It's ok, I'm not even reading this anymore either.

It’s not that I’m against smoking in restaurants; I’m just against being around smoke while I’m in a restaurant.

I am not a fan of smoke, there’s no question about that. I do understand not wanting to be told what to do. I do understand wanting to have a choice. But what I don’t understand is why the choice of non-smokers doesn’t matter? When you light up in my presence, my choice not to smoke is completely invalidated. It hurts my feelings.

If we’re going to have smoking sections in restaurants, then they need to be better separated. I’m from California, where all indoor smoking is banned. I’m spoiled over there and I know it. Right now, I’m visiting an area of the country where such bans do not yet exist. Their idea of smoking sections = this table isn’t, the table right next to it is. That means that pretty much the whole restaurant is a smoking restaurant.

Why not give them there own separate room with a nice air dam to seal in the smoke? I would support that. Why give me a headache and take away my ability to taste food? Am I really asking too much?

Also, could I possibly have a better topic for tomorrow’s post? That might be asking too much.

Ohio encourages poor judgment

I don’t currently own a chain of successful restaurants. This is a gross oversight on my part. I hope to correct this sometime in the future. When I do, you can be sure of a few things:

I will always serve fresh, delicious food.

I will require my employees to wash their hands excessively.

I will never choose to name my restaurant in a confusing manner.

This is a restaurant I will never own.

Look, all I’m saying is Park first, Eat second… seems a bit more logical to me. I don't care if it is the best breakfast in Cleve at special prices!

Spice up your life

Let’s talk about being stupid and eating things just to prove you’re not a sissy. Scotch Bonnet peppers are the item of the day. They rank fairly high on the Scoville heat rating scale. For a quick reference point, a jalapeno pepper rates somewhere between 2,500 and 8,000 on the scale. A Scotch Bonnet lands somewhere between 100,000 and 350,000 on that same scale. For the sake of my ego and legend, I’m going to pretend that I hit the top end of that rating system.

The worst part of trying to prove you’re not a sissy is that you can’t complain at all when you screw up and eat something that burns you from the inside out. On the plus side however, if you’re having trouble producing excessive amounts of mucus, or perhaps there’s not enough deep red in your complexion, those issues will be resolved by eating just one Scotch Bonnet pepper.

I now have a chemical burn in my mouth and I can’t even complain about it. You’d think that after awhile you’d get used to the pain, but not so much. In fact, it only seems to be getting worse. You’ll have to excuse any spelling errors in this post as I cannot see that well right now. The tears I’m holding back are not from the pepper though, they are from the loss of my soul, which I granted freedom from the hellfire within me now shortly after I swallowed that pepper. I’m hoping for some massive good karma based solely on that move. Of course, I realize the irony of building up karma for a soul I no longer possess…

At this point, my biggest complaint would be that the super market where this pepper was purchased did little if anything to help the average, ignorant customer. They separated the peppers into three categories: Mild, medium and hot. That’s all well and good, but there’s a pretty big difference between a jalapeno pepper and a scotch bonnet pepper. Were it not for the very well informed, leather clad biker (seriously, I make a lot of stuff up, but I’m not making that up.) that knew the names of all the peppers, I could have easily confused this cute little orange guy with having a harmless nature. How hard would it be to put up a little name card with a picture of a skull and cross bones next to these guys?

Somebody kill me. Kill me now.

God help me...

INDIANA!!! OH MY GOD!! WHAT A STATE!! IT WAS AMAZING.

Then I got lost in Ohio.

None of this matters though. Right now, I need everyone in the country to focus on one singular goal: Carson Daly needs to be taken off the air.

Look, I know there’s a writers strike going on right now, and I fully support the writers, but at the same time, something needs to be done about this. I’m smart enough not to watch, but there are others out there that don’t have a choice. Please, help me get this show off the air.

Semantics

I may have exaggerated slightly before when I said that I was going to take a trip around the world. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I’m taking a round-trip in the world, but that I will only be going to the Midwest.

