My plan for ukulele-porn driven world peace will not be undermined by that demon girl Hannah Montana and her didgeridoo-playing followers

Lately I have found myself obsessed with ukuleles. I watch you tube videos of indie ukulele covers over and over again. It's almost like a porn addiction because I am both secretive and ashamed of my inability to look away. Except it's not because ukuleles are sweet and pure and porn is rarely sweet and pure. In fact, I really think the porn industry should look into some ukulele soundtracks to clean up their smut factories. I really think they would be able to capture a wider market share. I would totally watch more porn if they classed it up a bit like this.



In fact, I am positive that there would be world peace if it was mandated that all songs be performed on ukuleles.



I wish this dude was my weird, red hat wearing french grandfather who would sing me songs of the sea on his ukulele and make delicious pastries for us to share.



Even Disney who, despite being the harborer of the anti-Christ and the catalyst for the ensuing apocalypse, is always at the forefront of feel-good brand association has jumped on the ukulele bandwagon.

There is even a rockstar ukulele available.

The one instrument that I think is the opposite of the ukulele and therefore the most likely instrument to spur war would be the Australian didgeridoo. Because even though it has a cool name, it kind of separates itself from the other instruments and acts all better than everyone else just because it is made out of bamboo hollowed out by termites. It's an instrument snob. We didn't want you to join our symphony anyway you smug son of a bitch! It also sounds kind of scary and it used to be that only men could play it and women had to play the lame-ass clapsticks, second only to the ridiculous triangle in lameness. So it's sexist too. It's basically the instrument equivalent of Jude Law. So fuck the didgeridoo and it's attempts to undo my mission of instrument based world peace.

*Update: I can't stop watching! Just look at the people playing the tiny little guitars with their big hands! They look like music loving giants! I wonder if regular sized guitars WOULD sound like a ukulele to giants? That would be totally awesome. I need to find a giant and make them play a ukulele because that would just set me over the freaking edge. I feel like rolling around on the floor and squealing at the very thought!

I might be having a seizure.

*Update 2: I really like nickels.

Greg Hanson ruined the Superbowl and trades slaves with Ragnor the Viking

So before the Superbowl I started writing this post about the time my super cool brother Keith and I went to a Notre Dame bowl game in Jacksonville and got chased down some dirt road by couple of homeless people. It was totally funny too. I was going on about how I kept yelling at Keith that I was sure the homeless people were going to stick us with needles and how we couldn't remember where we parked the car because we left it at some abandoned carpet factory or something. Yeah, totally awesome. Well I let too much time pass and now what could have been a relevant post relating to a current event (i.e. the Superbowl) sounds lame and random. In it's place I will tell you about my arch enemy, Greg Hanson, of Greg Hanson & The Backroads, and how we came to be pitted against one another. It is not random at all.

My husband and I moved into our current place in September of 2007 and shortly after set up a new home phone line. Almost immediately we began getting calls for a Greg Hanson. At first it was just one or two a day. "Is Greg Hanson there?" We got off with an easy "you have the wrong number." However after about a month the calls started getting more and more numerous and got kinda shady. "Is Greg Hanson there? Well when was the last time you saw him?" We were like "We don't know the dude, you have the wrong number."

A few months into it we started getting close to 20 calls a day from various flooring dealerships asking for, you guessed it, that rat bastard Greg Hanson. When we asked to be removed from the list the people would tell us that someone named Greg Hanson recently went to a flooring expo and put his name and number in the main box to be contacted by every flooring vendor in the tri-state area. Motherfucker.

A couple of months and hundreds of calls later the flooring assholes stopped calling. Yes, I know we could have simply changed our number, but I wasn't going to let these flooring jerks and the evil Greg Hanson determine my fucking destiny. I had stood up against my tormentors and had emerged victorious. Or so I thought....

It was at this point that we started getting downright harassing phone calls. They would call and ask for Greg Hanson of course, and when I told them they had the wrong number they would say things like "Are you sure you don't know Greg Hanson? This isn't Greg Hanson's mother?" And I would be like "no, I wasn't lying the first time, YOU HAVE THE WRONG GODDAMNED NUMBER!" To which I received a reply like"We know this is you Mrs. Hanson, we need to talk to Greg now." I couldn't believe it. I said "listen you fucking bitch, I'm only 30 26 years old. Any kid I could have would not be old enough to be getting phone calls from whatever gestapo you represent. I am not Greg Hanson, I am not Greg Hanson's mother, I have no idea who Greg Hanson is but I swear to you and to Jesus Fucking Christ that if I ever meet that son of a bitch Greg Hanson, harassing phone calls from little 'I only finished the 11th grade' bitches like you are going to be the least of his problems! Now stop calling!"

