Random As Rhyme

I love this dude and I  love what the internet has done to him.

Fuck the Oakland A’s the suck donkey dick!

WTF His mom put him in the oven!?

I got the idea today to do something very nerdy today and that is google myself. I hear celebrities do it all the time and I think i am famous so I gave it a whirl with a few different terms/variations of my name and location and interests. Here are the results:

Preface
I don’t google “Dave Thomas” because of these dudes who are actual celebrities. RIP Wendys Dave.

Search:  “Dave Thomas Mississauga”

Text: My resume – Searching for “Dave Thomas Mississauga” this is the third ranked item and relevant to me.

Image: Bloodbath bowl Jam whip

This is the first result that comes up via images and is me, sweet! I didn’t pull this to pedals however, not so sweet.

Search: “David Thomas Mississauga“

Text:This returns my resume again as the 10th result.

Image: No images returned within the first 5 pages of me but this dude sort of looks like me (an older me perhaps), but he is wanted by the Peel Police so this is not a good thing!

Search:”David Thomas BMX”

Text: elicitconcepts : the freelance mind of lyndsey mcdonald :: blog » BMX – Links over to my gfs blog so this is fairly relevant my first whip video is on this page.

Image: No images of me withing the first 5 pages again but this is rad

Search: “Dave Thomas BMX”
Text: Dave Thomas Bmx // BlogCatalog Topic // BlogCatalog – My Blog catalog entry is the first result and it’s 100% relevant, I guess their service is a valuable one

Image: Hot bars from Muskoka woods

This image is the first result and 100% relevant to yours truly.

All in all this wasn’t really that exciting which means I have to put more interesting things of myself on the internet. However one interesting thing was that nothing from facebook showed up… is facebook not searchable?

Before a lot of people come down on me for writing this blog I think I should explain a few things right off the bat. 1. I love animals, I have 2 cats and have nothing against dogs. 2. I am probably grossly misinformed, everything I know about the situation has come in 30 second chunks from breakfast TV or the radio, really if I had a reputable blog I would do some more research 3. I enjoy playing Devils Advocate. If you can accept these 3 facts then please click forward into this post. If not then this is not for you.

Now that all that is out of the way on to business, as we all know Mike Vick is not very smart and while enjoying an illustrious and promising football career for reasons known only to him he was also heavy into dog fighting. Which is inhumane and illegal. He got thrown into jail and served his debt to society and was also rehabilitated. That is one of the purposes of of jail time is it not? To repay your debt to society, be punished, and come out rehabilitated?

If the above are indeed the reasons why someone serves a jail sentence than why can’t he, provided he is physically able, play football again? He has done everything required by the law to make amends for what he did. It does not matter whether he is sorry for committing the crime or sorry he got caught. What matters is that he served the time for the crime that he did and therefore deserves the opportunity to continue his career. Sure it can be argued that the amount of time he received for his crimes was a slap on the wrist for what he did but that issue should be taken up with the US legal system and not the National Football league.

Football is his lively hood and as long as his employer (the NFL) thinks he is fit to be their employee than he should be able to play. It is not Mike Vick’s fault that football players are held in such high regard in our society. Once the light goes off and whatever hot shot football player of the moment is removed from their pedestal they are normal people who make mistakes. I could understand peoples objections to him becoming a veterinarian but he is not trying to become one, besides football is an incredibly dangerous sport. For those of you wishing bodily harm against Mike what better way for it to happen then a 300lb line backer trying to shove his spine out his ass?

Let the man return to his profession and make a living, because really would you want to see him working at your local McDonalds? Really?

Anyone who has been on the internet for a long time, works on the internet, or both, has no doubt seen lots of advertising for Classmates.com. It has not changed in forever so chances are these people look really familiar:

I have been receiving spam from Classmates.com proclaiming that I have long lost friends I can re connect with via the site since before I graduated high school and aside from my initial curiosity about whether those people still receive royalties (they don’t they were previous employees) the only thing that has peaked my intrest about Classmates.com is how it continues to exist.

