October, though nearly over, is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It also happens to be National Gay & Lesbian History Month, Talk About Prescriptions Month, Celebrate Sun Dried Tomatoes Month, and Toilet Tank Repair Month. (At my house, it’s always Toilet Tank Repair Month.)

In fact, there are dozens of other noble (cough) causes of which you are supposed to be aware, right now: List. How does anyone sleep at night?

In the same spirit, I have a couple of additional causes you should be aware of, during November.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve entered the bathroom stall at work and found the seat of the toilet covered in coffee-laced urine. Now I’m not talking about some nasty, cracked, U-shaped piece of whitewashed plywood that’s connected by a rusty nail to a toilet bowl located in a shed behind a Kum ‘N’ Go in eastern Arizona. I’m talking about a toilet seat in an otherwise-immaculate corporate bathroom.

I don’t get it. It’s got !@$%! hinges for crying out loud. How hard is it for you to grab a piece of toilet paper and lift the seat? And if you do pee all over the seat, can’t you take a wad of toilet paper and wipe it up?

You know what? I don’t care how nice you are, or whether you adopt stray puppies by the dumpster-full. If you leave a mess on the toilet seat for next poor bastard to clean up or sit on, you are an evil person. You’re the sort of person who, if you were a corporate CEO, would dump toxic waste in a river. If you were the leader of a country, you’d invade Poland.

Therefore, I hereby declare November to be … drum roll, please … Don’t Leave Your Bodily Fluids On The Damn Toilet Seat Awareness Month. I’ve even designed a rubber bracelet for everyone to wear. It symbolizes how, if we band together, we can overcome. I hope you’ll choose to wear one. If I sell enough of them, I’ll buy a porta-potty for my cubicle.

But wait! There’s more!

I’m not a morning person. Somehow, Monday through Friday, my brain stem - the part of the brain which scientists say we inherited from our reptilian ancestors - drags my butt out of bed, drives to work, and gets me to the break room. If I get there, and there’s no coffee, it’s going to be a bad, bad day. It means that some selfish twit took the last few drops but thinks that his or her time is far too precious to make the next batch.

Ok. I’ll admit. I’ve done it once or twice. But both times I was being chased by corporate security, and I still grieve for what I was forced to do.

That’s why November is also Refill The Freakin’ Coffee Pot Month. You can show your support for this important cause by placing this ribbon on the back of your car, with pride.

It’s sad that we live in a world with evil. These causes may seem trivial, but they’re not. Remember that how a person behaves with the small things is how he or she will behave with the big things, only more so. Today it’s a dirty toilet seat, or an empty coffee pot. Tomorrow it may be your rivers, your country, even your life.

Thank you. And May God Bless America. I’ll be going, now.

——

Trackback!

I’m sitting in bed with my wife, blogging. My cat is eating my ice cream, which is one of the reasons I have intestinal parasites.

Speaking of parasites, I’m very put out by the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said this week that Israel should be wiped from the map.

I think we should all be encouraged by the unanimous and strong denunciations of this statement by the rest of the Islamic world, except that they haven’t said a damn thing.

Like most unpatriotic non-Republicans, I’m actually in favor of trying to get along with everyone, as long as they’re interested in doing the same. But this is over the top. The Muslim world is really starting to piss me off. Oh, I know, the Christian world has done many terrible thing over the years. But we’ve also done a lot of good, too. We’ve brought universities, hospitals and Brittany Spears to other parts of the world for hundreds of years. Name one good thing that Muslims have given the rest of the world. Other than our system of numbers. And harem pants.

All I know is that the blogging community won’t sit quietly. Oh no. We will blog about this. We will say many nasty things about Mr. Ahmadiwhatever and his stupid backwards country. And they will be very, very sorry.

if ($support_bush) { set SENSE_OF_HUMOR on }

According to a top-secret plan being developed by the Bush administration, high ranking White House staffers intend to infiltrate al Qaeda in the hopes of leaking Osama bin Laden’s precise location to the press… “After all, leaking is the one thing we’re really good at.”

Read more …

With all the damage and pain caused in the Southeast part of the country by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, it’s easy to forget that severe weather sometimes strikes the West Coast, too.

The photo below shows the terrible damage to my parents’ home in San Diego after a storm passed through the area on Sunday. My parents are ok, but it will be a while before life is “back to normal.”

(Ok. You got me. This was a joke I got in my email last year.)

