Spamming scumbag of the week

Each week, amongst the many interesting, insightful and occasionally scathing comments on my blog, I find comments by businesses and/or spammers who are clever enough to construct comments that avoid spam detection technology.

I delete these comments and ban their IP address, but I know that I will be doing the same thing again tomorrow for a new spamming scumbag.

In response, I’ve decided to write one post each week that highlights these businesses that either engage in this spamming behavior on their own or have hired spammers to do it for them. My intent is to shame these vile companies and damage their business in the process. I realize that both goals are unlikely to be achieved, but attempting to do so will make me feel good, and that is enough.

This week I had to contend with only one spamming scumbag, perhaps because this is Easter week and the even the most vile of cretins don’t like to engage in this kind of behavior at this time of year.

Today I present to you Austin Oral Maxillofacial Surgery, a company serving central Texas for over forty years with ten convenient locations. One of the three reasons to choose this team of twelve white, male surgeons, according to their website (which I found via a spam comment on my blog), is because “You and your family truly matter to us.”

Apparently this is not the case if you are a blogger trying to keep an audience entertained and engaged while trying to find time for his wife and two children.

If you require oral surgery and live in central Texas, I suggest you contact Central Texas Oral Maxillofacial Surgery instead. Dr. Lavelle Ford, a Vietnam veteran and former Captain in the Army Dental Corp, is board certified as a Diplomate in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.

More important, as far as I can tell he is also not a spamming scumbag, which makes him okay in my book.

The essence of New England weather

    

Less than 48 hours later:

 

Snooze button sucks

I have always been anti-snooze button.

There is no better way to waste time than to remain in bed after you have awoken. People waste hundreds, if not thousands of hours, a year doing this. If you’re going to be awake, you might as well start your day.

The snooze button is a contributor to this problem, and according to science, you should not be using it. Ever.  

Worst super power ever

It turns out that I write about my super powers quite often.

First there was a post about my actual super hero persona: Mr. Indestructible.

I cannot be killed (having been brought back from death twice already) nor have I ever bruised, and I have not vomited since 1983, yet I tend to be hurt all the time. Golfer’s elbow. Bad knees. Separated shoulders. Frequent concussions.

Strength and weakness tied together. The classic superhero motif.

Then there were posts about some of my lesser super powers:

My ability to wake up in the middle of the night and accurately state the time within fifteen minutes of the actual time, and oftentimes much more accurately than that.

My ability to hold my breath underwater for an exceedingly long time.

My ability to sleep very little, fall asleep almost instantly and sleep almost anywhere, regardless of the discomfort associated with the location.

For a short period of time, I actually tried to bring a few of my friends together with similarly questionable super powers in order to form a band of super heroes.

At the time, I thought that if Elysha had wanted to join our team, she might use her ability to identify any song after listening to it for three seconds or less as her super power, but it turns out that she has a more legitimate and equally useless super power:

Her sense of smell is superior to any human being on the planet.

Unfortunately, this is the worst of the five senses to possess in super quantities. As far as I can  tell, this super power only allows her to smell the dog or similarly distasteful scents when no one else can.

Unless your sense of smell is superior enough to sniff out the chemical components of a bomb at an airport, a super sense of smell is an atrocious power to have.

It prevents you from sitting in the train car with the restroom.

It causes you to smell the dead skunk on the road for considerably longer than anyone else in the car.

And yes, it allows you to smell the dog when no one in the house can smell her unless she is in your lap.

On a positive note, her super power fits the classic motif of combining a super power with an associated weakness.

Now all I need is a name for her super heroine persona and she can be on the team. Suggestions? 

A question about female criticism that is likely to get me killed.

I am only asking, so please don’t kill me.

There seems to be an enormous amount of angry, female criticism of Sheryl Sandberg’s LEAN IN on the Internet. Tweets, Facebook posts, blog posts, commenters.

I can’t help but think that if a man wrote a similar book suggesting that men engage in a paradigm shift at work, the typical male critique would be something more like, “No, I disagree. That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That’s not for me.”

There’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with Sandberg’s premise (I have yet to read the book, so I have no opinion), but the criticism coming from women strikes me as so angry and outraged.

