I think I’m starting to look waxy. Do you know what I’m talking about? When some men reach a certain age, they begin to look like exhibits at a wax museum? Think Billy Crystal, or Jon Voight. Of course, I’m not nearly as old as those bastards, but I can see it all going in the waxy direction. And I’m not a fan.
Apparently “So….” has now replaced “You know what?” as our go-to sentence starter. Right? For the record, both annoy me to no end.
“What do you want for lunch?”
“So… I’m thinking Wendy’s.”
What the hell, man? Are you brain damaged? Have you suffered a severe electrical shock? Why?! Why does this kind of thing keep happening?
In more positive news, it seems that people have stopped saying “Really?” all the time. Or — and I sincerely hope this isn’t the case — I’ve just accepted it, and don’t really notice it anymore.
It bugs the crap out of me, all this monkey-see, monkey-do bullshit. Get it together, people.
You know what I never see anymore? Kids throwing a baseball around. When I was an ugly teenager (and before) I spent many an evening passing a baseball back and forth with a friend.
We’d also buy these baseball-sized pink rubber balls at House of Toys, throw ’em against the side of the NAPA auto parts store, and field the things. For hours.
It got to the point where I was a pretty good fielder, and started at first base for the best Little League team in town — even though I was a horrible batter. I remember our coach, Dean Thomas, yelling at me in front of everybody: “Kay, if it weren’t for your glove you’d be sitting on the bench!” And then he turned to Ronnie Bush and said, “And if it weren’t for your bat, you’d be sitting right beside him.” Heh. Good stuff. Nowadays they’d have to send in grief counselors.
But I never see kids passing baseballs in the yard anymore. My own kids told me, long ago, that baseball is “boring.” It was like a wooden stake, driven directly through my heart. And I don’t think black kids play the sport anymore, either. It’s all Latinos, Asians, and whiteys. It makes you wonder… If Willie Mays were 15 years old right now, would he be focusing on baseball, or some other sport? I’d put my money on some other sport. It’s too bad.
A few weeks ago, when we went to New York City, I stopped somewhere in New Jersey (I don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to call it Jersey), to buy gas.
Some dude came bounding out, and asked what grade of fuel I wanted.
“Oh, am I at the full-service pump? I’ll move,” I said. No way was I paying the full-service price. Funk dat.
“In Jersey, everything’s full-service. In Oregon, too,” he answered (pronouncing it Ora-gone).
Interesting. It seems like I knew this, at some previous point in my life. So, I got back into my car… while a stranger filled my gas tank. It felt really weird. I didn’t like it. It was foreign and strange, and almost an invasion of privacy, or space, or something. I can’t put my finger on the exact reason, but I didn’t care for it.
I have no problem calling the man. No way I’m changing my own oil, or any of that nonsense, for instance. And I’ll let my fingers do the walking when it comes to most home repairs. But this gas thing felt like a bridge too far.
I’ve had a yard service in the past, and felt a little guilty about it. I thought both my grandparents (and probably Dean Thomas) were looking down at me from heaven, and shaking their heads in disappointment. But I HATE mowing, and that trumped everything. If I could afford it, I’d hire a service today.
Where do you draw the line on such things? And can you explain my feelings about the full-service gas? I can’t. Maybe you can?
And I have to go back to work now. It’s not a good sign when you start your work week exhausted, but that’s what’s happening. I’m tired as a mofo, right now. Oh well.
See you guys again next time.
Have a great day!
Now playing in the bunker
Treat yourself to something cool at Amazon!
Yeah very strange getting gassed up in NJ. And handing over my debit card to a gas jockey is a bit disconcerting because it leaves my line of vision. Although I do it in a restaurant with no problem.
Plumbing sucks ass. I guess because I can’t do it. I can wire a house with the best of them, but when it comes to stopping a leaky faucet or pipe, I turn a drip into a raging, full-on catastrophe. That’s when I CALL THE MAN !!
And I’m right with you on the baseball thing, as a kid when there was no one else around I would even throw the ball up in the air and run to catch it myself. Kinda sad now that I think about it. But even now in the old geezer softball league I’m the best fielding third baseman. Finally have something to put on my gravestone.
the only way a kid today is going to bounce a ball off a wall and chase after it is if Apple makes a Smartphone inside a pinkie ball.
Gassing up in Jersey also makes me uncomfortable. I don’t like it at all. Are you expected to tip?? I never do. Baseball is my favorite sport. I don’t find it boring at all. I can watch any team play and still love it. Kids don’t go outside and do much or anything anymore. It’s all about ipods, cell phones and video games.
As a former “Petroleum Transfer Technician” in my high school days I can assure you that tipping is not required.
