Your End of Week Topic Dump, vol. 318

You guys aren’t going to believe this one… But I’ve been invited by Chevrolet to ride in one of their green Camaros, during the big festival of debauchery that is the Scranton St. Patrick’s Day Parade.  Yes, you read that correctly.

Apparently they’re going to have several local bloggers inside the cars, and asked if I’d like to be one of them.  I instantly accepted, because it has “memorable experience” written all over it.

I’m not sure it’s such a great marketing strategy to pack several sports cars with ugly-ass, pasty-white bloggers.  But hey, that’s not my department.  If they want me there, I’m willing to serve.

I don’t have all the details yet, but I think I’m going to be expected to crank-out Twitter tweets during the parade.  So, that’ll be interesting as well.  I’m unclear if I’ll be updating some Chevy page, or my personal Twitter account.  I’ll let you know, as more info becomes available.

Should be fun!  The parade is on Saturday, 3/13.  Pass the beer nuts.

In case you were wondering (and I know you were), here are the five most-visited pages at TheWVSR, during February:

Number One
Number Two
Number Three
Number Four
Number Five

That’s right, the homepage wasn’t the most popular destination last month.  These things happen, from time to time.  And it happened this time, because of Rusty Kuntz and friends.  I couldn’t be prouder.

And this reader comment, left by TILLY on Tuesday, contains one of the funniest lines I’ve read in a while.  See if you can figure out the line I’m talking about…

I was, in a past life, in charge of the kitchen at my church. We had “family Sunday” dinners once a month and we all brought a dish to share. I decided since I was in the kitchen anyway I would broil fish and serve that because someone had given me a ridiculous amount of cod. So I broiled it in the kitchen and proceeded to make the entire place smell like a vagina full of bad decisions. It was hilarious!! The entire congregation looking around trying to figure out what the hell was going on. NO fire though.

I almost did a spit-take, I’m not kidding.  Thanks for that one, TILLY.  Simply excellent.

I haven’t mentioned my “book” lately, mostly because there’s not much to report.  Oh, Metten gets my stressed-out, whiny emails from time to time. And so does Brad.  But I try to spare the rest of you.  In a nutshell:  the whole process is so infuriatingly slowed-down, it’s about to send me over the edge.

Anyway, I was in Borders recently, and saw a coffee table book about knots.  It was an expensive, oversized thing, with a photograph of a length of rope tied in a different knot on every page.  Knots!

And goddammit, if a publishing house paid someone for that crap, then I shouldn’t worry.  Right?  If the Book of Knots (or whatever) is on the market, it should serve as an inspiration to us all.

That’s the way I see it.

A few days ago I went to “lunch” (8 pm) at work, purchased a bottle of water from the vending machine, found a seat at one of the high school cafeteria tables, and flopped down.

And inside my lunch bag was a dirty Tupperware container, which had housed my salad on the previous day.  Underneath it was another bowl, with congealed 24 hour-old soup residue clinging to the sides.

Fantastic.  Toney packs my lunch, and I don’t even look at it until it’s time to rip into the thing.  But sometimes she forgets; she has ten million things going on, as opposed to my million.

So, I had to tear ass out of there, and went to… Subway.  I hadn’t been in that place since I told a sandwich engineer to go fuck himself.  But that was months ago, and I decided enough time had passed for me to make my triumphant return. And I was correct; the engineer was someone completely different, with no real reason to slip a booger into my hoagie.

And man… that thing was good.   I don’t know what it is, but sometimes those five dollar lettuce sangliches hit the spot.  The bag full of dirty dishes worked to my benefit, it sure did.

But it reminded me of an incident in Atlanta, years ago.  A woman thought she’d brought spaghetti or somesuch, leftovers from the previous night’s dinner, and popped the container into the work microwave.  It was a margarine bowl, and she just cracked open the lid, and popped it in the nuclear heating box.

And yes, you guessed it, she’d grabbed the butter instead of the spaghetti on her way out the door.  So, she sat down with a fork, in front of a steaming bowl of partially-melted margarine for lunch.

I can still hear the sustained laughter of her “friends.”

And I’m going to leave you now with a big Question.  I’d like to know what are the most amazing things you’ve ever seen.  How’s that, huh?

I’m thinking about locations, places in the world that blew your freaking mind.  But, as usual, you can bend the rules and list whatever you want.

Two things jump immediately to my mind.  I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon, or the Egyptian pyramids, or anything like that, so my two examples might not seem all that dramatic to some of you.  But both affected me a great deal.

The first was a couple of years ago, when we flew to England.  I’d wanted to get there since I was a kid, and was super-excited about the whole thing.

We took off from Newark around ten o’clock at night, and flew for about five hours.  Then it was daylight again (freaky), the sky was incredibly clear, and we were flying over Ireland.

Finally getting to the UK, and seeing it for the first time from an airplane window, was one of the most memorable (amazing) things I’ve ever seen.

Also, when I was an unsightly teenager I went to Fenway Park to see the Red Sox play one of the expansion teams.  Toronto, I think.

And when I walked up the tunnel and laid my eyes on the inside of that great old park, my heart skipped a beat.  I was a complete baseball freak at the time, and a lover of baseball history.

It was an amazing moment, one which I’ll never forget.

Now it’s your turn.  Tell us about the most amazing things you’ve ever seen.  Use the comments link below.

And I’ll see you guys next time, whenever that happens to be.

Have a great weekend!

Now playing in the bunker