Guidelines - Part Two

It has recently been brought to my attention that this Blog has no guidelines. My attention has reviewed the situation, and has become bored. It wanders, you see. So I took over, and I've decided that yes, we could use a few here and there. While I wait for my attention to come back, I'll share a few of them with you, time-wasters.

These guiding lines are merely in place to make sure that the ambient moronics are up to snuff. By the way, Ambient Moronics would be a great name for a really horrible furniture store.

1. Write when you're tired. You come up with really stupid things when you're tired, hungry, or asleep. When you sleep, your brain has nothing better to do, so it simply shuts down all of the energy-draining "intelligence centers" and runs in a power-saving dolt state. Like a laptop computer's processor. This is why your dreams almost never make any sense. You can be driving along in the mountains of Scotland in your new Ford GT, when all of a sudden you look over into the passenger's seat, and see that you're sitting next to your mom, who is waving a stovepipe hat out the window, which has just become the window of a small airplane. Before you have a chance to absorb all of this, you find yourself back in a high school class giving a lecture about fabric softener, and...well, if laptop processors worked like this, nobody would ever buy a laptop computer.
2. Make sure that you've got plenty of soda pop on hand. The sugar and caffeine stimulate the dope nodes of your brain, and there's always the chance that you'll spill it all over your desk, and then you'll have something funny to write about if your keyboard ever works again. Plus, it is entirely possible that you'll fall down while you're getting another can, or while you're watching the syrupy mess disappear into your laptop's ventilator ducts. This can have adverse effects on your processor. See #1.
3. Do you have cats? They're pretty stupid. Mine are. Can't spell worth a hoot, and their typing skills are lacking. Let them write something once in a while. Don't tell your boss.
4. I suggest a mild regimen of idiot excercises. Practice making bad decisions whenever you get the chance. You don't have to go to a gym or anything like that; these excercises can be performed during your everyday routine. For example, when you order food at a restaurant, decide to ask stupid questions. "How heavy, in ounces, are the pancakes? I mean, without syrup or butter," or "Could I have another napkin? Mine ran away." There are many superb places and situations where making bad decisions is super-easy. Driving, boating, walking, power tool use, dating, skeet-shooting, mumbling, vacuuming, chuckling, driving again and the ever popular "making of cake". Too many people choose to take perfectly good cake and destroy it by putting weird stuff in it or on it. Coconut, too much frosting, eraser shavings... lame stuff.
5. Spend some time getting to know your computer's operating system. If this doesn't drive you completely nuts, you will be able to reap an excellent stupid crop. Especially if you're still running Winders 98. There are whole lines of code in there dedicated to making up error messages about hardware your machine doesn't even have. Try to set up a home network! Go on! Try it! Create a bunch of files, put them in a folder, put that folder somewhere on your hard drive. Reboot. Now try to find your files. Granted, you have to be pretty stupid to lose things that easily, even with Winders 98's two gigabytes of user-thwarting code, but when I first started using computers, I used 98. And boy was it ever stupid! Ha ha!
6. Whenever a nearby cane-wielding crusty old man starts to mumble to himself, listen in. It's probably not anything stupid, per se, but it's usually funny. I can't wait to be an old man myself. Crusty I shall be, and a cane I shall wield. I will shuffle around in Mal-Wart for hours on end, pontificating on the nature of vitamins, canes with silver duck heads for handles, how awful my ear medicine tastes, them blasted groundhogs---all under my breath in a barely-audible wheeze. Sooo... Listen to people like me. The future me.
7. Sustain an injury. Make the cause of the injury vastly disproportionate to the severity of the injury itself. For example, if you manage to have both of your legs broken, tell your family: "There I was, right at the kitchen table. I was paying the bills, and I was licking the stamps in preparation to putting them on the envelopes. But wait! Hey, shut up. I'm telling this story. Anyway. So stamps, right? And you know what? They're self-adhesive! You don't have to lick them anymore! So they're stuck all over my tongue, and I got scared, and I fell down, and that's when both of my legs busted. What? I don't care! No. Forget that. All of you get out of my room! Especially you!"
8. Read forums or newsgroups. Any one. Any subject. There's always at least one person who can't spell and spends all of his time typing posts consisting of one giant run-on sentence (not capitalized) about how everyone else on the forum is dumb, and how his car (computer, audio equipment, electric toothbrush) is way faster than anyone else's.

I hope this has helped you out a little, time-wasters. These guidelines are set forth not only for us three Moderator types, but for anyone thinking of posting a comment. Think of them not so much as suggestions, but hard and fast rules. And have fun!