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Jag-off March 9, 2008

Posted by Merujo in bad behavior, CVS, people suck, sex, stupidity, the Hellmouth, troubled people, welcome to Bethesda.
5 comments

Thursday night, I stopped by the CVS in downtown Bethesda to pick up a box of Nice & Easy 114, the current (non-freaky red) cheap hair color of choice. I snagged a parking space next to the two handicapped spots and went in. As I scanned small boxes for the right color, I overheard snippets of a loud conversation between a couple perusing the Easter candy aisle.

“But do you think he’s really handicapped?”

“It’s just wrong.”

“Yeah, no shit! Nice car, though…”

I assumed someone with no handicapped plates had pulled into one of the few designated spots at the pharmacy. Wouldn’t be the first time that had happened here in the land of entitlement. I thought nothing of it and paid for my box of chemicals.

When I got to my car, I saw there was a very spiffy Jaguar parked next to me, occupying a handicapped spot. Indeed, there was a handicapped tag hanging from the rear view mirror. An older gentleman sat behind the wheel, the driver’s door open. He had one leg stretched out the door, and, though I tried not to look, I could not help but see he had a serious palsy in one arm.

Or so I thought.

As I did the “healing spine sideways shimmy” to get into the Crapmobile Mark II, I got a better look.

Nope. No palsy.

The guy was going to town, whacking his willy in his fancy-schmantzy car. Polishing the wood. Beating his well-aged meat. Wanking with abandon.

I could not help it. I just stared, my jaw scraping the ground.

The onanistic Jag-ster finally noticed he had an audience and tried to stuff his member back in his trousers and get his leg back in his car. People, this parking space is directly under a big light right on a busy section of Wisconsin – there is no way you can masturbate in your luxury car a few feet from the entrance of this CVS and NOT be seen.

For once, I didn’t say anything. I was just astounded and drove off, shaking my head. I know being affluent is no guarantee of having common sense, but there clearly had to be something wrong with this dude. At least I understood the conversation of the candy aisle couple.

What the hell is the problem with this CVS? Is it a second Pike Hellmouth, like the 7-11 by White Flint? I’m starting to think so. And I think I’ll start using Purell after touching any products in this particular CVS location…

An apology to my readers (or why I’ve just kissed Google Adsense goodbye) March 7, 2008

Posted by Merujo in commerce, embarrassment 101, moolah, people suck, technology.
4 comments

Update: I’ve received some very creepy e-mail from slavishly obsessed adherents to Adsense since I posted this entry. Also, two unscrupulous “made for Adsense” garbage website owners have stolen this Creative Commons license-protected content and posted it to their sites. This experience has been unpleasant. I’ve also been accused of making this up (yeah right – ask the Sasquatch, who sent me the screen capture of some of the ads), of being some sort of anti-Google agent provocateur (oh, puh-leeze!), and of being a pathological professional victim for complaining. Sorry, kids. Not the case. My blog, my rules. I talk about all sorts of stuff here – some of it more appropriate for adults, but regardless of my content (and remember, Google had to approve my site for their ads), Google promised “FAMILY SAFE” ads only. They did not deliver. I can control what I write here. But with Adsense, I couldn’t control the influx of inappropriate ads – my readers were getting different ads than I saw, depending on what entry they hit.

If you’re some raving Adsenser, you are welcome here, like everyone is, but I’m not going to engage you in any discourse. I honestly do have better things to do, and, having just gone through a cancer scare, I can tell you with no doubt, life is too short to talk to zealots. You’re creeping me out, Adsensers! It’s as if complaining about Adsense is akin to kicking your puppy or hitting your baby. Jeez. Go forth and make your money with ads and leave your self-righteous crapola at the door. And yeah, just so you know, there’s a difference between posting about goofy grown-up stuff and ADVERTISING for sex crime defense attorneys. I’m not shilling for them or adulterous dating websites, thanks.

Original post follows:

Recently, I put Google Adsense ads on my blog. I had hoped it might generate a little extra $ as both my desktop PC and my laptop are dying, and I’m saving my pennies to buy a new computer.