Anyway with classmates.com investing 30 million dollars in 2005 on advertising how is it exactly that I do not know anyone who has signed up for it? Well it turns out that despite that fact that I got there emails when I was 13 they actually mean to target graduate students who back in 97 would have been a fair age, in fact of the age that facebook (a service far superior to classmates.com) does not really attract and therefore people I don’t know.

Classmates.com also seems to attract the type of people are are not very internet savy, as you would have to be to have not heard of facebook, and non internet savvy people are often easily tricked when it comes to doing business on the internet.

This makes it incredibly easy for Classmates.com to deploy their shady and unethical business tactics. The scam is actually pretty simple: charge a vast amount of people (about 40 million) relatively small increments of money every three months.

Lets do some math:
40 people paying 15 dollars every month = $600
40 people paying 15 dollars 3 times a year = $18000

Ad a bunch of zero’s to the above number and you get an idea of what Classmates.com could make under ideal situations, the final amount is crazy and I doubt they make that, however there even under non ideal conditions conditions (they have a number of registered complaints against them for false advertising and all around poor business ethics) to be able to afford to invest 40 million a year into advertising they have to be turning some sort of a profit.

They do this by making there site hard to leave as evident by this image.

And by having a registration system that is essentially a trap, with a faulty auto renewal system which continues to bill you even after you have left the site and after your credit card has expired (they keep the number and change the date). This means that you have to scour the internet to locate the notoriously hard to find their notoriously hard to find customer service number and call them so they stop picking your pocket.

Now knowing all this, and knowing how easily I came across all this information, I can only wonder how much longer Classmates.com will continue to be around. Seeing as how 40 million credit cards take a lot longer to expire than 40 million people. The internet is a very crazy place that makes undeserving people very wealthy.

Wish I was one.

This is straight ridiculous. For real.

Apparently there is a restaurant in Beijing that serves dishes that are penis and testicles of animals which are apperently great for male potency an good for womens skin.

Seeing a menu with a big dick on it should be enough for no one to want to eat there.

A Yak Penis is enough to make me yak. I would never eat this.

She eats ox penis but I bet she is a prude

More of this craziness in detail over on impact lab.

For those of you hoping this would be about me wearing heels sorry to disappoint, this post is about women wearing heels to events that don’t require them and thus looking silly as a result. The past two weekends in a row I have been at out door events, Rock The Bells and Tuners Against Street racing. Both of these venues were outdoors on fairly uneven ground and standing for pro longed periods of time was the norm. So why would anyone in their right mind decide it’s a good idea to wear heels to an event like this?

In my opinion all signs point to vanity. I find feet very unattractive so I don’t really pay much attention to woman’s fashion but My friend Grant once told me that  heels are basically a  push up  bra for a woman’s butt so I assume all of the women at these venues thought their butts needed an extra lift. However any attractiveness gained by the but lift is instantly lost and then some when I am watching these women precariously teeter totter around the venue things like a toddler taking their first steps.

Not to mention some of the heels just looked down right uncomfortable not as bad as these:

But bad enough that I knew the wearer would be feeling the pain the next day. High heels have there place, sure, but not on grass. I get that some people always want to be the center of attention but is attention like press? You can’t get any bad attention? I doubt it.

Besides these woman didn’t need the heels to draw attention to themselves the tops they had on were cut so low that even Mr Mcgoo could have seen the mole on the left breast of the one with pink hair and a miniskirt.

Now here are some woman learning the hard way heels are impractical, hopefully no one broke an ankle.

and this was in flip flops but a disaster waiting to happen regardless

A week or so ago my dad gave me two tickets he had mailed to him for “Tv-Preview”. He’s not really the type that goes to things so he figured at least 2 of them should go to use rather than  wasting the whole four. TV preview was the oppurtunity to watch two pilots of a tv show before they hit they air. They toted it as me being able to help choose the next shows that end up on the air. Sounded pretty sweet.

The event was held in the bottom floor of a local hotel and upon arriving you had to give your tickets and state whether or not you were from a media agency. If you said no you got in and received a sealed package with paper.

