The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for February 2008

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi – I loved This as a Kid

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Once upon a time I was a boy who lived in a house with a small Black and White television set. We didn’t have a remote or any sort of recording device. Yes, I know that it sounds primitive. Imagine a home without a VCR/DVD, TIVO, Cable/Satellite or home computer.

In the Jurassic era of television you didn’t have the luxury of renting movies or television shows. If you had to use the bathroom you did your best to hold it until the end of the show. If you were a sports fan and you didn’t want to miss the big game you had two choices. Throw a fit so that your parents/wife would let you stay home or bring your trusted portable radio with the white earbud to the party.

Back in those days the networks were run by mysterious, superbeings who would magically beam shows to your living room. Once a year you’d get the opportunity to make some popcorn and watch beloved shows like the Wizard of Oz or Rikki Tikki Tavi.

Unless you were The Shmata Queen in which case you were doomed to live beneath blackened skies and snow covered plains. Every day you’d pray that the river wouldn’t burst into flames and that the Browns wouldn’t lose because if they did it was your fault.

Some Stories are Hard To Relate To

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This one just kind of threw me. It was hard not to roll my eyes, shake my head and ask if this is for real. Let me share some excerpts.

“And we wonder why men are afraid to commit, when women like me are depicted as hormonally charged sperm-bandits interested in nothing beyond the urge to have a child.”

Bitter, bitter, bitter. Attitude impacts everything doesn’t it.

I don’t know of any woman my age (35) who hasn’t spent several years in love with a boyfriend, only to have to give up on the relationship after realising that children and commitment were not going to happen for ages, if at all.

Sorry, sounds to me like you and your friends have questionable judgment in people.

Notes From The Past Week of My Life

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I am beyond tired so this is going to be a short synopsis of the past week or so.

Here at The Shack we sent Mom and Dad Benimble off on a two month journey to the East Coast, Amsterdam and da Holy Land.

Somehow they forgot to pack the webcam so the prodigal son ran to their home and arranged for FedEx to ship it to their secret East Coast hideout.

Freaky FedEx forgot to stick it on a plane. Old Jack used his candlestick to light a fire beneath their butts to locate and ship package. FedEx promised a full refund. Little shipping store in strip mall is run by people who speak limited English and therefore had a terrible time understanding my request and FedEx’s confirmation of the refund.

It took a good 45 minutes, but I received my refund. They refused to give me cash and sent me out with a check.

There is nothing like being in the middle of a multiple car pileup on a freeway. It adds so much to your life.

This can only be enhanced by news that your great-aunt has died accompanied by news that your grandmother is in the hospital. Did I mention that being advised of this news while watching Shamu’s show is great fun.

More fun and excitement is generated when you continually receive The Phone Sex Surprise. One of these days this moron is going to learn how to dial the phone. There is an upside as the moron has promised to take me on a nice trip. The downside is that he intends to do some very nasty things to my body. Well, I suppose rough love is better than no love at all.

More on all this later. For now I’ll leave you with this and some links to some old posts you might want to read again, or for the first time.

Jack Versus The Rent-a-cop

Cruising At 34,000 Feet

Random WebSites You Might Enjoy

The Body Watcher

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My apologies for the sudden ending- kids came home and I had to wrap it up.

My line of work makes it hard to find a date. It is not because I have a job that makes me work too many hours or a crazy boss. It is because of what my job is. I work in a morgue as a body watcher. In simple terms that means that when the morgue receives a body I am given the task of cleaning and preparing it for burial.

More often than not it means watching the distraught loved ones of the deceased sob or curse over the corpse, sometimes both. Grief manifests itself in any number of ways. Sometimes I think that I should go back to school and learn how to be a shrink. Heaven knows that a lot of these Joe’s could use some serious psychological help.

As you can imagine many women are a bit uncomfortable calling a body watcher their boyfriend. I once had a girlfriend who was so unnerved by my job she would demand that I scrub my hands in water that was just short of scalding. I tried to make her feel more comfortable by telling her about the stiff who came in with a stiff…well you know.

Anyway, I tell her about the owner’s crazy wife. She used to be a doctor but gave it up to live on a farm on a mountaintop with her slacker boyfriend. After many years of living off donations from her children and heaven knows how many drugs she decides that she wants to come back to reality.

So she divorces the slacker, moves off the mountaintop and seduces Mr. Schlatter, the owner. At least I think that it is how it went, I am not really all that clear. All I know is that Mrs. Schlatter is not quite right. I can’t tell you how many stories there are of her antics inside the meat locker, (that is what we call the room with the bodies).

In this particular case Mrs. Schlatter couldn’t help but notice the condition of this body. It is almost as if she is spellbound. She waddles over to the side and proceeds to stare at it like it is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen. She she fully enraptured by it and for a moment I am afraid that she might try to touch it.

By this point in the story people are either laughing hysterically or squirming off the edge of their seats. Not my girl. She is horrified, so much so that she is enraged and demands that we file charges against her. You can’t imagine a moment that was more uncomfortable than this one.