ThinkSoJoE's Thoughts

Alright.  I’m either going insane or I have some kind of “Shining” thing going on with the people who come up with television lineups.  About a month or so ago, I was waiting for my girlfriend to bring me food at work, and I was singing “They’ll be food around the corner, food around the corner, food around the corner for me,” which is a reference to an old Looney Tunes cartoon about a dog, owned by Elmer Fudd, who is attacked by a flea who sings the song.  A couple weeks back, I was waiting for a bus, and I was thinking about an old Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs convinces Elmer that he’s got a disease called Rabbititis.  I haven’t seen a Looney Tunes cartoon in quite some time (save for “Duck Amuck,” which I purchased on the Xbox Live Marketplace some time ago), and much to my surprise, there’s a Looney Tunes marathon on Cartoon Network today.  The first cartoon that was on when I tuned in was the cartoon with the flea that I thought about a little over a month ago.  That was then followed up by the Rabbititis episode of Bugs Bunny.  Seriously - first two Looney Tunes shorts that I see in years are the two that I thought of at some point over the last couple months.

Ok, so you say it’s a coincidence.  Well, explain this to me - I sometimes get random Family Guy or Simpsons jokes in my head.  Over the past week, every episode of “The Simpsons” or “Family Guy” that I thought of a joke from happened to be the episode that aired in syndication later that day.  If I’m not mistaken, it also happened with an episode of “That 70’s Show” at some point last week as well.

This used to happen to me all the time when I was younger, though more with music videos or songs on the radio than television shows.  I like the fact that this happens to me, but it’s starting to get kind of creepy…

Well, last time I posted was quite a while ago, wasn’t it?  On November 19th, I said that I lost my cushy overnight gig and was stuck doing 3-11.  Here’s the full story behind that.  On Thursday, June 12th, there was an electrical fire at my work.  It damaged the roof and wiped out the power.  Over the next couple of weeks, the power and cable were both turned off in the building as well.  My job was literally to sit on my ass from 11PM to 7AM five nights a week and tell anybody who might come by that we’re closed.  For five months I did this, which I didn’t mind, because there was nobody coming by that late at night, so my job was essentially to go into the building and get a good night’s sleep.  On November 19th, my manager asked me if it I’d be ok working 3PM - 11PM instead of my overnights, to which I reluctantly agreed.  I absolutely hated it.  Every single day I went in there I couldn’t stand it.  I finally managed to get my supervisor, who was moved down to the owners’ other property, to switch with me so that I’d work down at the other property and he’d work where I’d been working.  Finally, they laid somebody off at the other property, giving me her hours,  and closed the property where I was originally working.  So I worked all kinds of different shifts at the other property for a few weeks until it closed from a lack of business.

What does all this have to do with George W. Bush?  I worked in the hospitality industry, being the Senior Night Auditor of a Niagara Falls hotel for the last three years, being a desk clerk for three years before that.  Until this recession, I’d never seen either of the two properties do zero business in my six years with the company.  People have less money these days, and as such, they aren’t traveling as much, which means that hotels aren’t doing as much business as they were.  Even airlines haven’t been immune to the effects of the economy, with several cancelling massive numbers of flights.  Why?  Well, for one, we’re in a country that we had no beef with prior to our invasion of them, spending thusfar in excess of $583 Billion in Iraq.  Note to the President - the guy you’re looking for is in AFGHANISTAN, not IRAQ.

Look, in the eight years between Bush Presidencies, we had no war, no major terrorist attacks, and no major economic problems.  In fact, Bill Clinton left us with a large budget surplus and a low unemployment rate.  Now, we have the complete opposite.  I make no secret about it - I’ve absolutely despised Bush since the first few months after September 11th, and now that I’m a victim of his horrible management of the country, I hate him even more.  I’m counting down the days to Barack Obama’s Presidency.  We’ll finally have an educated President with some fucking common sense.

Meanwhile, if anybody needs a web designer, or needs press releases written, or some online band promotion, hit me up, either commenting here or hitting the contact form at Fropac.com.

Well, my cushy overnight gig is going to be ending for the foreseeable future.  I’m likely starting to work 3 - 11 next Monday, Sunday through Thursday.  Well, at least it’s starting after the WWE Survivor Series this Sunday.  Anyways, readers, how’s by you?

I’m here to vent today.  I’m in shock about the actions of somebody that I not only considered a good friend, but a mentor of sorts.  When thinksobrain were taken under his wing, and were called his “protoges,” I felt honored.  Two years later, instead of talking about this guy as a friend and mentor, I’m looking at him in a different light.  I’m not going to name names, or mention what those actions were, but I’m willing to bet that if he knows about this personal blog, and happens to read this entry, he’ll know who he his and what I’m talking about.  I’m just extremely disappointed that a man who I looked up to and performed with on several occasions, a guy who got thinksobrain a majority of their 2007 gigs, a guy whose shows we would go to after finishing up our own gigs, can be such a scumbag.  I’ll leave it at that, since I wasn’t there and am taking the word of somebody else that was there, and is somebody that I’d trust with my life.

If the person in question is reading this, feel free to offer your side of the story, because I’ve only heard the other half.  The comments section is open…

I’ve been gone from this site for a while, working on various projects, including a Buffalo Sabres fan page.  A cool thing about the site is that, much like I did with stupid5pin.com, I used some of the built-in functionality of WordPress to add something unique to it.

This time around, I used WordPress’s “show_count” function to essentially turn the category list in the sidebar into a real-time goal counter.  However, I ran into a problem when working on the functionality.

Essentially, the way I display my links in my sidebar in that site, much like the sidebar in this site, caused the default setup of WordPress to display the counts under the links to the categories.   It wasn’t exactly aesthetically pleasing, so I ventured to find a way to get them on the same line.  Rather than post the code here and take credit for it, here’s the link where I found the code to set it up the way I wanted it.

Sorry for the real BS post, this is actually more of a reminder to myself, since upgrading to the latest version of WordPress pretty much nullified the work I had done before and I had to re-do it.