If you said yes you got tarred and feathered… actually I don’t know what happened no one said yes but lets assume you would have been tarred and feathered.

One part of the package  was market research, you had to circle your  favorite shampoo out of a bunch of images of shampoos for example, and the other we were not allowed to open until the show started because it contained questions that the MC had to ask you about the show and without the questions the answers just didn’t make any sense.

I was expecting the tv’s  to be pretty high quality and the atmosphere to be movie like but it wasn’t at all. The tvs were just ok  and the  chairs kind of sucked, this was  explained by the fact  that when they used to do these previews in movie theaters the results were all skewed since most people like that is played in a movie theater just because of the size of the  screen comfort of the chairs and the sound.

We got to watch two shows, one drama and one comedy, before we watched the shows we had pilots explained to us. A pilot is a test episode of a particular show shot in the way they wanted it to look at that time. The idea is to show this to a network and audience to positive reviews and get it picked up for national broadcast. However not all shows are picked up right away, for example 90210 was shelved for 10 years before being taken  down re shoot and re worked into the hit it became.

So these shows were dated as hell reminiscent of watching the christian channel or retro tv, the first show was called “Soulmates” it was about two people connecting in present life who both thought they had been lovers in their previous life. Honestly it was pretty stupid, really stupid actually, its a show I would have never watched it. It was on the lovey dovey side except the chemistry was really bad, it had two interesting points though the first was that the lead actor was young Robert Kneeper (aka T Bag from Prison Break) and the lead actress never wore a bra. Other than that it was pretty snooze worthy.

After this first show we had to answer some questions about whether or not we liked it, if we thought the tittle worked, how was the on stage chemistry etc etc.  Then some prizes were drawn and we had to cirlce more products we would use over others.

The second show, the  comedy, was called Dads and while it was not terrible I think for it to really be funny you had to be a parent. It had one of the lesbians from Friends in it and some guy who was a less talented Tony Danza, oh and one of the Golden Girls as a German day car camp teacher. All in all I enjoyed it more than the first but it was fairly old as well.

After this there was more of the same answering of questions and what not. The whole expireance wasn’t terrible but was not near what I expected either. I thought I would be watching something new and cool that would give me bragging rights when it got on tv but really I just did a bunch of market research for shampoo companies and watched so so television. That being said I would probably do it again because it was free and I am a sucker!

When I started Random As Rhyme I always knew it would lead to another side project (well right now my only project) and I am proud  to announce that I have a second blog now focused on the automotive lifestyle. It’s called Stance Is Everything and it’s all about vehicles with the perfect stance. However this doesn’t  mean that Random is going anywhere. Quite the opposite, it just means that the content will be more diverse as oppose to every Wordless Wed containing a few pictures of cars.

I hope  some of you will hop over there every once and awhile and check  it out. As for the rest of you here is something completely random.

My friend, Patty, sent me these photos today of a guy who is riding this Hello Kitty Scooter across Canada for Charity. I can’t seem to find any other information about it on the web thought so I think he was lying and this is his daily mod of transport.

So I got let go from my job today.

This has never happened to me before but seems to be happening to a lot of people in this job market. It’s kind of an interesting experience and writing has always been somewhat of a coping mechanism of mine so I figured I would blog it.

I am not going to name names or anything because that is unprofessional but I will outline how it all went down best I can remember.

9:00 Get to work as usual, open my outlook, msn etc, start preparing for my “mid year performance meeting” and going over somethings to discuss that I don’t feel were going so well the past 6 months and how we can work to improve them. At this point I am still employed.

9:30 Manager comes and gets me and we go into meeting room, I notice we are not going to our normal meeting room which didn’t strike me as odd at the time. Walk into the meeting room and I see the HR representative and the writings on the wall. This writing says “HA HA YOU’RE FUCKED”.

9:32 My manger informs me that I am being let go due to skill set incompatability, which is kind of an ego blow, I wish he said due to B.O. or something tangible as for what I was originally hired for I am very good.

9:35 My manager wishes me luck and says that he can be a reference if I so need it and leaves. I am curious about what sort of reference he would give if he sees me as under qualified but that sorta washes out with the other stuff running through my head.

