Gunny Walker

  There are some folks that I work with that are trying to teach me Ebonics. It's pretty funny. I've learned that if you want to greet some one you say, "Sup?" You have to wear ankle socks. I need me some school boy glasses whatever those are. The really funny parts are when they teach me terms like Yo and Jive Turkey. Sometimes it's hard to keep from laughing while they try to teach me things. I guess they don't know the jokes on them. I can't help that I am redneck, but that doesn't mean that I don't understand Ebonics. Heck, most of the language is the same. I'm surprised that I didn't give myself away when I said "Ah-ight."
  That's all I got today. Later, jive turkeys.

  I just got back from seeing Shaun Of The Dead. It's a great movie. I went in thinking that it would be a comedy, but I was shocked. It's an actual zombie movie. It has it's sad moments and terrible moments. And even one time when much like Night Of The Living dead, I wanted to shout out, "Oh, just shoot his a**!"
  There were some shocking moments and many moments when I flinched in my seat. I didn't flinch out of shock. I flinched because of the whole situation.
  Well, that and the special effects. They are great. There is one scene where they poke a hole through a zombie and then the zombie gets back up. Then they do the extreme camera shot where you actually look through the zombie. It was then I realized this wasn't a stoner comedy. It became a real movie. It even had its disgusting moments like when they showed one guy getting ripped apart while he was still alive.
  When the movie started to wrap up, I thought, "Crap, this is going to end on a downer. I can't believe they are marketing this as a comedy." I was greatly surprised by the ending though. It has some nice emotional moments at the end and a great twist.
  All in all, I'd have to say it is a great remake of Night Of The Living Dead. I know it wasn't intended to be, but since it came out, aren't all zombie movies just remakes of Night Of The Living Dead?

  Wow! I just finished watching North by Northwest. What a movie. I guess this is what Big Stupid Tommy would call "auteur". Hitchcock was a freaking genius. The amazing thing is that after this one he went on to make a black and white movie. Today, and probably then, people would think you were crazy for wanting to make a black and white movie.
  The funny thing is that he was contracted by MGM to make another film. While writing a script, the script realized that he couldn't pull it off. Hitchcock then decided that they should make a different film. He never actually came out and told MGM that he wasn't making The Wreck of The Mary Deare anymore. He just gave them a pitch for North by Northwest. MGM actually thought that they were getting two movies for the price of one. Even through filming they were unaware that it wasn't a film about a movie at sea.
  I can see many things that other movies had taken from North by Northwest. If you like this movie, you should also see Double Take

  So, at work last night somebody looks over and says, "Hey Gunny, what are you smiling about?"
  "Nothing."
  "You were smirking. What's up?"
  "I was just thinking about a joke I heard the other day. Q: You know what they say about men with big shoes don't you? A: Well, I can pretty much tell you it ain't true."
  Then I proceeded to explain that sometimes the dumbest things like that will keep me smiling for hours. Sometimes I retreat into my own little world because it's so darn amusing. Does that make me crazy?
  Probably.
  The funniest thing I have ever heard was when I worked at Taco Bell and a friend and I were talking about haunted houses. "They've even got one in Woodbury," he informed me. "They just walk you through a barn and say things like 'This sheep's cooter's got teeth!' "
  I burst out laughing at "This sheep's cooter's got teeth." It was the hardest thirty seconds of laughter I can remember. I abruptly stopped and asked him what a cooter was. I laughed the because cooter is a pretty funny word. He explained it to me, and suddenly Dukes of Hazard became much funnier. He had never thought of that before, and we both had a good laugh.
  It's been over ten years and I still smile thinking about it. Anytime I need a good laugh, I remember it. I try to explain it to others, but they just don't find it that funny. I guess I've watched too much British comedy or something.
  "This sheep's cooter's got teeth!" :)