Unfortunately, Google Adsense has not served me well. Despite Adsense claiming their ads will be “family safe”, I’ve had crud show up here with titles like “Cheating Wives Meet!” with a link to a “cheating wives” dating site. Another ad was titled “African Radio” – this would have been fine with me had it featured a link to an African radio website. Instead, the link was for “blackpeoplemeet-dot-whatever” – another dating site. No radio, no how. Look, I have no problem with black people meeting. Or purple people meeting. Or lonely guys and space aliens meeting, for what it’s worth. I’m all for all people meeting. But disingenuous crap pisses me off, and I certainly don’t want to look like a skeezy tool to you, my regular readers.

Google Adsense has a feature where you can filter out specific URLs. And that’s fine, up to a point. But when I look at my webpage, I often don’t see the same ads you do. Sometimes, I have no idea what you are seeing, unless someone lets me know. So, most of the time, if there is something tasteless up there, I simply don’t know, and therefore, can’t take it down.

Tonight, however, the Sasquatch let me know my website featured ads with headlines blaring about incest and sexual abuse. He sent me a screen shot, and I was horrified. One of the ads was a link to a sex crime defense attorney website. Great. I’m advertising to defend sexual criminals. WTF?

Well, that was it, as far as I’m concerned. Do I need to bring in extra money? You bet. Am I going to do it with a company that’s going to pop bold headers on my blog with the words “incest” and “sexual abuse” and “cheating wives”? No way in hell.

Here’s the e-mail I sent to Google Adsense tonight after I pulled all the code off my page:

“I wish to cancel my account immediately. I have removed all Adsense code from my blog. I was shocked and digusted to have a regular reader contact me with a screen shot of my blog featuring ads with titles about incest and sexual abuse.

From the Adsense blog, I was led to believe that Adsense would feature only “family safe” ads. How ads titled “Incest A Family Tragedy” and “Sexual Abuse Arrest” count as “family safe”, I simply cannot fathom. I am disgusted and embarrassed that my regular readers think I am happily advertising defense attorneys for sexual abusers.

I now have to apologize to my readers.

My blog is may not necessarily be family-friendly, but writing as a grown-up doesn’t mean I support sexual abusers.

Sick.

You need to vet your clients better, and you should make efforts to protect the publishers from crass and disgusting un-family-safe ads. I have no idea how many of my regular readers I have offended with your ads. If you want a copy of the page my reader sent to me, I will forward you the screen shot, complete with incest and sexual abuse-titled ads. I don’t care about the content of the links, I care about the bold headers my readers see and associate with me.

Close my account now.”

So, dear readers, I apologize if any of you have been offended or put off by any of the ads you may have seen on my blog. It certainly was not my intention to put anything crass or distasteful on my page. I noticed a decline in my readership recently, and I can only hope folks will come back to read.

This really upset me to find this out tonight. I may be a flake, I may be a goofball, and I may swear out here now and then, but I don’t encourage cheating spouses and I don’t help sexual abusers find a handy lawyer. It’s upset me enough that I’m still up at 2:10 in the morning, embarrassed and angry.

This sucks.

With sincere apologies to everyone,

Merujo

Totaled. September 24, 2007

Posted by Merujo in pain, people suck, the Crapmobile.
6 comments

My freaking car is totaled.

Shite.

I’m going to take a walk (well, a limp) and try to be Zen about this.

Le Crapmobile est morte. 😦

I may have found a completely new level of Hell June 24, 2007

Posted by Merujo in commerce, Hell, people suck, self-entitlement.
21 comments

Disgusting. Dirty. Unsanitary.

And that’s just the customers.

Come with me, dear readers, on a trip to the Germantown, Maryland Wal-Mart – a larger, more wretched hive of scum and villany than Mos Eisley ever was.

Friday night, I had need of several items that normally would require multiple stops to procure: Jobe’s houseplant spikes, lightbulbs (including the elusive 200-watter), Kleenex, underwear (screw you, Rockville Target, for no longer stocking my size!), and a handful of fiddly bits.

I got to Wal-Mart at 8:45. I would leave 35 minutes later, nearly running for the door and the bottle of Purell I keep in my car. Truth is, I should have left as soon as I walked in the door and made a stop in the ladies room.

Here, folks, is a glimpse of the Germantown, Maryland Wal-Mart ladies room at 8:45 on Friday evening:



Included in this mess is the bag with the dirty diaper that a kindly suburban grandma threw on the floor as she walked in. When I said, “What the…???” She looked at me and said, “Well, what else can I do?” I heard her clucking and objecting from her stall as my cell camera clicked away. Too bad, granny.

Still, I had driven up there. I was in the store. I could pick up my stuff, get the hell out, and not come back. Not for a long, long time.