After this I decided to make it my personal mission to find this Greg Hanson and take him down personally. I figured there must be some kind of reward for his head, and at the very least I could stop cursing people out on the phone in front of company. My first stop was Google of course. Google that I love with every inch of my Greg Hanson hating being.

The first few results were promising, although somewhat intimidating. Dr. Greg Hanson is the US Senate’s first Chief Information Officer. Well I'm not going to fuck with anyone in charge of my information. I once screamed at a lady at the drivers license place and subsequently failed my vision test seven times in a row despite not needing glasses. Dr. Greg was out.

The next candidate for my plan of vengeance was Greg "Digger" Hanson, a Hollywood stuntman who has worked on such film gems as "Good Luck Chuck" and "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed." He seemed like a possible match since those films were huge flops and probably left him without much money to pay off his creditors, but then I realized that stuntmen are typically testosterone fueled idiots and would not need to hide behind a wrong number if he had done someone wrong. He would accept, no seek the confrontation that would arise from him being a deadbeat and not paying his bills. Again I was left without a target for my rage.

The third Greg Hanson I found was a lawyer in Minnesota no less. Who could be more likely to receive a bunch of pissed off phone calls than a lawyer with cheated clients? I felt like I had found my man and began leaving him threatening messages in earnest. "Greg Hanson, attorney at law! After almost 2 years of harassing phone calls from all the people you have pissed of, you leave me no choice but to challenge your ass to a duel. If this is THE Greg Hanson, meet me by the Spoonbridge with the giant cherry on it, downtown Minneapolis, Friday at 9 o'clock! Don't fuck with me Hanson!!!"

That Friday I got to the Spoonbridge early so I could set up a trap. I know all lawyers like Life Savers candies so I set a trail leading to a spike pit that I dug that morning. I sat in wait for what seemed like hours. By 12:30 I knew Hanson wasn't showing. I figured I had the wrong Greg Hanson because I explicitly told him that if it was THE Greg Hanson, he'd better be there. I went home and sent him a letter stating that I must have the wrong guy. I even included some of the Life Savers (I wiped off most of the dirt first) as a peace offering. I didn't hear back from him, but I think he forgives me.

The only possible Greg Hanson left was a country singer. Greg Hanson of Greg Hanson & The Backroads. At first glance this looks like your normal average country band. Until you get to their drummer.

WTF? This dude is no country band drummer! He's no drummer at all. He looks like a 1989 IBM programmer with bad, photoshopped long "drummer" hair.

It all began to make sense. This "band" is obviously a cover for some seriously dark, underground shit. His clearly phony band members, his cliche list of favorites, (seriously, your favorite way to relax is to "Ride the 4-wheeler or horse through the pastures on parent's farm near Wilmot." How fucking naive do you think I am Greg Hanson?!?) along with his association of LeRoy VanDyke, a known fast-talking auctioneer leads me to believe this Greg Hanson is running some kind sick, illegal auction. Maybe even a human slave trade auction. Yeah, that's probably it. Well I'm on to you, you sick fuck Greg Hanson. I will bring down your dirty human slave trade if it's the last thing I ever do! I brought down my Girl Scout troop leader in the third grade for skimming the top of the cookie sales, don't think I can't do the same to you!

And for any of you that doubt me, here is the proof. A picture of Greg Hanson with Ragnor the Viking, who is the Minnesota Vikings mascot, and also suspected of being a trader of humans.

*Update- The date stamp on my blog is clearly fucked up because if I had posted this before the Superbowl took place it would not make any sense. Unless I am traveling through time without my knowledge which totally makes sense because I never know what day it is and frequently find unexplained bruises on my body. That could also be explained by all the drinking.

My milkshake... is cleaner than yours

It may surprise you to know that I have a few quirks. One of these quirks is that while grocery shopping I cannot take the most forward sitting product on the shelf. I always take the one right behind it, preferably without touching the first product. I do this, obviously, because the first product on the shelf is dirty and those further back are fresher and less likely to have been touched by the heathens. If there is only one product left on the shelf I just refuse to buy it.

