Howie do it

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When I first saw Howie Mandel, he was doing hilarious stand-up comedy. Then he had a great cartoon show that my children and I would watch on Saturday mornings. The past of couple years has found him doing an intense game show and a hidden camera show. And now he has moved into creating some humorous Sales ads on Youtube for Buy.com. They're the kind you would hope to see during Superbowl halftime. Although, judging from the content of some of the videos, you certainly won't see them on regular TV. Someone would have gotten their pants in bunch over a few of the cheekier innuendos. Thank goodness for the Internet.

I don't know what is next for Mr. Mandel. A podcast or two, a Facebook presence, wouldn't surprise me. But I'm looking forward to a few more entertaining videos.

Goods news at work.

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After three years of no pay raises, my company is finally going to give the hourly workers a 5 cent per hour increase! You can imagine the joyful effect this will have on not quite fifty people. Management's momentous decision can only be possible because they helped ten other hourly employees avoid the anxiety of moving into a higher tax bracket ... by firing them. (If you're keeping score, that would be "Yearly Increase of Payroll": $7,500 to "Yearly Decrease to Payroll": $270,000. Company wins! Yay Team!)

With these continuing changes in the company, resumes and letter of recommendation are becoming required items of safety equipment as we work to protect our lives, limbs and bank accounts.

Rich And Thin

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Someone once said you can never be too rich or too thin (perhaps a quote by an Ethiopian millionaire). While this may explain the surplus of supermodels, it may also explain the mindset of a lot of people that I work around. They tend to be rich in patience and good cheer, and anorexically thin in any undesirable qualities.

Someone also once said that you tend to become like the people you hang around. Perhaps I'm not hanging around them enough. Or maybe I just need to hang around the guy that keeps coming up with quotable sayings.

Things Change When You Get Older

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I'm 50. My body just isn't what it used to be. Today I realized that a tremendous sex drive means only that my girlfriend lives 130 miles away ...

What Do You Buy For a SuperStar?

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Sometimes I find myself thinking about questions that have ethical dilemmas. Just the other day, I found myself wondering about all of these professional athletes who are earning millions of dollars for being able to play with a ball or a stick. When it comes time for Christmas or their birthdays, what sort of presents do their friends and family buy them? Would it be an insult to spend the few measly dollars that you have on sports gifts for these overpaid entertainers? Would it be like buying a set of Wal-Mart's specially priced knives to give a world-class chef?

I'm sorry. I shouldn't pick on our highly paid athletes. But it's not like a multimillion dollar superstar is going to read this. They do know how to read, right?

Big Words From Such a Little Mind

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Have you ever been around people who tend to make things sound much more complicated than they really are? It's as if they have a compelling need to take a simple term and turn it into a poly syllabic phrase. I have one such friend who suffers from this affliction. Actually, he has the affliction, the rest of us suffer.

He works as an exterminator. Instead of saying that you step on a bug to kill it, he refers to the action as applying "spontaneous compression" so that the bug dies from "vertical planar syndrome". The other day, he had an assignment at the Campbell Soup factory down the road. You can imagine how all the dried grains and vegetables tend to attract an insect or two. Instead of telling me that he was putting Indian meal moth traps around the plant, he said he was installing "Native-American-dinner-butterfly hunting gear". I guess he thought this was funny because most of the workers at factory claim lineage to Lumbee tribe. I'm thinking that if he tells any of them what he is installing, he is soon to be informed of how "factually unencumbered" and "non-cerebrally gifted" he is. No doubt the more expressive members of the group are sure to help him become "metabolically inactive". All I can say is that he just bugs me...