Tales of Fail

To honor my new favorite website, failblog.org (it won’t disappoint you, I promise, unless you’re one of those demented freaks who gains no pleasure from others’ mistakes and misfortunes), I have decided to compile my own list of incredibly stupid behavior.

Thanks in part to Failblog (whose content is not always 100% wholesome, just be forewarned), current slang calls such acts “FAIL.” The word “failure” is no longer necessary, Mr. Webster.

I’ll start with a letter that I received recently from a company called Oriental Trading, a company I'd never heard of.

I tore open the envelope because the words “pay to the order of” showed through the window. Sweet!

Turns out it was only a voucher fort ten dollars off my next purchase of $30 or more. I’m so disillusioned!

The attached letter was addressed to my wife. Good thing, because her name is easy to spell. I, on the other hand, have often been called “Chuck” or “Carles” in these correspondences.

I went by “Charles” until 4th grade, when Mr. Betterly caught me standing in the back of the classroom, urgently but discretely scratching myself in a personal area. (FAIL!) He announced, with all the discretion of a recently-divorced drill sergeant, “If you’ve got something to take care of, Charles, you probably ought to use the bathroom.”

Since then, I have gone by numerous aliases.

Anyway, I don’t use my wife’s name in my column, because then she might have to start using aliases, so I’ll just pretend the Oriental Traders letter is addressed to me. It says:

“Dear Charles,

You know the old saying, ‘New friends are like silver but old friends are like gold?’ Well, that’s how we feel about you. You’re an old friend we haven’t seen in a while. And frankly, we miss you!”

Somebody get me a Kleenex.

To drive home the idea that I’m special to them, a fake stickie note appears at the bottom of the page, with phony handwriting offering the chance to “enjoy exclusive savings when you sign up to receive our weekly emails.”

This, somehow, fails to entice me.

People, if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: you can set your blender on crush, puree, pulverize, blend, liquefy, dismember, obliterate, masticate, humiliate, or incinerate, but, at the end of the day, it’s just some metal blades whirring around really fast so you can enjoy a relaxing fruity beverage, and that’s all.

My next example of Fail comes from Scrabble, where my friends and I compete at the highest level, measured in terms of our effort in convincing everyone how awful our rack is at any given moment:

“I’ve had the worst luck. I have all vowels.”

“Yeah, well I’ve had six Ps and a Q for three turns in a row.”

“That’s nothing. The last four turns my rack has held nothing but nine V’s, two Chinese symbols that look like a hot dog stand, and a small sample of llama dung that I’m pretty sure contains some e coli.”

Lately, I’ve taken to playing Scrabble on Facebook, which allows you to cheat unabashedly.

It’s a shame that a whole generation of Scrabble players might grow up without learning the gamesmanship involved in playing a word like “blurve” on a Triple Word Score just to see if an opponent has the gonads to challenge.

“Sure, it’s a word. I keep seeing it in my junk mail.” Since no one but me reads junk mail, it works every time.

Question the Questions

Since I began writing this blog/newspaper column, dozens of readers, both real and imaginary, have emailed questions and comments:

1) Would you like to add two inches RIGHT NOW??? No thanks, the editor says my column is long enough as it is.

2) Are you related to WLBZ-TV weatherman Steve McKay? No.

In fact, “McKay” is not even his true last name. I think his last name is actually “Smith,” although it's hard to get genuine information about celebrities.

At any rate, you can't go around as a weatherman and disc jockey with a name like “Steve Smith.” People would realize you have no personality.

Plus, I think Steve McKay might be vampire. Come on, take a good look at his photo and tell me it isn't at least possible.

3) How do you live with yourself, taking all these cheap shots at people? I probably should feel bad for saying such things about Steve McKay, who by all accounts is a pleasant and wonderful human being/flying rodent.

But if I'm ever important enough for someone to make stupid public insults about me, I'll count myself lucky.

4) What do you make of all these sports scandals? This is a great time to be a sports fan.

NFL superstar Michael Vick is under indictment for something to do with dogfighting; I'm not sure exactly what the charge is, since ESPN radio has spent several days analyzing whether or not Vick should have appeared in public to say that his lawyer has advised him not to say anything publicly.

Ex-NBA referee Tim Donaghy has been busted for gambling on games he worked and for taking bribes; obviously the league keeps orchestrating elaborate distractions to prevent people from realizing all their teams run the exact same offense, and, in fact, have many of the same players.

And the Tour de France apparently operates on more chemicals than a sewage treatment plant. The same cold be said of Major League Baseball, where Barry Bonds has become the most hated figure in sports because he cheated more effectively than everyone else did.

Since no one cares about or appreciates the actual games, the sporting world has never been more entertaining. Just keep your kids away from it.

5) Chuck, are you still obsessed with the official web site of Hormel Foods, hormel.com? Everyone should visit hormel.com, especially those who are interested in chili recipes, although if you take chili advice from Hormel after consuming one of their products, you deserve to eat whatever you get.
Let’s face it; Hormel chili is about as spicy and flavorful as Kleenex. Plus, each can contains (no exaggeration) 102 percent of your recommended daily allowance of sodium. From looking at the ingredients list, I can’t tell where all that salt comes from, other than perhaps the ingredient listed as “flavoring.”
If you want a real chili recipe, contact me, and I’ll share the recipe for my Seventeen-Alarm, Imaginary Neighborhood Chili-Cookoff Honorable Mention-Winning Chili of Doom, which includes jalapeno peppers, cilantro, diesel fuel, and two quarts of minced garlic.

It's great for warding off TV weather forecasters.