Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- This week we’re talking about ALL CAPS, drinking at work, making friends with co-workers, Lite Bright and then Alex gets way off track talking about terrible Baby Boomers and Tori Amos, so she ends up kind of crying at her desk, cuts the column short and leaves to have a drink. Happy St. Patrick's Day, and happy reading! Submitted by: @Schadenfreudelish Is there ever a good time to use the CAPS LOCK during political discussion on Twitter? Also, SWIDT?? And again?? In my opinion, the only time it is appropriate to use Caps Lock on Twitter is if it is to declare that a certain policy will LITERALLY LEAVE PEOPLE DYING IN THE STREETS. I guess the problem with this is that, if my progressive friends are to be believed, this is the expected result of even the slightest cut to any proposed budget to any governmental program at any level. Has your local library asked for a 4% budget increase next year but the Town Meeting only voted them 3.5%? “Why do you promote youth illiteracy? Children that can’t read are unemployable and they will LITERALLY DIE IN THE STREETS.” Maybe your Senator has suggested a more accurate measure of inflation for the indexing of entitlements. “Senator McDuck voted to let seniors DIE ALONE IN THE STREETS”. Still, that is substantially better than the misuse of Caps that we see from White Nationalists. This, more than the haircuts and the pepe Avatars, is the tell-tale sign of a full-blown alt-righter: an apparently genetic inability to use the Caps Lock Key properly. First, there are people who just use it all the time...they tweet like Jacob Silj speaks. Every single tweet is a screaming announcement about the DEEP STATE and OBAMA’S ILLEGAL SILENT COUP WAKE UP SHEEPLE. Also, I imagine that this is what the subtitles on any show featuring Alex Jones look like. My personal favorite are the random capitalizers. Similar to the random hashtaggers, they put the focus on really unimportant words in sentences…”Trump #making America GREAT Again. pATRIOTS uNITE! Globalists #are SOROS paid TREASON!” Throw in a #MAGA or two, and you will fit right in. Submitted by: John Phipps How can I learn better punctuation skill,s faste.r I would suggest drinking a lot less vodka while tweeting...that is a really easy way to improve punctuation, I find. Or, get a secretary! That works really, well, too...I can barely even guess as to how much my written grammar is improved by my admins. You know, now that I think of it, why am I writing this…? Shouldn’t I have them help? Submitted by: Ross Since St Patrick's tomorrow any tips on drinking, what to drink, how to avoid a hangover and what to do if one shows up uninvited anyways? Funny you mention this, because I feel kinda like I was trampled by an angry horde of leprechauns today. As I have mentioned before, I have a standing Thursday dinner date with my little sister. She is, however, enjoying her last collegiate Spring Break in Turks & Caicos, and was therefore unavailable for dinner. Never fear, though, because my husband is more than willing to pinch hit for her! He is also, it turns out, willing to leave work at 3:00 and sit in a bar watching basketball all afternoon, which made it a really good thing that I forced him to stop at eat at dinner;-). One other relevant fact here...I weigh somewhere between 98 and 102 pounds, and I drink like it. Yada, yada, yada, Alex is kinda hungover. I think I am more tired than I am hungover, but I have definitely felt better… Also, we just skipped ahead by four hours, it’s now 2:45 and I am kinda drunk again, so the rest of this column should go really well...and OMG, there are mint chocolate brownies and a chocolate Babka in the office and I am in heaven. To answer your question, though, the key to avoiding hangovers is hydration. You can’t just drink beer or wine, because you’ll get too dried out and wake up with an army of nail-pounding ants living in your skull. If you do, you need to fit in at least three glasses of water during your night. Mixed drinks can work better, so long as you don’t get so drunk that you render any precautions to be useless. Mixed drinks with fruit in them are probably better for you, cuz of the Vitamin C, or something (note: Alex is not a doctor). My standard recipe, that seems to work pretty well (today excluded) is to drink a Vitamin Water and take a couple of Advil before bed. That’s the best advice I have for you. Submitted by: Anonymous I've really been enjoying my 20 min tea break at work, alone, in quiet contemplation. Yesterday, I was called aside by a colleague, she relayed a sad tale of another colleague next door to me who is apparently lonely during her 20 minutes of solitude , and suggested I join her for our mutual break. All day long I have to be smiley and chatty, is it too much to ask just to be left alone for 20 minutes to frown into my cup of tea? Is it Alex? I can’t answer this without knowing: a) do you dig on chicks? and b) is she cute? Because it is entirely possible that you are being set up with a fellow tea drinker without even knowing it. And we are starting from a place where you both have no friends and like tea...if that’s not the foundation of a healthy relationship, what is?! If that is not the case, however, might I suggest a very tactful and refined “I hate most people. That includes you. I will talk to you all exactly as much as is contractually required. So, how about you fuck off and leave me to my tea?” That is probably how Emily Post would handle it. Also, how do you not know that the person in the office right next to you is also sitting by herself drinking tea 20 minutes at a time? Are you possibly that obtuse to have not picked up on this? I mean, c’mon, look around once in awhile...it won’t kill you. Submitted by: KDJF I'm ten pink Lite-Brite pegs short of finishing my piece, should I try to etsy them or just give up performance art? You are missing your own accomplishment here...while you have been trying to finish your performance art piece, you have accidentally coined a truly fantastic phrase to describe a stupid person. