Truth is dumber than Onion

I love The Onion. Sometimes I run across articles that look like they belong in the Onion, but they're real. Sometimes it's the onion free truth that makes you cry.

This black-and-white handout photo provided by the General Accountability Office (GAO) shows a product billed as an air room cleaner that was actually a space heater with a feather duster and fly strips attached. Fifteen phony products, including the air cleaner, won a label from the government certifying them as energy efficient in a test of the federal 'Energy Star' program. Investigators concluded the program is 'vulnerable to fraud and abuse.'

Open Book

I was going through a bookcase the other day. I love books, but they’re heavy, and heavy things aren’t really the best thing when you’re considering moving. I had to go through and be brutally honest with myself—was I going to read it again? Could I find it at a library? If I bought it and hadn’t read it, was I ever going to? If I did plan to read it, could I find it at a library? You get the point. I am the person that says she won’t buy a Kindle (or e-reader) because 1) I’m cheap, and 2) I like books. Books don’t need to be charged, and if the book gets damaged (water bottles have a strange way of leaking all of their contents around my books), you’re not damaging an entire collection. If you leave it someplace (yes I've done it), you didn’t just throw away $200+ dollars.

At the bottom of the bookcase are my journals from college. I wrote in them every year I was there. I didn’t write “Dear Diary” or have a lock on it or anything corny like that, but I wrote pretty regularly. People say this is a good habit—it’s therapeutic, and you’re keeping a record of events as you see them when they’re happening, not later when your memory is fuzzy and you embellish the past into something better than it was. I will probably always have them, but here’s the problem—I can’t go back and read them without feeling embarrassed for myself. It’s like time traveling without the advantage of being able to interact with those characters from the past. Suddenly you’re reading about things that happened and how you felt, but you’re also thinking, who is this dumby? I read a page, cringe, turn the page, read, cringe and repeat until I’m compelled to shut the book.

Some people say (who am I, Fox News?) “But the past is what makes us who we are!” Please. That’s just a way to excuse the sheer idiocy that went on. I don’t keep a journal, but I write here, and what you see is just a highly edited sliver of what goes on in my head and in real life. If there’s anything I learned from those books I wrote in college, it's that sometimes the fuzzy (and sometimes embellished) memory really is better than the young, dumb truth.

Early Bird

Apparently Conan O'Brien is doing a tour. As soon as I found out about this, I looked for tickets. The D.C. show is on June 8th. Well, I checked the calendar and initially thought "Shit! Crap! I won't be here!" I am visiting my best friend in June. I try to go every year (or she comes here). Then I thought, "Oh good, I will be here." I will be catching a red eye flight home, which means I get in an Oh-dark-thirty in the morning and that night I could have a night on the town with my husband. We got to see his man-crush in October, so I should be able to see my Co-nan crush in June, right? Fair is fair. Besides, my husband thinks he's funny too. It wouldn't be like he'd be checking his iPhone throughout the show, like he did at a certain Cure concert or something.

Apparently word got out through Twitter. I have a Facebook account but I drew the line at Twitter. It just sounds too annoying and high maintenance. Some people look at Facebook the way I look at Twitter. "Why should I get an account? It's just people twittering or tittering or tweetering in 140 characters or less. Why do I need this?" Well I got my answer today, didn't I? Apparently the tickets sold out pretty quickly, or at least for the D.C. shows, you can't even find tickets in pairs anymore. If I really wanted to find some tickets now, I guess they wouldn't come cheap. Get it? Cheap? Cheep? CHEEP CHEEP? Eh?

is this thing on?