Just to change things up a little bit and do my part to make the world a more confusing place, I’m a gonna depart from my regular format for the night and just put up a few random thoughts and observations which will hopefully mask the fact that its late and I’m not thinking coherently enough to write a real blog tonight.  Be forewarned however, for what you are about to read below is like, pure 200 proof Benthink.  So you might want to have a few beers first lest any of it make sense to you.

            Suppose you happened to be a convicted felon, and it came to pass that improbably enough, you were having brunch with the governor.   Suppose then also that after this repast, you happened to summon forth a mighty belch, and said, “Pardon me.”  And then, if the governor said “Sure” would that mean you were free to go?

            The other day I passed an Ethiopian restaurant.  At first I thought it was some sort of a gag, like a Chinese Big & Tall, or a French Bed, Bath, & Beyond.  But then the altogether terrible thought occurred to me that it might be legit.  That’s awful though, cause they already don’t have any food over there, what are they doing sending what food they’ve got over here where it might as well rain éclairs every day (I love Microsoft Word, it automatically put that little homeless apostrophe over the E in eclair even though I didn't care enough to add one in manually)(Hey, it didn't do it that time, what gives?)?  It also means they probably sent one of their few remaining Ethiopian chefs over here too, and that’s just not cool.  That’d be like if we rounded up all the white guys with dancing ability in America and then sent all five of them to somewhere where everybody can dance already, like, um, Djibouti, which though the fact is little known here in the states is generally known over in the Middle East as The Funkytown of the Gulf of Aden.

            When you go to Panera, they always ask you your name so when your sandwich is ready they can just call you and you can go up and get it.  But that sucks, cause whenever I go with my parents, my dad orders, and his name is Bob.  And every time we’re eating there, it’s like we’ve chosen to go on the same night as the Great Festival of a Thousand Bobs, so when they call him, like, fifty other guys named Bob come running too.  That’s why whenever you go to Panera, you ought to come up with some awesome and original name, like Abominus the Desecrator.  If there’s more than one of those in the restaurant, you probably don’t want to meet the other one.  Or, when you go up say that you’re name is Bob Dole, and that way when they call you up, everyone else will be all, “Huh?! Bob Dole?! In Panera?!” and they’ll be all looking around and stuff, and maybe you’ll even get some Bob Dole groupies (of which there are many).

            People always ask their friends, “Would you take a bullet for me?”  But that’s totally lame, cause you’re kinda guilting them into it with a question like that.  Instead, how about asking, “Would you take a mullet for me?”  No one’s gonna lie on that one, and then you’ll know who all you’re true friends are.  Also, if a mullet-wielding madman ever starts running towards you, you can just be like, “Hey Abominus the Desecrator, time to make good on your promise!” and then throw him to the mullet fiend (also, The Mullet-Wielding Madmen would make a somewhat unwieldy name for a band, so I’m gonna suggest it for a large, multinational corporation instead).

            You know that commercial where there’s that random Indian standing by the highway and someone drives by and throws a potato chip bag out the window and he cries?  Maybe it’s not about the environment at all.  I think what that Indian is probably thinking is more along the lines of this:

Hey, here comes another car!  Maybe this one will pick me up and drive me to Atlantic City!  Maybe I shouldn’t have just worn a loincloth if I’d known I was gonna be thumbing a ride all the way there.  Nuts, he’s not gonna stop!  Ooh, what’s this?  He’s throwing something out the window for me!  It’s a bag!  Man, I hope it’s full of Doritos, I could really go for some Doritos right now.  What the?!  It’s empty!  What kind of jerk tempts a big loincloth-wearing Indian with Doritos like that?  Damn, now I’m all sad.

Indians love Doritos.

I spend a lot of time in hardware stores.  And if I stopped right there, that would be the least thought, ever.  Fortunately there’s more.  You see, they sell a lot of goggles and various other eye protectors there at said hardware emporium, and all the snazzy futuristic-looking ones have pictures on them of all these attractive young people standing outside, mostly not doing anything that should require fashionable yet dependable eye defense, though there’s always one guy welding Batarangs just so you don’t forget what the goggles are for.  “I’m certainly glad I’ve got these trendy goggles to protect my eyes as I protect the city from evildoers!”  he seems to say.  Anyway, further on down the isle they’ve always got the discount goggles, that don’t make you look like the Matrix, they make you look like Mr. Flugelman, the Shop teacher from your middle school.  But instead of trying to play it off and put cool-looking people on the box, they always just go ahead and find the biggest, dorkiest-looking, whitest white guy ever and put a picture of him riding his lawnmower and looking like the least cool thing ever to walk the face of the Earth.  “Look at me!  I’m a big white guy riding a lawnmower and wearing goggles just in case it decides to shoot sparks at my face!  I only paid a buck fifty for these!  Gorp, gorp, gorp!”  Honestly, it’s just sad.

You know how we call that thing where everybody gets out of the car and runs around it before taking a seat other than their original one a Chinese fire drill?  I’ll bet that in China they just call that a fire drill.  And you know that thing where they set off the fire alarm on purpose so everyone can practice leaving the building in a safe and orderly fashion to escape the theoretical fire?  I’ll bet they call that an American fire drill.

If you’re ever in the restroom at Panera or something and there’s some other guy in there talking on the phone like he’s such a big powerful business executive that he can’t possibly hang up while he takes a leak, don’t just sit there and rage in idleness.  Rather, wait until you’re sure that there’s no one else around, and then unlock your mighty word-horde and shout, “Thunder, Thunder, Thundercrap! Hoooo!!”  and then cut loose with a Force 10 Pantsbuster or a reasonable approximation thereof.  Depending on who he’s talking to, you’ll probably get him fired, or possibly dumped (which would be additionally funny, owing to the multiple possible meanings of the word “dump”).

No matter who is in the car next to you, it is never a good idea to rawk out to Brittany Spears at a stoplight with your windows down and the bass crankin’.  Especially if the person in the car next to you happens to be the Pope or Dick Cheney.  Unless it's both of them together, and they're on some kind of a Footloose and Fancy Free partying montage where they go into town and chase pigeons in the fountain and then they go try on lots of funny hats while some Cindy Lauper song plays in the background.  That would be kind of cool.

Whenever I go to the post office, they always have all these ads up for postage stamps.  But’s that’s retarded, cause you don’t have a choice about it anyway.  “Mailing a letter?  Why not try Stamps?  It’s just ridiculous.  Have people found another way to convey letters and other physical objects to distant locales that I’m just not aware of?  Are we all using owls now?  Did somebody invent a transporter and decide to use it solely to convey their personal correspondence and occasional cable bill around?  If the post office didn’t tell people, would they just start driving everywhere that they wanted to send a letter to?  “Crap, it’s time to send Aunt Clarice her birthday card again, and she lives all the way out in Saskatchewan!  I wish there were somebody else who could take it there for me for ¢37!  What’s that you say?  Stamps?  How very novel, is this a new thing they’re trying?  Oh.  My bad.”