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer? A few clowns short of a circus? A couple of beers short of a six pack? A few checkers short of a full set? All good...but I am going to work “A few pink pegs short of a Lite Brite rainbow” into regular conversation from now on. Lite Brite pegs are, it turns out, super cheap, so I would suggest you just go ahead and buy them. But, if you buy them, definitely make sure that you don’t accidentally knock over the box and spill the pegs all over your kids floor and spend four days stepping on them and finding them hidden in every corner of their room. How does a Lite Brite peg travel around a wall and behind a dresser that is 25 feet away from where it was dropped? Do I have peg-toting mice in my house? These are things that even I can’t answer. Submitted by: Jimmy’s Incorrigible (4 questions) 1) In the song "Shut Down" by the Beach Boys there is a fictional race between a 1962 SuperStock Dart with a 413 and a 1963 fuel-injected Stingray. In the race, the Corvette wins. In real-life depictions of this race, the SS Dart wins. Is this simply because people like how Vettes look, or do you think the Beach Boys had some kind of "product placement" deal with Chevrolet (This song, plus "409", etc). IF they did have a deal with Chevy, then isn't this one of the first happenings of fake news? You haven’t thought that maybe the Corvette had a better driver? Or a better crew chief who employed better pit strategy and won the race on fuel mileage? Or, like my favorite NASCAR driver Kurt Busch, he simply avoided trouble, missed “The Big One” and then took advantage of the inexperienced remaining racers to claim his first Daytona 500 win? {Note to self: have @jholmsted work on a cocktail featuring Monster Energy Drink and Miller Lite.} I’m gonna get off track and talk about the Beach Boys, though, because my initial reaction to this is “Oh, the Beach Boys made a song about racing cars? I find this really stunning…(snooze).” Those of you who have ever paid attention to me know that I am anti-Baby Boomer. They are, collectively, the worst people to ever live (individually I like many of them just fine). And one of the things that bothers me about them is that everything they went through as young people is totally the greatest thing ever...especially music. I mean, have you ever listened to the recordings of Woodstock? Baby Boomers will tell you that this was the greatest concert ever put together, full of really important, world-changing artists that fostered peace and love and ended a war and ushered in a new era of peace and love and awareness and blah blah blah and no...just shut the fuck up, you are all terrible and the music sucked just like everything else about your beloved childhood. There. I said it. I feel better already. The Beach Boys are one of about 50 thoroughly mediocre acts from the 1960’s that Baby Boomers have convinced themselves are just the most importantest and swellest thing they’ve ever heard. But seriously, get over it. You’re not that special and it was 50 years ago and it is time to move on and start acting like adults. This has me thinking about “The Big Chill”, which is as quintessentially Baby Boomer as just about anything ever made (and somewhat timely, given William Hurt’s recent death...) It may be the ultimate in Boomer-schlock, be chock full of more whining than my kids' first grade class and feature an absurdly overrated soundtrack, but it does include one absolutely brilliant moment that sums up all of the false-nostalgia about the 60’s that too many Boomers are unwilling to acknowledge. The woman who became the public defender, hoping to defend the Civil Rights warriors of her day, finds herself disillusioned with her job and the kinds of people she has to defend. The friend asks “Who did you think your clients would be?” and someone suggests “Huey (Newton) and Bobby (Seale)?”. She sighs and notes “I don't know. I just didn't think they'd be...so guilty”. OK. This is maybe a little harsh, and I already want to walk back my comments on the Beach Boys, who are actually not terrible, and made “God Only Knows”, which is just exquisitely perfect. (I will first direct you to Jeff B at Decision Desk Headquarters, who sent a tweetstorm about the Beach Boys about two months ago that included, I believe, 3,814 tweets detailing every bar of every song ever written.) More importantly, though, is that the YouTube suggestions attached to that video include “Silent All These Years”, and that is just going to suck me into an emotional hole that I am not going to get out of this afternoon. It’s hard to describe how much Tori Amos spoke to neglected, angsty, confused 14 year old Alex. I mean, I kinda want to meet her some day and just give her a hug and tell her how many nights I listened to Little Earthquakes and felt like, just maybe, if I made it through one more day, one more week, that there was a bigger, better world out there. So, I am saving Jimmy’s last three questions and one more for next week because I am too drunk to answer any more questions and I am now feeling very, very emotional. Plus, my adorable husband is waiting for me to meet him for a drink before we get our two healthy, happy kids from school, and my absolutely perfect sister is packing up to head back home tomorrow and I shouldn’t spend much more time reminiscing about sad things I shouldn’t be thinking about. Until next week, then...sorry to end on a serious note. But, as I learned a long time ago, when you don’t feel like there is anything you can do, just put your head down and keep working. Baby, don’t look up...the sky is falling.
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MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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