Chicago is the first stop. It’s cold. Ohio will be the next stop. I hear it’s cold there too. Already I’m feeling like my travel agent screwed me. To be fair, I said I had a limited travel budget. Then, for seemingly no reason at all, I also casually mentioned that I had a pretty nice coat for cold weather situations. Honestly, I was just trying to make conversation, but I see now, in retrospect, how that could have been misinterpreted.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go prepare myself mentally for the voyage to Ohio. As I understand it, it can be quite taxing if you’re not ready for it. They say it’s like Vegas, New York and Paris all rolled into one. And it’s like that for the whole state, not just in vacation hot spots like Columbus and Kent. I only hope I can find the time to continue posting through what I assume will be the single greatest party stretch of my entire adult life. Fortunately, since I’ll be driving in, I’ll be able to soften the culture shock of Ohio by driving through Indiana first. I don’t think I could take it if I just flew straight into the belly of the beast like that.

Wish me luck!

Ways to test my patience

Let’s talk about what is acceptable and what isn’t today. In my book, the game Minesweeper* is a very acceptable game. It is a game of skill and awareness. Not just anyone can be good at Minesweeper; it takes a special blend of patience and determination in order to succeed at the highest levels.

At least that’s what I had thought. Then I started my journey around the world. While I was sitting on the plane, I witnessed a game of Minesweeper being played by a boy I assessed to be in his late teens at best. He seemed pretty savvy with the keyboard shortcuts, so I can assume he’s not new to computers or the game of Minesweeper. I’ll tell you right now that if I were a scout for the national Minesweeper team, I wouldn’t spend much time on this kid. He was making bad moves and getting stuck when there were still plenty of obvious mines to mark and move on. It was hard enough just to watch him struggle through his bad moves, let alone not go over there and manually instruct him on how to play the game. Then he did something that made me want to press the call button for the flight attendant and request that he be forcibly ejected from the plane. He got halfway through the board, was stuck, SAVED the game, made a wrong choice, then reloaded from the save point!!!

This, my friends, is unacceptable! The game of Minesweeper teaches us valuable life lessons about how to make good, logical, well-thought-out choices. You need to know that if you choose wrong, you will die in a fiery explosion and the game of life will end. You can’t just save it, test your choice and if you get it wrong, reload from that save point! It’s completely against the code of the Shuck N Jive. It is something that I will not stand for. As soon as I landed, I sent a letter to the M.A.N. (Minesweepers Association of Nantucket, the foremost authority of Minesweeper players everywhere) to officially have his Minesweeper license revoked for life.

I wish that’s where the story ended, but it is not. The reason the letter was sent as soon as I landed and not shortly after I landed is because after saving and reloading nearly half a dozen times, he “beat” the game and gave an overly enthusiastic fist pump as a means of self congratulation. This is beyond unacceptable. There can be no celebrating that victory, only mourning the death of your self respect.

*You’ll notice that I never explain the rules of Minesweeper. That is because I believe this game to be more popular than soccer, so it would waste our time as a society for me to bother explaining it. It should also be considered redundant and unnecessary. And if you don’t know what it is, then I probably don’t even want to talk to you in public anyway.

The Road Show

I think it’s pretty obvious that everything has gotten stale here on this blog, so in order to spice things up, I’ve decided to take this show on the road. I’ll be traveling all over the world in order to bring you some of the most exciting blog fodder you’ve ever seen/read.

I left from Los Angeles international airport. I flew Southwest because, let’s be honest, they’re cheap. I’d like to commend Southwest on their new boarding system that they didn’t bother to tell anyone about. Basically, there’s a new system that involves both letters and numbers. Think of something really confusing, multiply the confusion by 10, then thumb wrestle an alligator and you’ll have a small glimpse of what the new system is like.

I’m on the move right now, so I’ll get back to this later, in the mean time, I’ve got a globe to trot.

Turkey day

Thanksgiving is a time to look back on your life and appreciate the good things. It’s a time to spend with family and friends and enjoy a good meal together. But mostly, Thanksgiving is about football.