  "Where's my cake?!?!?"
  As I'm sure that many of you have read on Fark, Rodney Dangerfield underwent heart surgery. He was quoted as saying, "If all goes well, I'll be there for a couple of weeks. If things go badly, I'll be there for an hour and a half."
  I don't why he doesn't get respect. Rodney's one funny guy.
  Anyway, the bad news is that he's been doing badly. Let's be straight here. Mr. Dangerfield is 82 years old. You can't expect him to bounce back quickly. Heck he had to have a surgery to get ready for this surgery. He's currently in a coma. I can't stress it enough how much I and I'm sure others wish him a speedy recovery from his surgery. I'm sure that he gets much more respect than his routine indicates. Of course, that's not why I have brought this up.
  I thought, "Who's that chick he's with?" It's not his daughter. It's his wife. And she is pretty good looking. She's no supermodel, but for an 82 year old guy, Rodney's doing pretty well. That's enough reason for me to come back from the surgery.
  Did you know that Bobcat Goldthwait is engaged to Nikki Cox?
  Jerry Lewis claims to have spent more time with Marilyn Monroe than JFK.
  Alanis Morissette wrote songs about and dated Uncle Joey. Okay, his name is Dave Coulier.
  The list goes on and on. Jerry Seinfeld. Chris Rock. Ellen DeGeneres. Tom Arnold divorced the comedienne and now he gets the chicks. Albert Brooks. Even Will Smith whose closest attempt was his videos as the Fresh Prince.
  But you see my point, right? Comics get the chicks! So, I'd like to announce that I am going to start doing stand up comedy. I've got to start working on a catch phrase.
  "Where's my cake?!?!?"

  Here's a great story I read a few days ago. Out of all the fifty states, Tennessee pays the least in state and local taxes.

  Guess what I got today! It's Clerks X. It's the tenth anniversary edition of Clerks. It's got lots of extras. I'm watching the documentary on Kevin Smith. It talks about how he got started making Clerks. He worked at RST and Quick Stop. He went to film school, dropped out early, and then went back to work at RST and Quick Stop just so he could film there.
  He was working a crummy five dollar an hour job and ran up more than $20,000 dollars in credit card debt to pay for Clerks. He took an extremely large chance and hit it big time. It's a great story. It's inspiring and worth watching.
  That is if you don't mind putting up with the extreme vulgarity that takes place in the movie. There is no action. There is not much of a plot. Ninety percent of the movie takes place in two rooms. And it's in black in white.
  This ain't Hollywood, folks. It's Jersey.
  Anyway, the big story out of today's Tennessean happens to be one of a guy working at a local shop that sells games. Not the owner, just an employee. He has been accused of molesting a twelve year old boy. I feel kind of sorry for gamers on this one. Here it is they just want to play their HeroClix or whatever, and now they are going to labeled as child molesters. People will think, "Why else would they play these children's games but to lure them into their predatory clutches?"
  Because these games are still kind of fun.
  Not that I play these games. Well, because they are kind of childish. And I'm grown up now and have much more mature tastes. They were cool in the fourth grade, but now I've gotten beyond that stuff. That's all I've got for today folks. Now, I'm off to watch Cats Don't Dance

  So anyway, went to the state fair last night. There was supposed to be a demolition derby, but they announced that they would not be having one. They said that they would gladly give me tickets to Thursday's demolition derby. Great. What happens if they cancel then? Do I get free tickets to next years demolition derby?
  Well, Ken and I went to ride rides. We rode the big loop. I think it's called the ring of fire. By then I had started to burp up my lunch and decided that maybe it's time to quit. We rode a couple more rides and left.
  I guess it's eight or nine carnival rides and I'm done. Maybe, I shouldn't have had such a large lunch. Anyway, we still had a great time.
  There was the world's smallest horse there. It looked sad and was all head. It made me depressed to see it. I wish I could have brought an apple for it to eat. Maybe that would have made it's day.
  Ken's son, S, was pretty scared at first over the ride, but then started having a great time. He repeatedly rode the carousel with the vehicles. He couldn't get the horn to work, but kept sticking his thumb up about half the time he went by.
  We left then evening sweaty and tired. I carried S. Ken's wife carried their daughter. Ken pushed the stroller.
  All in all, it was a great night.