The HR guy tells me some stuff about my severance package and what not. He also says that I don’t  have to sign it right away and that they have a taxi  chit for me since they don’t want me going home “in this state”.

“This state” stands out, what kind of state am I in? Did my hair suddenly change color? How does he know what kind of state I am in? I wonder what kind of state HE is in since he has to do this fairly often now.

9:40 A grievance/transition counselor guy comes in, and the HR guy leaves. This guy seems nice enough and offers me some services to help me get a new job. I will probably take him up on his offer since what else do I have to do now?  We exchange info.

I never got up to shake his hand or anything but he never really offered either. I was actually relived as I didn’t much feel like shaking hands. So far today I have shaken zero hands.

9:45 Return to my desk and pack up my stuff, mainly headphones, ipod, Ride BMX mags, some toys, have to go back for a few more things, forgot my phone charger (no I didn’t) so I will have to go back sooner rather than later. I have to return my signed severence package also so I will do it all at the same time.

9:50 Everyone is telling me how shocked they are, not to many people knew I guess which is nice because it helps me not feel like the but end of some big joke.

I don’t really know what to say and I am having a hard time talking. I have also become aware  of the fact that I am sweating pretty bad and thankful I am wearing a dark shirt so no one can notice. The old spice deodorant seems to be holding out pretty decent so it was worth the $2.49

I wander around the office a little bit looking for some of the other co workers to say goodbye too but they are in meetings so I peace out.

10:00 I call my gf, and mom but not my Dad as I don’t want to hear the time to go back to school speech right now.

My Mom says “Oh shit”. She doesn’t swear to often so that’s kind of amusing. I have brief conversations with them about new beginnings and what not while I sorta walk aimlessly down the street half heart-ed-ly hailing cabs as I go.

10:15 I am off the phone now and some dude asks me how my day is going, surprising even myself, I answer him with  “Been better you?”. He replies saying He is good thanks for asking and I notice he is carrying a hat with a brain sticking out of it. Is he some sort of a zombie?

Turns out it’s Jerry The Brain Guy, and yes, he is kind of a zombie since he died twice due to a head injury and now has a company based around that and writes books. He also invented some kind of thing that helps you learn better. It’s all  pretty crazy and he has a bunch of youtube videos if you want to check it out.

He asks me what I want to do and I tell him that, ideally, I would have a successful action sports store and it would be awesome.

He tells me a bit more about his lifes story and says that the only thing standing in the way of my dreams really is myself and that if I need anything to contact him. Thats kind of neat, normally I don’t talk to people on the street and this guy had an interesting story and didn’t charge me any money to hear it.

10:20 I finally get a cab ask the dude if he is ok with going to Mississauga, he says yes and get in. Once in he see’s my taxi chit and tells me to go to the guy in front of him. For the first time since I got ‘let go’ I am angry. Fuck dude if you didn’t want me as a fare you should have said no!

10:21 Get in the other cab, this one smells so I crack the window and I am on the way home.

10:45 I Realize my cars at the Go station and I told him home so I  give the cab driver the worst directions to get there. I am in a haze at this point so it’s a bit hard to navigate someone who doesn’t know the area I really just want to tell him he is a cab driver get a damn GPS.

However my old companies picking up the bill though so I am not stressing over  the cost.

10:50 I am filling out the taxi chit, seriously don’t want to be doing this and I’m annoyed going on angry now. I hate taxis and I just want to go home.

I have actually been writing this blog most of the ride home in my head and  filling out the time and date of the pick up is screwing up my thought process.

10:55 I yell to the cabby yo ho smell ya later.

11:00 Hop in my whip (well mine as long as I can keep paying for it) and drive home.

11:30 Start writing this blog and thinking about what to do with the rest of the day. BMX seems approrpriate given the weather and my new abundance of time but I feel sorta shaky like I couldn’t actually ride right now I am pretty tired and somewhat shaky, I sort of feel similar to after a hard work out at the gym or something.

I actually hate popped collars. But I love me some MC Hammer, so I am a bit conflicted.