If my wife starts the conversation with “So…..” when I get home from work, I know she’s spent a lot of money or my boys broke something.
I think kids aren’t interested in baseball anymore because golf and pro bowling have edged passed it in excitement. Grass-growing and paint-drying are still up there, but baseball is slipping.
I always liked baseball because I liked knocking the shit out of something with a club. Plus, I was fairly good at it.
Ain’t that what wives/kids are for?
Just to add to Mr. S’s in-depth analysis…
We’ve lost interest in anything subtle. We’re adrenaline junkies and instant gratification addicts. We do OK with a TV remote or game controller in our hand, and we can appreciate games in which someone scores every 30 seconds, or in which violence might end someone’s career on every play, but we’ve lost the gift of contemplative enjoyment. We have lost that gift to our long term woe, but that’s a bigger story.
Nothing new here. Just an old man ranting about the lawn.
jtb
Spot on JTB!
The baseball stadium concessioneers need to start selling Qualludes. I can just hear the vendors now, “Qualludes….Qualludes….Make a slow game go slower…………
You’ve obviously not watched a game of Test Cricket…3 frickin days…..talk about bored shitless!!
someone gassing up my car for me feels like a violation and really creepy if i stay in the car while it’s happening. brrrrrr!
Good Afternoon Surf Reporters…
Agreed that you never see kids outside doing ANYTHING anymore. No Frisbee, no pick up games of football, or Wiffle-ball. Nope. You just need to look back inside the house to find the young ones hunkered down in front of a computer or TV.
The pink rubber ball brought back memories. We called them “Super Pinkies” and used to do the same, relentless throwing them up against the side of a building and fielding the comeback.
A friend and I even “invented” a game using the Super Pinky that we, for whatever reason, termed Jabberwocky. It was a combination of handball, but you were allowed to catch it off of one bounce and throw back against the wall. If you held it too long while you regained your balance or missed catching it entirely, the other player got a point.
Good God, in the summer evenings, we played for hours. The official court was my friend’s grandmothers house in her driveway. The driveway came downhill and slightly curved into the garage. The uneven surface made for some interesting bounces, and that added to the strategy of the game.
And yes, you can break a window with a Super Pinky.
I use to play a similar game against the 6th street wall that held up route 28 in PGH. We drew a box on the wall with a piece of road asphalt that you had to aim/hit for the point. Years later after driving by the old childhood home I could still vaguely make out the box.
I generally won’t pay someone to do something I can do myself. That includes most home repairs, minor mechanical, etc.
Currently I’m removing an in-ground pool from my back yard, which I don’t recommend as a “do it yourself” project unless you have no other option. My next project will be a new deck.
My 11yo and I play catch a couple times a week in the summer, but he hates baseball otherwise.
“Really?” has been replaced with “Seriously?” which is even more fucked up.
almost as annoying as a jerseyite whining geddowdaheah
Why do they now call it, “going to prom” instead of “going to the prom”? It seems like everyone got the memo to drop the “the.”
Yeah that has been festering in my “WTF” radar. We always said THE prom not PROM.
Now a days, kids just hold up signs saying Prom?
George Carlin looked like that in the end, kinda sad.
Gotta admit, I catch myself with the ‘So…’ every now and again, and unfortunately I’m still a fan of “Really?!” Mainly when pertaining to dumbasses.
It’s like any other sport today, you ask a kid if they wanna play some ball and they ask which controller you want.
The oddest part about feeling uncomfortable with them pumping your gas is, when we were runts, that was the norm! “Fill the gas and check the oil, please. Oh, and could you check the tire pressure, too?!”
Now I’m starting to feel like Archie Bunker, “Those were the days.”
My cousin lives in southern Jersey and since their gas is way cheaper than New York, I have no qualms stopping along the Garden State Parkway and having someone else pump for me. Especially on the GSP. That road can get kinda creepy if you’re travelling alone at night. Especially if you run into a bunch of rum dums coning back from Atlantic City and they look a little bleary eyed.
From where I sit typing this, I can look out the window and see two kids playing catch, and another group of kids playing hockey in the street. Maybe my neighborhood is an anomaly, but it seems like there’s always kids playing outside. Hell, I even saw a few kids setting up a croquet set a couple weeks ago.
Where is Old Jersey?
It’s a small English island off the coast of northern France. Ironically, a very nice and genteel place.
I have to go to NJ fairly frequently and I try to time fill ups to happen there, a tank of gas costs dollars less, and if it’s snowing some poor schmuck gets cold rather than me.
I was thinking something along the same lines Dave, how long until we can drop the “new”? Hell it’s 350 years old!