Dang It! I do declare! Now for some reason my volume control is not coming up. First, my modem goes out now this. It's about time to drag out the disks and wipe everything clean. I don't know. Maybe I've got a virus or something. Either way, I'm still wiping everything clean, but right now I'm off to the state fair. Go read about Erich von Däniken. He thought that current humans have no idea how things like the pyramids were built so therefore ancient humans didn't know how to do it either. All the ancient monuments that are a mystery to us must have been built by aliens. I guess "I forgot" is an unacceptable answer.
There. At least I am entertaining you somehow.

  Boy what a bunch of spoil sports! Salt Lake City has just removed a law of their city books. They haven't allowed planes to fly 2000 feet within their city for years. They recently removed an exception. They will no longer allow Santa Claus to fly within 2000 feet either.
  In other news, Tennessee's State Fair began yesterday. It's an all day event that will continue until the 19th. They have shows at the racing arena for an extra price. Unfortunately, it's listed on a different page. They've got concerts, demolition derbies, and racing. You should go.

  I loves me some infomercials. It's great how with one small, reasonably priced product, I can change my whole life. Also, I get three times the value for what I pay for it. Tell me more!
  I really am a sucker for these things. I guess that's an addiction that I will have to deal with since I do frequently work evenings. Why can't I get old episodes of Andy Griffith or something. Of course, I saw one about how I can invest my money in the stock market. I'm hooked. You know I am. Well they pull the old trick that says I can try it for ninety days for $9.95. After that, I can mail it back in and not pay another nickel.
  I've seen this trick before. I've seen it with Robert Kiyosaki and Video Professor. So I checked it out. It turns out that if you buy the package from Trend Trading To Win, then you only have to pay three easy payments of $75.
  Excuse me. There is no such thing as three EASY payments of $75. I watched the show. All this guy teaches is how to channel stocks, read technical analysis, and utilize options. Of course you can find this information in a few books for less than a hundred bucks. All you need are the books located in the sidebar.
  Of course, I don't have a well engineered infomercial with exciting music. Heck, I had to look up "channeling" in the dictionary to check the spelling. "Technical" still never looks right even though I am using it quite frequently. I'm just some redneck telling you something for free. And we all know that you get what you pay for.
  Of course, I still loves me some infomercials.

Greetings Folks. I've been reading a very interesting book for the pat couple of days called The Number : How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America. It's a pretty good book. I've been reading it at about 50 pages a day and considering it's only 250 long, I'll be done with it soon. It does however have some very interesting passages. Some of which struck me enough to think, "Gee whiz, I should put this in the blog. It's crazy." Of course, I went back over the pages and found several other things I found interesting. Some of them I hope to include here, but some of them I'm sure I'll go back and look at and say, "Nah, that's interesting to me, but I'm not sure that the average person will know why I find that interesting." Anyway, I thought that I would post the beginning of the first chapter. It paints a very interesting image about what the market was like after the crash of 1929.

