The Most Unwanted Music

Time for another incredibly random post. You are about to listen to one of the most ear-splittingly awful things you have ever heard in your entire life. But also one of the most gut-bustingly hilarious.

This morning I read this comic:

I thought the idea of Opera and rap was one of the worst, yet funniest ideas in music history, and I really wanted to know what it might sound like, but my brain just couldn’t put the two together. After I read the strip I went down the page and started reading the comments that people had left. One person replied that Opera-Rap had already been done, and posted this link.

~http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/04/a-scientific-at/~

This is so much more than just Opera Rap though. It is a terrifying fusion of Opera, Rap, Cowboy music, and children's holiday choruses. It is played on bagpipes, tubas, electric keyboards with the preset beats, harps, pipe organs, banjos, acordians and many other instruments that have no buisness being in the same song. This is 20 minutes of musical horror that is like watching a train-wreck with your ears. It is so awful, but so incredibly funny!

The opera singer can barely make herself understood, even when she is not rapping. I couldn’t understand most anything she said. The most hilarious thing I could pick out was when she was wailing mournfully, lyrics to a cowboy song, singing about "Miss Kitty" and going "Yaaaaahoooooooo..." very very sadly.

The children's chorus sings many songs, all to the same tune, joyfully exclaiming about shopping for Christmas, Yom Kippor, Labor Day, and Halloween. "AT WAL-MART!"

In short, you have to hear this! You will laugh your head off as you plug your ears. :D

All Hail the Mighty Expiration Date!

Yesterday I read the following comic and it got me to thinking about how ridiculous some people can be when it comes to expiration dates.

There really are people who are like this. I know, I’ve seen them at the grocery store. They don’t care when a product was made, they just want to know when it expires.

What they don’t realize is that those dates are almost meaningless. The companies pick a random date at a specified point in the future because the government says they have to. I mean, seriously. Do they really think that on 05/06/11 that box of cereal is perfectly fine, but at precisely midnight on 05//07/11, *POOF!* it suddenly becomes a box of toxic death flakes to anyone who eats it?

Expiration dates are a handy guideline, but to throw something away the day after the date on the package expires is just foolish and wasteful. Some things are still good months after the expiration date, and some things, such as pasta, are good years after. Just as long as the package is sealed, and bugs haven’t gotten in it.

I did an internet search on how long some items really last and I found out that even these five most feared items are good for quite a few days past the date. (Original article HERE.)

Milk: If it's properly refrigerated, it will be safe, nutritious, and taste good for about a week after the "sell-by" date.

Cottage cheese: It should last 10-14 days after the date on the carton (or 10-14 days after you open it, if this period ends before the printed date).

Mayonnaise: If it’s unopened and refrigerated, it can be kept for 30 days after its expiration date or three to four months after opening.

Yogurt: It will be good 7 to 10 days after its "sell-by" date.

Eggs: If they’re properly refrigerated, they should last at least three to five weeks after the "sell-by" date.

Just use your own good judgment, and don’t follow the religious sect of the Expiration of the Holy Date.

It drives me crazy how wasteful our country is. The store where I work throws tons of perfectly good food away because of that date on the package. And they don’t even wait till it passes, if the date even starts approaching, it gets chucked in the dumpster. Why not mark it down or donate it to a food pantry? Oh, right, because Nanna Government says not to. And we mustn’t disobey Nanna now, must we?

Ok, that’s enough ranting for now. I’d better move on to some homework before I start off on another tangent on how wasteful the government is. :)

Hello Russia!

Apparently Russia is spying on me! Every time I check my blog’s stats, I have page views from Russia. Today I had 5!

So… Hey Russia! Um… Wear a parka, it’s cold outside!

I think I’ll refrain from any communist jokes. :)

Pinkness Awareness Month

Longtime readers of my blog may recall that a year ago I wrote about how October was Breast Cancer Awareness month, and that the store where I work had been overtaken by pink ribbons. If you’d like to read that post, you can find it HERE. This year is no different.

I thought about doing the same thing this year as I did last year, but when I saw the following item, I thought, “This is all I need to show how stupid this has become.”

Really? REALLY?! You can NOT tell me with a straight face that this was a coincidence!

I still feel the same way as I felt last year. All these “Aware” items, do nothing to raise awareness. It’s just a way for these companies to get more people to buy their products under the guise of charity.

What’s worse, is that since last year I have learned terrible things about the biggest breast cancer charity, the Susan G Koman Foundation. They have become nothing more that a giant greedy business. They have gone so far as to SUE other small charities for using the phrase “For the Cure” in their promotions. Charities that have nothing to do with breast cancer even! I will link you to two articles so you can see for yourself.

~http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/08/05/pm-susan-g-komen-fights-for-trademark/~

~http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/07/komen-foundation-charities-cure_n_793176.html?ref=fb&src=sp~

In conclusion, if you REALLY care about finding a cure for breast cancer, then seek out a GOOD charity, and donate directly to them. Money given to the Susan G Koman foundation is pretty much wasted. They do not use their donations wisely, and they use money that has been donated to them to finance their legal battles. If you really want a pink box of mushrooms, then go ahead and buy it, but if you ask me, this fad is just getting ridiculous. I hope I won’t be writing another of these posts a year from now, but something tells me I probably will.