Even though I never played baseball and don’t really like it that much, I frequently play catch with my 10 year old daughter. And I love it.
The pink rubber ball was always inexplicably called a “spaldeen” in my neighborhood. Maybe it’s a corruption of Spalding. We used it to play stoop ball and occasionally stickball. We regularly played softball in the vacant lot on the block; if you broke a window with a batted ball, it was a ground-rule home run. It never happened, although the old man in the adjacent house would yell at us out his window in Italian, expressing the concern.
I drive between DC and southeastern New England often enough that I’ve settled on “somewhere in Jersey” as the perfect stopping point for refueling, and it does have about the cheapest gas on the route. Yes, it is a little creepy having someone else fill the tank. As for the debit card, I always pay cash for gas in Jersey – but nowhere else. I have no excuse for this behavior.
.
Chill…
We played with both whiffles and spaldeens in the 1950s and 60s neighborhood of my youth. One summer, I found my mom’s cashe of wood-framed tennis rackets from the 30’s, when she had played fairly serious tennis.
Play work-up with a tennis racket for a bat using a whiffle, and you’re very likely to stay up all day if you’re the oldest. Play using a tennis racket and a spaldeen, and you’ll hit the ball something like a city block. Turns out both are hard on the strings, and eventually spaghetti them (before spaghetti strings were in vogue). My mom was one pissed Indian, and she was from Scotland.
With regard to catch, we played endlessly. We played a lot of pickle, where we’d set up two bases about 40 feet apart and place a smaller kid with a leadoff off one of the bases and give him a quarter if he could steal on us. It’s amazing how good you can get at catching, transferring, and throwing by doing that six hours a day for years.
jtb
Pickle, yes! Although we didn’t do the “give him a quarter” part; none of us had that kind of money to throw around.
.
Grew up in Jersey, never pumped gas till I moved to New England. Weirdest thing is when my 60 yr old relatives come to visit and ask me how to do it – paying, turning-on the pump, etc. It’s like asking how I brush my teeth.
As an engineer, I’m surrounded by “So” sentence starters. It seems to be an unconscious way of showing assertiveness. For example, if you’re asked a question, like “When did you get that car?”, answering simply “Two years ago” puts the questioner in control – you’ve become subservient to him. But if you answer “So I got this car two years ago” it sound like you’re declaring something. It’s a practice I detest.
I said AMEN 7 times to this post. Read my mind. Getting gas pumped by someone else strips you of your manhood. Might as well ask someone to hold your pecker while you pee.
Kids sit inside way too much these days! Our house sits on an acre of land and our kids are outside all the time. We have a very long driveway back to my husbands shop and my kids are always out riding bikes, roller blading and jumping on the trampoline. We’ve had several friends, who don’t have kids, tell us it’s good to see the kids playing because you rarely see it anymore!
Kids these days are getting lazier and fatter and it’s all the parents fault. It’s really easy people! Turn off the boob tube and the electronics and open the back door. Tell your kids to get outside. Maybe the days of come-home-when-the-street-lights-come-on have passed but that doesn’t mean you have to raise a generation of hermit slugs.
I never know what to do with my hands when someone else is pumping my gas. Why does that sound like a euphanism?
As the boy and girl were growing up, I would ask them annually to play catch with me. It would start out as, “if I bought you a baseball glove, would you wanna play catch?”. Always (sadly) “nah not really interested”.
i skipped a step and bought some gloves for them to use. They felt a twinge of guilt perhaps but still didn’t see the point of playing catch.
Things got better over the years though. Still no catch but not too long ago the boy and I were at the same table at pokerstars.com…. while sitting on the couch beside each other. Not quite the same thing but it was quality family time, right?
I miss my Dad and playing catch with him is one of the many reasons why.
My son is 21 now, but the days when we played catch in the back yard and H-O-R-S-E in the drive way are memories I’ll always cherish.
We always played “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. I always made sure I played that one with dumb kids, who weren’t very good spellers.
I remember the days of “get out of my house and don’t come back until you hear me yell”. We weren’t allowed to play inside on the weekend, it got in the way of moms house work. The only exception was rain, and then it was board games with the neighborhood kids. I remember we had 1 neighbor with cable, and they would allow us to occasionally watch Nickelodeon….this was late 70’s early 80’s when they has just started up.
Now you can’t hardly drag kids away from the ipad or tv to get them outside. They get too hot, I don’t wanna get dirty…and many parents are to blame. They are too afraid that a pedophile will drive down their street at the exact moment they aren’t hovering over their child with sunblock and special allergy foods.