Can you disagree with the woman without simultaneously attempting to tear her down by disparaging her career, her wealth and her parenting choices ?

Again, I’m only asking. Perhaps my perception of the situation is entirely wrong.

I’m sure you’ll tell me if it is.

He’s nine months old!

       

Mystery of Prince Rupert’s Drop

This is the most fascinating six minutes of video on the Internet today.

That is all.

Unprecedented sibling love (and the people who suck at life who want to spoil it)

I don’t think I have ever seen as much sibling love and affection as exists between my two kids.

Parents of children older than mine are fond of telling me that this moment of bliss won’t last. Sibling love will eventually give way to sibling rivalry.

While this may be true, you have to truly suck at life to say something like this to a father who is beaming over the love that is shared between his two kids. In fact, I can’t begin to imagine the degree of suckitude that one must possess in order to attempt to spoil a parent’s moment of joy.  

An interview with my not-so-fictional character

In case you didn’t know, Mrs. Gosk, the third grade teacher in MEMOIRS OF AN IMAGINARY FRIEND, is a real person. I’ve worked with her for the past fifteen years, and when I started my teaching career, she served as my mentor. When it came time to choose the best teacher possible for Max and Budo, I couldn't help but use Mrs. Gosk.

She is essentially a non-fictional character in a fictional story.

Mrs. Gosk and I recorded an interview that appears at the end of the audiobook, but in case you didn’t listen to the book and wanted to hear a small portion of the interview, it’s available here.

If you want to hear the interview in its entirety, you'll have to buy the audiobook.

Be different. But be prepared to suffer, despite what parents and teachers may tell you.

While I think this book looks excellent, it also seems to embrace a fundamental flaw in the teaching of young people.

It’s an issue that I am slightly obsessed with.

We tell our children to be themselves. Be different. Blaze their own trail. Ignore peer pressure. Find their own style.

But unless those differences allow you to guide Santa’s sleigh on a foggy night (as is the case for Rudolph) or fly (as is the case for Dumbo), you are likely to lead a difficult life. People will punish you for being different. Nonconformity breeds contempt.

You may ultimately succeed, but it will never be as easy as your parents and teachers make it seem.

Nor will it be as easy as this book seems to imply.

Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend: Large print

Behold the large print cover for MEMOIRS OF AN IMAGINARY FRIEND.

Thoughts?

 

Stupid people are still dangerous.

In my experience, this may be true, but it doesn’t mean that you are safe. They will still attempt to destroy you.

The $91,500 shirt is actually quite useful

The good folks at Hermès have created a black men’s crocodile top that retails for $91,500.

This may seem excessive, but I actually think the shirt is quite useful, for a few reasons:

1. It instantly identifies a company that I will avoid doing business with for the rest of my life.
2. It serves as the ultimate douchebag detector.
3. It provides further evidence that exceedingly ugly things that cost an exceedingly large amount of money will be purchased by exceedingly materialistic people who desire exceedingly expensive status symbols.

It’s disgusting either way, but which is worse?

This photo was taken by author and photographer Deborah Copaken Kogan in Claire’s, an accessory store found in malls across America.

Which is worse? The company that sells a product as vile as this or the person who purchases it for his or her daughter?

I’m honestly not sure.

Do you want Kate Middleton’s nose?

TIME reports:

Among the many things that women envy Kate Middleton for are her style, her poise and her husband.  It may be time to add one more thing to that list: her nose.

According to the New York Daily News, young women in New York and Long Island are flocking to the plastic surgeon’s office like it’s a spring sale at Barneys to get the Duchess of Cambridge’s sniffer.

I hope that this story is hyperbole on all counts.

I hope that women aren’t actually envious over Kate Middleton’s style, poise, nose and especially her husband, particularly if they have a husband of their own already. 

Most importantly, I hope that women find the title (What New York Women Want: Kate Middleton's Nose) and the first sentence of this piece as offensive and demeaning as I do.

I happen to know a number of women living and working in New York, and I can’t imagine any of them expressing envy over the shape of Kate Middleton’s nose or anyone else’s nose.

My hope is that TIME has based this story (and its hyperbolic assumptions) upon an infinitesimally small group of horrible, superficial, low-esteem women and that the use of the word “flocking” does not imply a number large enough to constitute an actual flock. 

