There are two types of people who write checks at the counter these days:

• Construction workers who have gigantic checks often in gigantic books
• Old ladies with gigantic purses

I will allow for the former, but the later is making me crazy. This is 2007! Why are you still writing checks? Men don’t write checks because we don’t carry around a piece of luggage to hold the damned things. And we don’t enjoy writing in cursive. I think this may be part of the issue. Women enjoy writing in cursive.

And I think it may be a class of people who have more time than anything. That’s the only explanation for not just the ungodly slow check writing process, but also for the makes-me-want-to-strangle-them act of waiting until they get a total to pull out the billy club of a wallet and start actually putting pen to paper! They live in a world where time is not an issue. A land that time forgot.

I know this rant will have no impact because the Luddites that still write checks are not on the freakin’ internet reading blogs. If they have a computer, it is collecting dust in the other room after they got online and clicked where they should not have and now when they turn it on they immediately get 25 porn pop-ups.

I swear, last time I was behind one of these old ladies I nearly grabbed her checkbook and ripped it to shreds and screamed “use the freakin’ card they sent you slow ass bitch!”

That’s the question I heard as I picked up my to go order. I thought it deserved saying again.

People get murdered every day.

Why did this particular event become the headline? Why do I care at all about this particular event hundreds of miles from me and unrelated to anyone I know?

Why is this headline news on all the networks? Does anyone ever ask that at the network? Does anyone ever ask if they are hurting or helping both the victims and their families, and the viewers? Does anything but sensationalism and ratings matter?

I really don’t give a shit about these headline stories. They have absolutely nothing to do with me or anyone I remotely know.

News should matter to the viewers. It should have some relationship to their lives. It should not be a slow drive by a crash on the highway.

That’s sick.

I got this cool RAZR v3xx recently. I can plug it right into a USB port on my computer. It tells me in the manual that if I get a memory card, I can transfer video, music and pics onto the phone from my computer. So I got a 1 Gig microSD for $20.

I plugged it in and sure enough, I can browse over to the phone. Yippee! I dropped a couple of tunes over there and a few pics and I am rockin. I’m gonna have a unique tune for all my friends and their pictures.

But, the phone says all the pictures are corrupted and the songs hosed.

I tried logical things like searching the Motorola support site. Did their thing. No good. Tried to exactly match images to the size and dpi of the pictures I took with the phone camera. Nope. Jpeg or gif. Nope. Downloaded a number of free software trials. Nope, nope, nope.

You see, you can indeed put files on your RAZR’s memory card from your computer, the manual does not lie. However, if you want to view those pictures or listen to those tunes with your phone, sorry man.

They want you to download your songs and ringtones for a price. They want you to email the pictures or send them some other wireless way they can charge you for. A nice slow draining.

I am begining to see cellphones as the biggest scam ever perpetrated on humanity. From sites that offer ringtone downloads, but first make you put in your number to back-handedly sign you up for a monthly fee to be added to your bill; to phones that start talking to other phones at will to send them songs and, hey, there is a small fee for the transfer, or, you can get the Googly-Moogly Bandwidth package that lets you send lots of crap from your phone each month for just $19.99 monthly! They went ahead and put this into my new contract without telling me. Thanks dude! And don’t forget the carefully placed extra buttons right next to the dial and hang-up buttons that immediately take you to the Internet and start the slow drip, drip, drip of your money… Oops!

I am a pretty smart guy and technically savvy, and this is clearly not a simple work around. The answer is out there, and I will find it. It’ll probably cost me of course. And if you want me to tell you how to get files from your computer to your RAZR, well, that’ll cost you. I want my cut of the action. Unfortunately, my feeding off of you does not make me young forever, but my kewl ass phone does… as long as I feed the beast…

This stuff kills me. The guy got a stupid tattoo on a whim, and so, he decides to fix it by getting an even bigger, stupider tattoo on top of it! Yeah, that looks better. I had a girlfriend who got a yin-yang symbol on her hip. She hated it. So she fixed it by getting a dragon tattooed, holding the yin-yang symbol. Hated it.

Eventually these people’s entire bodies will be covered by one enormous tattoo on top of another on top of another…

Hey doofus, this will be on you forever. Think a long time before you do it. For your entire existense, will you want to be seen with a “tribal” arm band? Me, I change outfits daily. I change my hairstyle every so often. I have more than one mood. And what I strongly believed even just a short time ago, I now question. Why the hell would I want anything on my body forever?

And the old tired cliche of getting a dead friend or a child tattoed on you… please. I love my family and friends and if I need a tattoo to show I love my daughter, I have a serious problem. I show my love by, like, actually loving.

A tattooed friend said that it’s addictive. Once you get one, you want more and more. He doesn’t really like most of his tattoos either, like most people I meet. I think it’s more like when you get a new car and it gets that first ding. After that, you really don’t care how many more dings it gets. It’s hosed.

On the road this weekend I found another great vacation spot:

Gnaw Bone, Indiana. Near French Lick.