A few years ago I had a chat with then NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, or P. Tag as I like to call him (but I do want you all to know that I spelled his name right on the first try), and I was just spitballing a few ideas at him. Sure, just writing them down would have been easier, but P. Tag and I have a unique relationship that allows us to have fun even when we’re working, so I can wad up these ideas and spit them back at him. He’ll only acknowledge the ones that stick to his glasses, so we were only able to discuss one of my ideas.

My idea was simple. Football on Thanksgiving is the best, no question. But I said to P, “Look, Detroit and Dallas are classic. I love watching those games, but at the end of the day, when that second game is over, I think to myself, man, I could do one more. How about we have a triple header on Thanksgiving?”

I had to thumb wrestle him before he O.K.ed the deal, but I had been training for that moment for over 17 months. He never saw it coming. Point is, we now have 3 football games to watch on Thanksgiving because of my spitball aim and thumb wrestling prowess. I explained to the commish that the beauty of the third game will be that we can schedule any two teams we want! That way, that third game will always be one we look forward to.

Then they released the schedule for this year. Indy VS. Atlanta for game number three today. Rodg really dropped the ball on this one. I’m obviously going to have to have a sit down with him. I need to show him I’m serious, so I’ll be bringing Ed Hochuli with me. We shouldn’t have this problem next year. I apologize to everyone that has to watch this game.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!

This will all be on a quiz someday I'm sure.

I’m all about self-discovery. Figuring out what makes me tick is always interesting. Conversely, figuring out what does not make me tick is also very interesting. The thing that I love most about self-discovery is that it can happen at any moment and at any time. There are no rules when it comes to this sort of thing. For instance, yesterday, I found out that I write at an elementary school level. That’s good info.

Today, I discovered something equally as important. I found out that one of my least favorite things to do in this world is replace the toilet seat on a toilet. This was not a discovery made slowly over the three-hour course of operation: New Toilet Seat. No my friends, I made this discovery very early on in my mission. There are only two bolts holding on the toilet seat and this might give someone the false sense that it’s and easy project, but just wait until the first bolt strips out like it’s made of loosely packed sugar.

You might be thinking that this is a good time to bust out the Gator Grip. You’d be wrong. For that to work, you’d need some semblance of an edge to grip onto, or at least and oval shaped head. That is not the case. Instead you are left with a perfectly circular nub. I momentarily halted my operation to bring in a team of scientists with some really expensive equipment to confirm this. It was a perfect circle. I think they're going to publish cross referenced articles in both "Plumbing Mishaps Monthly" and "The Scientific Journal for Circles and Circles Only." That second one is bi-weekly (and by that, I mean that it comes out every two weeks), so keep your eyes peeled.

I won’t elaborate on exactly which power tools I used, or how much my fingers may have bled, but suffice to say, there’s a new toilet seat installed now. Word to the wise though, don’t ask me to help you change your toilet seat unless you’re in desperate need of a slap to the face.

An Apology

By a show of hands, who here thought that the streak had ended?

Wow. That’s a lot of hands. I didn’t even realize I had that many readers. Of course, I did not specify, but each person should have only been holding up one hand, not two. Still, point taken.

I want to share with you all a very important lesson I learned today. The fact that I learned it today should be mostly irrelevant to you, but I do hope that you learn from my mistakes.

I found out from this website, that in order to read and comprehend this blog, you need to have, at the very least, completed junior high. This came as a bit of a blow to the staff here at The SNJ. We’ve been in operation for coming up on three years now and we had no idea that we had let ourselves go like this. We have standards. We have principles, and because of this, we feel it is necessary to apologize to everyone in the entire state of Rhode Island, as well as the unincorporated territory of Guam, for having let ourselves sink this low.

From this point forward, The SNJ promises not to be such a smarty-pants. Hence forth, you can expect a severe dumbing down to take place. No more fart jokes that go over everyone’s head. No more passing notes during class. No more advanced geometry! We’re going to bring The SNJ back down to the kindergarten level where it belongs.

Starting tomorrow, you can expect to see a lot more posts about finger painting and how NOT to eat play doe. I can only hope that it’s not to late for my actions to still mean something. God help us all if I am too late.

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