Zombies Are Coming

Mini rant alert! Anyone overly affectionate toward the undead should skip the next paragraph and just look at the picture. :)

Are you fed up with all the stupid zombie jokes popping up all over the place? Are you tired of all the inane references to the impending “Zombie Apocalypse”? Are you sick of seeing zombie references all over the internet, television, and pretty much everywhere else in pop culture? Well I am. It drives me crazy how such stupid things can overtake the culture. First it was Wizards, (Thanks a heap, Harry Potter) then it was Vampires, (Way to go, Twilight) now it’s Zombies. (Um… Not really sure what started that one, they’re just everywhere all of a sudden…) What’s next, Swamp Things? That being said, I am afraid I am going to do nothing to help matters by passing on this picture. Yes, it’s yet ANOTHER zombie joke, but it cracked me up so much that I felt it would be a good subject for another “Random” post. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on joining the zombie obsession (Zombie Cult?) but I got a laugh out of this, and I felt that I should share the humor. :)

Vintage Photographs: Before & After

I’ve been working on a bunch of pictures for my grandma in my spare time this week. It takes a long time and a lot of work, but it it so much fun! I already shared the first one I did for a class assignment, but I’ve done a few more since then, so I thought I’d make a new post so you could see what I’ve been doing.

These first two weren't too much work. I got them done just today, in less than an hour each. The little girl is my grandma, and I believe those are her brothers. At least two of them are. Ken and Stanley. I’m not sure if the other one is or not. I was thinking she only had two brothers. Maybe the other is a cousin or a friend.

Anyway, here is the before:

And here is the after:

The next picture is of my grandma and grandpa when they were MUCH younger.

Before:

After:

The next 4 I’ve been working on all week. They were significantly damaged, and have taken a LONG time to repair.

This is my grandma with a friend of hers. The back of the picture names her Rose Marie McCullay. Grandma is on the left making ice cream, and her friend is on the right. If you look closely, you can see that Rose is holding a cat. I didn’t even notice that until I’d scanned the picture into the computer and blown it up huge.

Here it is after I’d fixed it. The sky still looks a little odd, but I decided not to fix it further because I thought it looked sort of like clouds, and it made the picture more interesting.

The next one is a picture of my grandma with another friend, but I can’t read much of what the back says, so I’m not sure of her name. Grandma is on the right.

Here is the finished version. And again, after I’d scanned it, I noticed a cat. Can you find it? :)

The next one is another picture of my Grandma and a friend, but she is not named. She looks similar to Rose from the earlier picture, so it could be her again.

It struck me how much my Aunt Ruth looks like grandma in this picture.

Here is the fixed version.

Other than the very first one that I chose for my school assignment, this last one has been the most challenging. Not only was it damaged, but it was over exposed, and was taken through a window causing multiple ugly reflections to obscure the image.

I really had my doubts as to whether or not I would be able to fix that but I did!

This is grandma as a little girl along with her brothers Ken and Stanley.

I still have a bunch more to work on, so I‘ll be doing another post like this soon!

Photoshop is Amazing!

For our latest assignment in our Digital Photography class, we were to find an old photograph and restore it. It had to be a damaged photograph. It didn’t have to be very bad, but it had to have stuff that needed cleaning up. Folds, stains, dust, etc.

Well, I don’t know if we have any bad pictures around here, most of ours are in albums or envelopes, so I went to see my grandma to see if she had any old pictures that needed fixing. She did. I found a lot of old pictures in a box and I found some really badly damaged ones. But worst of all was this one.

As you can see it’s an ugly mess. I decided to go with this one. There are ones that I have that would be much easier to fix than this one, but I felt like a challenge. If you look at the picture you can see a whole lot of places that just a regular healing brush won’t fix. The one woman’s ear is completely gone, and huge chunks are gone from their coats. Plus the sky is a washed out mess, the photographer’s shadow is on the subjects, and they had their finger over the lens just a bit.

Well, it took me about three or four hours, but I finally got that picture to look like this.

It’s not perfect, but I can’t believe I got it looking as good as I did!

I still have a bunch more pictures, so I will post some more when I get around to fixing them.

Overheard at the Zoo

This post is in the same spirit as one of my previous posts, Little Kids at the Zoo, which you can find HERE, only this time there was some humor from stuff I heard adults say as well. So instead of calling it Little Kids at the Zoo 2, I just renamed it altogether.

For the easily offended, there is some crude humor. Kids say the darndest things you know…

Kid Number 1: Dad! Dad! Is that its shell?

Kid Number 2: Dad, is that its shield?

(Last chance, anti-crude people, you have been given fair warning!)

Kid Number 3: (After watching the rhinoceros stand in the water with its tail raised for awhile) “Why isn’t it pooping yet, mom?!”

Mom: (Holding back laughter) “I don’t know, sweetie.” *To her husband* “He’s your son.”

A man misread the sign for the Dama Gazelles. In his defense, he was standing quite a ways away, and the sign for the Dama Gazelles is written in a slightly odd font.

His wife’s reaction:

*Horrified exclamation* “Steve!” *To someone else* “Did you HEAR what he just told the kids they are!?”

He thought the second “A” in Dama was an “N”.

This one you sort of had to be there, but it was so cute I’m writing about it anyway. There was a lady with a baby, less than a year old, in a stroller. She pushed the stroller up to the fence beside me, by the Red River Hogs, and there was one right below us, eating. The baby got so excited and almost stood up and began exclaiming wildly to the hog in baby talk. The mom listened for a while and laughed, “Wow, you’re just having a regular conversation there aren’t you?”

“Mamma! Look at the Goat!”

*Dryly* “That’s a gazelle, honey.”

“Hey! He’s got a mohawk!”

“I want an orangutan SO bad!”

“LOOK! A NINJA SQUIRREL!”