Let me introduce you to the Germantown Wal-Mart shoppers. They come in every color and ethnicity possible. And, let me tell you – none of these folks were making themselves look good. None of them.

Like the mom opening up shampoo and condition bottles left and right, squeezing out large “samples” for her kids to play with on their arms and legs. She then pulled a box of baby wipes from the next aisle to open for them to use for clean-up.

Lesson 1: Don’t buy toiletries at Wal-Mart.

Then there was the clearly crack-addled woman who wandered the food aisles, opening packages of cookies, sampling them, closing them and then screaming “Muthafucka! Shit! Stupid fuckas! They don’t have my cookies. Hey, hey, you! (said to passing, scared customer) WHERE ARE MY MUTHAFUCKING COOKIES?”

Lesson 2: Don’t buy dry food at Wal-Mart.

Even better, just around the corner there was the woman who picked up a package of hot dogs off the dirty floor, where they had been pushed around by several carts, opened the refrigerator with the non-floor hot dogs, and tossed them in with the rest of the weiners for sale.

Lesson 2.5: Don’t buy ANY food at Wal-Mart.

Or how about the dad carting a toddler dressed only in a t-shirt, sandals and a diarrhea-overflowing diaper. While daddio railed at someone in Arabic via cellphone, he plopped down the stinky leaky diaper kid on top of a pallet of bottled water. DIRECTLY onto the bottle tops, his feet bouncing and rubbing all over the next pallet of bottle tops. That was the point when I finally yelled.

“Hey. Hey! HEY, DAD!” Dad spun around, phone still to his head. “Get your kid’s filthy bottom off the water bottles. And get his feet off the bottles, too! What is wrong with you?”

Dad screamed at me, “You are a horrible woman!”

I just replied, “Well, at least I’m not a horrible father.”

Lesson 3: Never buy anything to drink at Wal-Mart. You have no idea where those bottles have been.

Then there was the couple dry-humping on a big pile of paper towels. She leaned over the innocent towels, propped up on one elbow, chattering away on a glitter-spattered cell phone while her boyfriend pounded away at her phrase-covered backside, chuckling loudly as bored, tired immigrant couples passed by, their carted children observing the mock sex with great interest. As the stacked piles of paper products shuddered with every thrust, I started to wish both of these guys would smother in a tragic two-ply accident. (Of course, their families would then sue Wal-Mart – successfully, likely – over the fact that the paper towel display didn’t carry a warning about the dangers of sexual activity in a retail environment.)

Lesson 4: Never buy paper goods at Wal-Mart.
Lesson 4.5: Never bring impressionable children to Wal-Mart.

By 9:15, I’d had enough. I felt dirty, I was angry at the asinine and grotesque behavior throughout the store, and I was tired of dodging products dumped on the floor/opened and abandoned. I had given up on buying underwear because, after what I’d seen in other departments, that was one item with which I wasn’t going to roll the dice. The last thing I needed to find out was that my undies had been pre-worn by some inquisitive shopper.

When I hit the check-out, I didn’t even want to interact with a clerk. I know I muttered “Get me the hell out of here” under my breath. More than once. I went to an automated line to avoid any need to exchange false pleasantries. That was the highlight of the evening, actually.

The final ridiculousness of the night was in walking out the door, where you have to present your receipt. The door guy pretends to study the receipt, doesn’t cast a single glance into the cart to verify anything, and then issues a red ink slash on your paperwork. Yes, indeedy, this cart has passed Wal-Mart muster!

Ugh.

If I can avoid it, I won’t be back for a very, very long time. I can always buy my undies online. Strosnider’s hardware is on the way home from work, if I manage to keep my houseplants alive long enough to need more buck-ninety-nine plant spikes, and Target has just about everything else. Except for my damn underwear. But, they even have diet cherry crack on tap up on the second floor now, so that mitigates the underwear issue.

As for me…

Lesson 5: Wal-Mart is a much bigger Hellmouth than the White Flint 7-11 ever could be.

I learned enough for one Friday night.

Every bad thing about America that you think, my fellow Americans – every bad thing your foreign friends and family think about this nation? It was all there at Wal-Mart. And it’s depressing as hell if this represents average America. Really, really depressing. If people are this freaking oblivious and grotesque and classless and ignorant… well, is it any wonder Bush got re-elected?

After writing about this, I think I need another shower…