thinglets: 5 Ways to Piss Off a Bar Full of People

All of the following have been done by myself or with a group of people. Some of them were done to intentionally piss people off, some of them were only discovered annoying after the act was complete.

  1. Ordered 6 pints of Guinness in a small bar in London with only one bartender and a slow tap.
  2. Engaged in a competition with some friends to clear the bar of young'uns with obscure jukebox music. I won when I found the live version of Dazed and Confused from Zep's Song Remains the Same clocking in at over 26 minutes.
  3. In the same vein, while playing in a classic rock cover band, once played a 45 minute version of Radar Love because the only table of drunks left in the dive bar kept yelling for "Skynyrd".
  4. During the Blue Jays World Series years sang the "Okay, Blue Jays, Let's Play Ball" song 36 times over a span of 4 hours. The song still gets sung today although there hasn't been much call for cheering until this season again.
  5. Had a peanut shell fight that turned into an all out peanut fight which the bartender kinda got into, but the regular cronies in the corner didn't appreciate... why do they give out free peanuts anyway?
As part of making amends, I offer only a 9 minute version of Dazed and Confused below. Use it well.

lovehate: 25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You

I refuse to participate in the 25 Things meme on Facebook as I don't think Facebook is a good platform for long-winded text entries and I'm half-convinced that the FB gurus started the activity themselves as a means to move people from blogging to staying on the social network du jour.

While I do admit to a lovehate relationship with lists, as evidenced in previous blog entries here and here, I will define my participation in the activity from the reverse angle and present "25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You"

1) You wet the bed every night until you were 17... you only wet it twice a week now.

2) You voraciously defend Richard Gere's reputation on the gerbilling accusations at the pet store three times a week.

3) Your musical "guilty pleasure" is the Mamma Mia soundtrack... your regular listening habits include the entire ABBA discography.

4) You watch NASCAR, but not for the crashes.

5) You keep lube beside your clock radio.

6) You once mistook Preparation H for toothpaste.

7) You once signed a petition to make LOLspeak an official language using your Twitter name and included the @ sign.

8) You still check the bulletin board in your building every day to see if people have ripped off one of the phone number tags for the flyer you put up about your "Handmade Crafts for Sale" and then rush back into your apartment to sit by the phone with the lights off.

9) You are building a wall in your basement of empty 2 liter bottles of dollar store Cream Soda.

10) You made a conscious decision not to speak "baby talk" to your cat because you wanted him to learn the proper way to yowl for Meow Mix.

11) You have a rash and/or are chafing. (I don't care where it is or how you got it, just don't speak of it any further)

12) You speak of your child's feces like you're gazing on the golden city of El Dorado.

13) You are only fourteen months away from completing your five year photoessay entitled "Things I've Cut or Clipped From Me".

14) You never gave up on the Laserdisc format and it's "close to DVD" resolution even though it's been all but dead for twenty years.

15) You overuse unnecessary articles by always saying "The Facebook", "The Twitter", and "The Skype".

16) You always say you're not "feeling fresh".

17) You decorate your house for the Olympics.

18) You have been hanging on to old issues of Tiger Beat for 25 years because you're sure that when Kristy McNichol makes a comeback they'll be worth something.

19) You scrapbook.

20) You consider shopping a hobby.

21) You once went to a concert because you overheard someone you thought was really cute say he/she was going there and you wanted to run into them and have something in common.

22) You have a collection of soaps, shampoos and other sundry bathroom items from every hotel you've stayed at that you keep on a curio shelf and will not open for fear of reducing the product's sentimental value.

23) You think it's quite acceptable to replace every lyric after the first line of a song with mindless monosyllabic gibberish.

24) You spend fifteen minutes in every supermarket you enter evaluating the wobble of grocery carts to ensure the success of your comsumer experience.

25) You would gladly write 50 or 100 things people didn't know about you if only a whacky social network spamming activity would prompt you to.

So that's it - 25 things I didn't want to know about you... or anyone for that matter. Here's an idea; let's pass this idea around and I think we'll learn a hell of a lot more about our friends without feeling like we're playing a bad game of Scruples.

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