it’s an unstable piece of shit. It’s written in Java, so of course this also means the JVM that ships for the Treo 650 is also a piece of shit. A user-space application running on an intentionally encapsulated, isolated “sandbox” environment (the JVM asks me, every fucking time I run Opera Mini, for permission to even let it make network connections), should never be able to crash the host runtime environment or the entire fucking machine.

So great job on producing an unstable, insecure Java Virtual Machine, IBM, and wonderful job on writing a web browser that reliably crashes if it ever tries to load a page more than 300k in size and that reloads (and clears) most input forms the minute you actually fill in a field, Opera.

If you didn’t get the point of my rant, Opera Mini crashes my phone. A lot. We’re talking complete reset/reboot. It also locks it up on occasion — I had to yank the battery at one point tonight to wake the fucking thing from its coma.

Deny Access to Your Biggest Customers … Smart!

The dipshits at expedia.com, travelocity.com, cheaptickets.com, and orbitz.com deserve to be dragged out into the street and shot. Go ahead and try to use any of their sites from the Treo 650.

My favorite trick is this one: they’ll send 300k worth of ad-ridden page content before their server sends the JavaScript snippet that forces the browser to redirect to a “not supported” page. Note that the JavaScript works properly and performs the redirection. Note also that it can take two fucking minutes to transfer 300k of data. That’s two minutes you get to wait, only to be redirected to another page anyway telling you the page that had just loaded (and was working properly) won’t work on your browser.

Doesn’t it make sense that a lot of customers might be using their mobile phones to check on flight pricing and availability? It doesn’t make sense to these morons, I guess. So, sorry, fellow mobile phone users, we’re all fucked.

The Grand Realization

I realized, firmly and concretely tonight for the first time, that I have thrown myself unintentionally in redneck country by moving here. I imagine the only place the average human is dumber than this is in the deep South.

Don’t get me wrong — rednecks are a great source of entertainment because of the dumb things they do (most people here talk longingly about moving into a double-wide, and sadly, I’m not joking), and I love my friends here immensely (S rocks the karaoke circuit, woooo! Oh, and she’s a pretty bad-ass friend, too ) and wouldn’t change a thing, but sometimes the redneck antics just get to be too much to deal with. Fortunately I can hide at home away from the insane ones And if this is my competition for IT/tech work … heh! I’ve got it made here.

And I’m Spent

I’m tired and grouchy; I had fun tonight despite the moron parade but it’s definitely time for bed.

More rants to come on the ‘morrow. G’night, folks!

Fear, n.:
What you feel when you see a U-Haul with Texas license plates.