I just walked by a clothing store that marketed their products with an alleged Johnny Cash quote saying “Life is tough so you gotta be rough“.

Whaddya mean “Life is tough so you gotta be rough”? Of course!

Is it just me or is that a little too obvious, no brainer and self-explanatory to pass for wisdom?

If not, I have a few more good ones at the same level:

“It’s cold out there, so you better put warm clothes on”

“When approaching a lion, don’t rub yourself in meat and crawl on all fours making wildebeast sounds.”

“It’s a tall building, so you shouldn’t be jumping off it.”

The latest Men’s Health is apparently a fitness issue. Yes we get it, you’re about keeping the man fit. Is that your journalistic angle, stating the obvious?

I mean it’s like:
Financial Times - Money special
Playboy - Chick issue
Scientific American - Knowledge special

I totally get that veggies think I’m doing a bad thing when I eat animals, and from many rational viewpoints they’re right. What drives me nuts though is when they add the word “dead“, just to further make me out to be a bad person.

Well, of course it’s dead! I’m not gonna eat the poor writhing, screaming creature alive!

You might as well accuse me of eating dead, depressed, disgruntled, politically marginalized, socially repressed, financially disadvantaged…dead animals.

This holiday season I’m gonna get a live Christmas turkey, nail it to the cutting board and start carving it up while it in vain gobbles for it’s life. And then I’m gonna grab the nearest veggie and with a compassionate smile calmly say “We’ll at least I’m not eating a dead turkey…“

When they finally release the iPhone where I live, it’s out of stock within a few days, and just being gone over the weekend made me miss the whole thing.

And why do loyal Apple customers such as myself get lumped in every Tom, Dick and Harry, that have never bought an Apple product in their life and suddenly want the iPhone with the big touch screen?

There should be a loyal customer program from Apple and any subsidiary selling their products, giving people like me the red carpet treatment, and first dibs on the iPhone!

Or…the store clerk simply asks a question about Apple to all iPhone customers. If they get it right, they get their iPhone.
If they mess up, they get slapped and have to go to the back of the line.

- Who’s greater, God or Steve Jobs?
- Err…Steve Jobs?
- Trick question - Steve Jobs IS God! *slap* Back of the line!

The statement at the end of e-mails Consider the environment before printing this e-mail has is now being rephrased as Please don’t print this e-mail unless you really need to! (Like I need another exclamation mark in my life…)

Well, exactly how do you define really need to?

If I don’t really need it, I won’t really print it.

One thing I will not do is engage in the internal debate of my personal and professional short and long-term needs of printing this e-mail versus any and all real  and potential negative consequences of doing so.

And if I really really need it? Rest assured, I will really really print it!

And one more thing: This ridiculous message is not in text but as an attached image! I would simply say: Don’t clutter my inbox with attached images unless you really need to!!!

Why do people do this? Spend gobs of cash on sudden journeys around the globe, to come to someone’s funeral? Who benefits from this? Certainly not the dead person.

You better not spend a lot of money on coming to my funeral. If you’re too far away to drive - stay there!

I wanna see my loved ones while I’m alive. Not when I’m dead! Your visit is of no joy or consequence to me when I’m dead.

I’ll tell you what, cross an ocean to come see me while I’m still around, and you’ll get a no-presence-required-at-funeral card from me. Honest!

When watching TV it’s somewhat acceptable to pay less attention. It is after all a machine of perpetual unintellectial superficial - imagined or real - entertainment.

When watching a rented video you paid for it’s stupid. You wanna pay and then not enjoy it? Well, that’s your prerogative, since it’s in the privacy of your own home.

 When doing it in a movie theater - it’s infuriating! One of the few offenses to which I find capital punishment more than called for. Unfortunately most legal systems don’t share my view…

My big problem with people not paying attention to the movies they’re watching is not they’re own waste of time. You know I don’t care about that! But the failure to follow the plot inevitably leads to – questions! Lots of stupid questions, none of which would ever had arisen, had they been paying a minimum of attention.

 And then they expect that the person next to them – who may or may not have been paying attention themselves – to answer these questions.

Is he the bad guy?

Why did he kill his wife?

Is that his wife?

Is that Robert Deniro? Or is it Robin Williams? (This is in the final phase of a long sad medical history of not paying attention to movies.)

Pink is the new black, hetero is the new homo, humble is the new smug, right is the new left, et cetera.

Really? Let me tell you something: Shut up is the new eloquent!

Sony announced a while ago that they weren’t going to allow pornography to be distributed on blueray.
What’s up with that? Is it the position they’ve taken to defend the last moral highground? No porn i hi-res?

OK, you can watch the blind donkey molest the paraplegic nun, but you CANNOT watch in i hi-res! Unlike you, the good people at Sony have morals.

I’m out shopping and I see this white shirt with an Easy Iron sticker on it.

I’m curious as to if this means that the shirt is easy to iron or that it needs no ironing.

I’m sincerely hoping that it, like many shirts I own, is a case of non-iron. Otherwise there’s not much point is there?

I mean a non-iron shirt you just wash, shake and hang to dry on a hanger. Very practical. A lovable garment.

An easy-iron shirt? Well I still need to bring out and unfold my damn ironing board, refill the friggin iron, plug it in and wait for it to heat up. Who the hell gives a damn if it’s easy to iron or not? By the time I’m ready to iron I’m already frustrated!

There is iron and non-iron. Anything in between is completely pointless!

So I kindly ask the store clerk if this Easy Iron sticker means non-iron or just easy-iron? The poor thing doesn’t know, so she has to ask the store manager. So she asks him:

-The Easy Iron shirt. Is it easy to iron or doesn’t it need ironing?

He replies:

-The Easy Iron shirts are easy to iron.

That is the exact moment I realize that any further reasoning is futile. The combined intellect of these two people cannot outdo on the infinite wisdom of a two-word sticker.

I politely hang the shirt back where I found it. And then… iron right out the door…