I’ve started searching for other blogs, to see what’s out there. It’s incredible, really. Everyone has a blog. There are blogs about everything, including blogging. As with everything else I do, I feel like I’ve arrived rather late to the game. I just hope there’s still some beer and peanuts left.

Here’s the funniest one I’ve found, so far: SamanthaBurns.

The majority seem to be right-wing political blogs. Why is that? Blogs, Talk Radio, Ham Radio …. Congress …. The White House …. uh oh ….

We live in an age of jaded cynicism. Our Heros have been exposed as frauds, their flaws unearthed. We have no one we can aspire to be like, anymore. And so I present to you a new Hero, one whose achievement is so singular, so grand, that his legend will surely survive. I present to you …. Sooty!

Thanks to GadgetryBlog for brining this hero to our attention.

I turned 30, last month. It was my first time.

Thirty seems more significant than all my past age milestones. Sure, 16 was big, because I finally had a license to drive home the fact that my parents wouldn’t let me drive. And at 18, of course, playing with matches became a felony. That was hard. But at 30, I think I have finally lived long enough to have a little perspective on life.

I’ve realized that age makes you boring. When I was 23 I was deep. I wrote poetry with no punctuation about loneliness and had soul-searching conversations in smoky coffee shops about the human spirit and what it would take to change the world.

Now, at 30, I spend my time wondering why the sprinkler system keeps breaking. I write emails with bad punctuation about application deployments and have mind-numbing conversations in brightly-lit conference rooms about human resources and what it would take to change our processes.

This morning, I’m thinking about the flu. Scientists warn that when the Asian “Bird Flu” mutates and gains the ability to jump from human to human easily, we would probably be looking at a pandemic like the “Spanish Flu” of 1918. According to this Standford site, 675,000 Americans died. According to US Census estimates, that is the only year–in our history–when the US population decreased. In 1918 the US population was roughly 100 million. Today it is roughly 300 million. So, with today’s numbers, the flu would have killed roughly 1.8 million people. An AP article published by wired.com confirms this estimate.

The US is pretty spoiled, now, when it comes to disasters. The big San Francisco earthquake of 1989 killed 67 people. Hurricane Katrina killed 1000 people. The September 11 attacks killed 3000 people. Our War in Iraq has so far cost the lives of 2000 soldiers. The rest of the developed world is much the same. The recent terrorist bombings in England and Spain have together killed roughly 300, for example.

I’m not saying these deaths aren’t tragic, but we are getting off easy. The rest of the world copes with much worse, all the time. This weekend’s earthquake in Pakistan killed more than 20,000. Last year’s Indonesian tsunami killed almost 300,000, it is now believed. Since the US invasion of Iraq, between 20,000 and 100,000 Iraqis have died violently, depending on the source.

We don’t have the slightest idea what that’s like, here. So, imagine an epidemic in the US that strikes every state, city, town and kills 1.8 million people. One in four people get sick. One in 166 die.

Now, consider the fact that it’s probably going to happen in the next three years.

Have a nice day.

Today is not a good day. To begin with, there was the news about Tom and Katie. I had been hoping desperately that Katie would wake up and smell the prozac and run like hell. But now that crazy bastard has got her knocked up.

So borrowing a notion from Douglas Adams, Tom Cruise is my first official pick for the “List Of People Who’ll Be Up Against The Wall When The Revolution Comes.” That’s right, folks: when the glorious “People’s SpoonFighter Revolutionary Army” marches to victory, Tom will be blindfolded and smoking his last cigarette.

(The preceding statement was for entertainment purposes only and should not be construed as an endorsement of violence, treason, or tobacco products.)

After such a sad morning, I was hoping that lunch be a turn-around point. I was sorely disappointed. What looked like a delicious chicken and vegetable chinese stir-fry turned out to be something infected with fake crab meat. And the fortune cookie sucked, too. I had been quite fond of Mr. Lee, but now I’m adding his name to the “List Of People Who’ll Be Up Against The Wall When The Revolution Comes.”

(The preceding statement was for entertainment purposes only and should not be construed as an endorsement of violence, treason, or fake shellfish products.)

All I can say is this: Things had better improve by this afternoon, or the List is going to get longer. Don’t piss me off.

It’s Wednesday and I’m at the office. About to dive into a meeting. Wondering what to write about next. Tired, because after going to bed early, my evil brain decided it really needed to figure out how two spaceships travelling away in the opposite direction from the same

departure point at the speed of light would still only be moving away from each other at the speed of light and what it would look like to a third party observing from a coffee shop suspended in interstellar space across the street from the departure point. Evil, evil brain.