Speak Up storyteller: James Bengiovanni

With just six weeks to go before our inaugural Speak Up storytelling event, we will begin introducing you to the seven storytellers scheduled to entertain you that evening, in the order that they will appear.

One storyteller each week until the big night on May 4 at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut.

Leading off that evening will be my best friend for the past 27 years and my DJ partner for the past 16 years. He was my best man in 2006 and delivered a toast that people still talk about today.

He’s sure to start us off with a bang. _____________________________

James Bengiovanni

James ‘Bengi’ Bengiovanni is a man of few talents.

As a child, he nearly learned how to swim. Later as an adult, he almost found an agent for his novel. Most recently, you can find Bengi not on Facebook or Twitter.

Somehow Bengi was named the 2013 Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy Teacher of the Year. By default, he has also been the reigning A-Mattzing Race Champion for the past five years.

The father of three, he started running with his eldest daughter three years ago and will be running his first full marathon in Hartford this year.

Even though he acknowledges that Speak Up is not competitive storytelling, he has guaranteed victory.

Was the destruction of the Death Star an inside job? Also, how did Luke Skywalker dodge the stigma of incest so easily?

If you haven’t seen the recent conspiracy video suggesting that the destruction of the first Death Star was an inside job perpetrated by the Empire, you should.

The video also got me thinking:

Luke Skywalker is one unlucky son-of-a-bitch.

In the span of just a couple years, his father tried to kill him multiple times and he fell in love with his own sister.

And I don’t care if he didn’t know that Leia was his sister. He still thought that she was hot. He still put a move on her. They still kissed. 

How did he manage to dodge the stigma of that so easily?

If I were Han Solo (and I like to think I am), I would’ve never let him live it down.

 

WWMD (or maybe WWMDD)

A friend recently employed the following strategy when she found herself looking for a solution to a problem:

WWMD: What Would Matt Do?

And it worked. She asked herself what I would do, and almost immediately, a solution was found. 

I was thrilled. I told her I wanted to make WWMD a thing. A viral sensation. A new decision-making stratagem.

She agreed.

There’s a possibility that she wasn’t being entirely sincere.

Still, it worked for her, so perhaps it could be the next big paradigm in business and life management 

Maybe I could launch a podcast where listeners could ask, “What would Matt do?” and I would respond accordingly.

We could be onto something.

I say “we” in hopes that you are as excited about this as I am. Or perhaps in hopes that using the word “we” will trick you into being as excited about this as I am.

Either one is fine.

But which is better?

What Would Matt Do? (WWMD) or What Would Matthew Dicks Do? (WWMDD)?

Thoughts?

Oh, and if you’d like to pose a question, go right ahead. No need to wait for the podcast and possible network television show. I’m here, waiting.

The Matthew Dicks Law of Thank You Notes

Inspired by a pair of insipid aunts in Will Schwalbe’s memoir The End of Your Life Book Club, I offer this bit of indisputably accurate wisdom regarding gift giving and thank you notes: There is nothing wrong with being disappointed when someone fails to send you a thank you card for a gift that you sent.

I find the requirement a little tedious and arcane when a verbal thank you has already been expressed upon receipt of the gift, but some people think a more formal act of appreciation is important and appropriate.

I think these people are slightly insane, but so be it.

But the important thing to remember is that there is something very wrong with telling other people about a person’s failure to send a thank you note. When you tell a parent, relative, coworker or friend about someone’s failure to send you a thank you note for a wedding or birthday gift, you become exponentially worse than the person who didn’t send the thank you card.

You become a vile and disgusting person.

That’s my rule.

In the world of gambling, this is what’s known as a parlay.

Clara: Mom, can I try one of those pieces of rock candy? I’ve never had rock candy before.

Elysha: If you’re a good girl, you can try a piece tomorrow.

Clara: I am already a good girl. Maybe I’ll try a new food tomorrow.

Elysha: Great. If you try a new food tomorrow, you can have a piece of rock candy.

Clara: Mom, I never tried rock candy before. It’s a new food. If I try rock candy tomorrow, can I get a new toy?