It had been a very long week for J.P. Morgan Jr.
Morgan - the world's leading financier, the personification of Wall Street - had endured days before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee about his firm's misbehavior during the 1920s boom and the crash that followed. Under pointed questioning by Ferdinand Pecora, a hard charging New York prosecutor who was the committee's chief counsel, Morgan admitted that he and many of his partners had not paid any taxes in 1931 and 1932, with the depression at it's worst. He acknowledged at the height of the bubble, his firm had offered government officials the chance to buy shares in a hot new company at below market-price. With 25 percent of all Americans unemployed, with banks failing and farmers starving, these revelations did elicit great warmth. A generation later, The New York Times would call the inquiry "remarkable for its unfriendliness even in that year off banker's general unpopularity."
That year was 1933. And on the first day of its sixth month - Friday, June 1 - at 10 a.m., in a Senate hearing room crowded with reporters and photographers, Morgan and his aides waited for another difficult day to begin.
Then the midget showed up.
The reason Lya Graf came to the Senate that day has been lost to history. Her employer, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus, was in town, but Graf had no obvious to make her way to the Capitol. Perhaps Ringling was looking for some easy publicity; a Ringling press agent named Charles Leef had accompanied her. Perhaps she wanted to see Morgan in the flesh. If so, both circus and midget got their wishes. Ray Tucker, a reporter a reporter for the Scripps-Howard news service, saw Graf in the crowd outside the hearing room and pulled her in. "I'm going to introduce you to J.P. Morgan," Tucker said. And he did. Photographers swarmed and reporters rushed to capture every word of the not-very-interesting conversation between Morgan and Graf. (Morgan: "I have a grandson bigger than you." Graf: "But I'm older") Then Leef, the press agent, picked up Graf and popped her onto Morgan's lap.
  In pictures of the incident, Morgan looks stunned and Graf amused, her arms spread wide. Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange and Morgan flunky, quickly sent Graf off, and Morgan recovered his composure.
  But he could not recover his reputation. In a moment, he was transformed from a powerful plutocrat to confused old man....
  A midget had sat on J.P. Morgan's lap. It would be two generations before Wall Street and corporate America again ran so far amok during a boom or were so badly humiliated in the bust that followed.

  I don't know. This makes the Enron/WorldCom/Imclone/Tyco circus look mild by comparison. I guess it may be as bad, but Martha never became a circus sideshow.
  There are a couple of notes here. The kind that are in the back of the book and tell you that this story came from The New York Times Magazine's article titled "Thirty Years Ago: A Midget Sat on J.P. Morgan's Lap and Showed the Great Banker Was Only Human" (May 26, 1963, p 50.)
  The other note of interest is one of sadness. It's a bit of "Whatever happened to?" It says that in 1935 Lya Graf, whose real name was Lia Schwarz, returned to her native Germany. Half Jewish and a midget, she was arrested by the Nazi's in 1937 as a useless person. She was executed later in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. It sad whenever people talk about people being exploited in freak shows. In freak shows, we make them celebrities. In the real world, we often make them corpses.
  That's all for today folks. I'm going to read some more. Or sleep, I don't think that I've gotten my full eight today.
  Read The Number : How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America. It's a pretty good book.

  According to D.L. Hughley, black people while growing up...

• Would play cheap games like that folded football game. Or rolling dried up glue into little balls.
  
• Were unaware that Pop Tarts were supposed to go into a toaster.
  
• Would have a small working TV on a floor model TV.
  
• Would frequently have incomplete costumes for Halloween.
  
• Would often eat fried bologna.

  I guess I was unaware about the fact that I was African-American. I hate it when people tell jokes about how races are different whether they be redneck or black. Frequently, the people in the audiences don't realize how similar the jokes are.

  Okay, today I present you with the top ten reasons for voting for Bush/Cheney this year.
10 Oil is expensive. Bush made a lot of money speculating about land deals in Texas. He was pretty good at finding the oil rich properties and selling them at a higher price. He can use this knowledge for the US to find oil rich properties. (And then invade them.)
9. He's not all big business like some folks seem to think. Remember he worked for the Texas Rangers.
8. Can spell 49 of the 50 states. (That Hawaii can't be right. It looks like some kind of foreign word.)
7. Supports an amendment to create Freedom Fries, Freedom Dressing and Peter, South Dakota.
6. Michael Moore needs the money.
5. As a former member of the Texas National Guard, he knows about war.
4. Kerry can't swagger.
3. Because Heinz ketchup is red, just like North Korea's communists, axis of evil that they are.
2. Because he figured out that Mexicans are getting too expensive to hire. That's why Camp X-Ray is in Cuba.
1. Cause if he loses, then the terrorists win.
  While I was doing this I found this. It almost looks like a real site.