The hubs and I plan on buying a large piece of land and raising our kids how we were raised, outside with little tv and no facebook.
In my book, you win Parents of The Century.
Hello!!!!!
I refuse to go grocery shopping. I hate it. Before I got married I would do food deliveries from stop and shop. Best $20 I could spend.
I also used to have my laundry picked up and dropped off for me. All I had to do was put my clothes in a bag, and then put them away… Fuck spending 3 hours at the laundromat (my apartment didn’t have a washer/dryer)…
Other than that? I do my own home repairs (I have a penis)… Including roofing and plumbing. I don’t do yard work because fuck that…
You’re gonna want to consider substituting in a good roofing hammer and a bigass pipe wrench.
jtb
You couldn’t get me inside when I was younger. I was having to much fun with my friends outdoors. It was also a good way to avoid a beating or at least prolong one because of whatever reason my dad had come up with that day to hand one out. I also remember the ball being thrown AT me by my dad, not TO me, so there’s that.Thank Jeebus I had good friends to lean on.
I agree. There is something very emasculating about having someone else pump your gas for you. I bought a car for my wife the last time I was in Oregon, and drove the brand new vehicle around for a few days camping around the state before driving it home. The very first tank of gas that I bought for this vehicle was pumped by some local dude with about three teeth in his head, and he felt that he should offer up his opinion on the color of the vehicle. I was very close to telling him to shove his opinion deep and on a slant, but was probably wise not to do so.
MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU
The Kent State Massacre involved the shooting of unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.
Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the Cambodian Campaign, which President Richard Nixon announced during a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.
All those shot were students in good standing at the university.
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground? How can you run when you know?
Hmmm, I know that song from somewhere ;)…see my user name.
May the 11th. Commenting on the May 5th WVSR update. If Jeff won’t entertain us, then I guess I’ll just have to start entertaining myself.
knock knock
who’s there
leaf
leaf who
lee foo have your chinese food delivery. Open door!
I love jokes like that! Thanks, John.
Does anyone know what happened to Jeff? It’s entirely possible that he went on a break or needed time to work on a project and I just missed the memo. I’m just hoping that Jeff and the fam are okay. Has any Reporter heard any news? Thanks, all!
I’m wondering the same thing. No mention of anything on Twitter, and his last post was 2 days ago.
https://twitter.com/jeffkay
I hope it’s nothing major hair whipping.
I was also wondering what the hell is going on…
Nancy & Translucents arrived unannounced, after Nostrils kicked her out – “that damn patchouli smell” – and Jeff has been hiding under the bed with a hot water bottle ever since.
Well, it looks like we’ve finally ticked off JK so badly that he’s abandoned the Website for good. Good job, surf reporters. It was probably the lack of cheese-f**king references over the last several months that tipped the balance.
I never post. Ever. And I’ve read for years, and I’m wondering wtf. someone check the obituaries!
Jeff,
I dined at the Vortex in the hood on Saturday and thought of you. The old Castle of Doom is still standing and creepy as ever.;) I did not have my phone with me to get a picture, but I did eat a bad ass fucking delicious half pound bacon cheese burger with no mayo or pickles washed down with 4, yes 4, ice cold Yuengling golden nectars in your honor!
JayinATL
Okay, Jeff, it’s been long enough now that we’re all begging you to come back. Please let us know that you’re at least alive. This is no longer funny.
Jeff, seriously come back, I’ve re-read this post a dozen times now…
If there is in fact some major hair whoppong going on then a btesk from us assholes might be just what Jeff needs. Im just worried about him. But, if someone saw a twitter post from him a couple days ago then thats a good sign, right?
Woops, hair whipping! Lol
Jeff’s twitter feed/software is set to re-run certain posts every so often (the Good Morning America one from earlier today, if you can’t be funny be loud from yesterday, abbey road cam from Sunday etc), but the one with the dog pic is “genuine” as far as I can tell:
https://twitter.com/jeffkay/status/465667477909676032
He was likely alive three days ago. Hope this helps as we all transition from Surf Reporters to Surf Detectives.
I truly hope all is well in the compound.
testing 1, 2, 3…
Testing…
Noticed I have a comment in moderation from May 6th, sure hope everything is okay.
The Wal-Mart folks finally got tired of his shit and sent out their “cleaner”?
Dude’s beginning to scare me.
Jeff? Everything OK? We’re jonesing for an update. Please.
Funk the update – just let us know you/the fam are OK.
He was alive Sunday. I saw he posted about his son’s prom on FB.
Hey guys. Im sure we’ll get those box scores soon enough.
I actually checked out the news online in the Wilkes Barre Scranton area…
He posted on Facebook on the 13th.