The other day I saw something that shook me to the core. While shopping at my local Target, about to pick up some milk, I saw a woman take out three gallons of milk, put one in her shopping cart, and then put the other two back. She didn't even put them back in the right order! The dirty milk was now the second milk on the shelf, and the fresher milk was in front!

Well first of all, fuck this bitch. She obviously has the same kind of sickness as me, really even more of a sickness because she had to take the third goddamn milk on the shelf (what kind of sick person needs the third milk back? A total sicko that's who.), and yet she didn't have the common courtesy to put the milk containers back in the correct order? She obviously doesn't know what she is messing with. You go screwing with the order of things like the dirty milk/clean milk paradigm and you are just asking for fucking anarchy. Good job Lady, you just put us all in mortal peril. She probably doesn't even use a paper towel to open the door in a public bathroom. Amateur.

So, obviously I was in distress by this milk situation. It made me realize that I really cannot rely on the fact that the second milk back will be the clean one. I really was an embarrassment to the vigilance of germ-watchers everywhere. Sloppy bitch in Target had made that crystal clear to me. I realized then, that the only way to be safe would be to go four milks back because no way is anyone sick diligent enough to go back that far. The problem with my new plan was that it's not always easy to reach four products back to get something without taking the other three out first. So I had to take the first three milks out, set them on the floor, and then grab my fourth, assumed clean milk.

Most days that would have been the end to the story. I would have taken the fourth milk, put the other three back and been on my merry way to the cookie aisle. However, on this day the fourth milk back had a smudge on the bottle. Well of course I can't buy the one with a smudge, that milk has obviously been through some shit. Unfortunately there wasn't a fifth milk on that row, which is total bullshit. Obviously Target was trying to slip their smudge-milk by on some poor unsuspecting fool. Well not on my watch Target! I left the smudge milk on the shelf (but turned backwards which is the universal signal for "don't buy this! It's yuck!"), but didn't put the other three milk containers back yet because, in an emergency, if all the other bottles failed their inspections, I could buy the third milk and just wipe it down with Clorox wipes once I got home.

I bent down and began removing the first third containers of milk from the second row and set them down (in order of course since I have respect for germ hierarchy.) I was in luck and the fourth milk on the shelf was smudge free and otherwise unremarkable. So I lifted it out and turned to put it in my cart, but somehow, before I could deposit my milk safely into the cart, it slipped out of my hands, crashed to the floor, and burst open in a white blast of clean milk goodness. At that moment a Target employee walked by and found me standing there in a huge puddle, surrounded by six full gallons of milk. Everyone was staring at me like I was the crazy one. I briefly contemplated stuffing a bag of chips under my shirt and going with a "my water broke" story, but I was afraid everyone would think I was totally weird for having white uterus juice and might take me to some scary medical research facility where they would do scientific tests on me and stuff... so I decided to suck it up and go with the truth. I explained that I was just trying to get a clean milk but most of their milk was dirty, so I had to keep testing them and that obviously it was their shoddy milk container craftsmanship that was the problem here and not me.

The Target guy didn't seem that sorry and I was starting to panic, so left with no choice, I grabbed the soggy third milk container and headed off to the disinfectant aisle leaving a milky trail behind me. On the way I gave the lady who started this whole mess a pointed look and held up my dripping container so she could see what havoc she had caused. She just looked away but I could tell she knew what she'd done and that from then on she would follow the rules like a normal person. Walking away I kind of felt like a superhero or something, like I'd really made a difference and that the world would be a cleaner, less germ-infested place because of me.

I'm going to use the headless bodies as diversity paperweights

There is a battle of wills going on in my office. Our office Christmas tree is still set up in the middle of the office an no one wants to be the one to take it down. Each day the effort to avoid looking at it, and therefore be designated as the one to take it down, gets more and more difficult. Each of us has devised creative methods to appear busy or engrossed in something else as we walk by it. None of us acknowledge that we are avoiding it. We all act like it's perfectly normal to still have the undecorated tree up on January 20th.

Up until last week I had been trying out different strategies to avoid being the one to take it down. I kept up a pathetic looking limp for two weeks just to shirk it. Another successful method of mine was to crazily mutter to myself while shuffling a stack of papers around as I walked past the tree. If anyone talked to me I would just say something like "How do they expect me to get 700 mules to Arkansas by Friday? Huh? You tell me!" and then walk away, twitching my head to one side.

Last week I grew tired of the charade so I devised a strategy that would allow us to keep the tree up for another few months at least. I figured I could hang a bunch of Martin Luther King figurines from the tree and make it a Diversity tree. What racist asshole decided that Martin Luther King day didn't deserve a tree anyway? Like Christmas is so superior? I realized that I must make a Diversity Tree to stick it to The Man! Equal Tree rights for all, motherfuckers!

So I bought some MLK bobble heads online and tried to hang them from the tree, but they were too heavy so I pulled their heads off and just hung those up with some twine. I was pretty happy with it and felt like not only had I finally brought justice to a tragically under-decorated holiday, I'd also allowed for an extended period of laziness by giving us a reason not to take down the tree. This is why I was totally surprised when people started freaking out. They were like "you can't just hang decapitated Martin Luther King heads off of a tree with pieces of rope! Don't you know how that looks?" And I was like "Hell yeah I do, it looks like a kick-ass Diversity Tree!" because it totally did. They kept going on and on about how bad it looked, and how I was celebrating the practice of lynching, all the while completely ignoring my festive 'Diversity! Yeah!' tree topper.

As usual people refuse to see my vision.

Lesson learned? Don't die in Target without the proper undergarments

I used to work at Target. One day a lady was shopping there and she just toppled over and died. They called over our walkie talkies for anyone with CPR experience to meet them over in the toy department where she collapsed. That is something they don't talk to you about when giving CPR training, the fact that you will most likely be giving CPR to some yucky old dead person and not some young, perfectly normal smelling alive person. No way was I going near that lady's mouth.

I already was working a plan in my head if no one volunteered and then they somehow figured out that I was CPR certified. I planned to tell them that that woman looked just like my grandma's sister and I was too shocked and grief ridden to remember that I knew CPR. I figured it would be safer to say my grandmother's sister and not my actual grandmother because they could probably research that shit and find out what my grandmother looked like. I didn't think their research would go deep enough to reveal that my grandmother was an identical twin because usually people who do research like this are lazy and will only go with whatever the first Google result is. The fact that my grandmother is a twin would have to be at least 2-3 links down on the page so I figured I was safe. I probably could have said that she looked like my friend's grandmother or something because no way would they have time to search for all of their grandmas online too, but I was too freaked out by the dead lady, and the fact that I might have to touch her to think too thoroughly about the subject.

It turned out that lots of people in our store knew CPR, or were at least pretending they did so they could get a closer look at the lady so I was safe. Some red-haired kid gave her CPR but it was too late. The paramedics put her on a stretcher and started wheeling her through the store towards the exit. Well I don't know what kind of CPR that red-haired kid was taught but the lady's shirt was open and her old dead boob was totally hanging out.

It was traumatizing on so many levels. One had to deal with the evidence of their own eventual demise while at the same time trying to forget the image of what their boobs would look like someday. It wasn't pretty.

Anyway, the other day I was wandering through the Target toy aisles looking for a gift for our niece when I ran across something that made me wonder what that old lady saw that day that could have pushed her over the edge. This:






At first glance it might appear innocent. Just some cute dollhouse furniture for your little one to play with. A sweet young child and her loyal pup playing in the bathroom. You might take a second look though and notice this:




That sweet pup is clearly rubbing his junk. And if that wasn't bad enough, look at what he is looking at while rubbing it.




The toddler in the bathtub! I always suspected Target was into some sick shit, I just never knew how deep.

Who would buy this crap for their child? I don't know but I bought it for myself. $15.99 and worth every hilarious, sick penny. I was so proud of my purchase that I brought it into work to show my coworkers how funny it was. They were like "yeah... that's funny. A dog in the bathroom." And I said "is that all you see? Didn't you notice that the dog is pleasuring itself?" They didn't see it and instead gave each other looks like I was the perverted one. I yelled "I'm not making this up! One time this old lady just dropped dead and had to be pushed through Target with her old, wrinkled, dead boob hanging out and she totally could have been looking at this toy to buy for her sick grandkid and it scared her literally to death! How do you think she felt?!?"

They haven't talked to me since then but I think that is because they feel bad about the old lady and they realize they were being insensitive.