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Sometimes It’s a Western, Sometimes It’s a Porno

5 Nov

My office sits at the end of a hallway, and I often have that part of the building to myself. During these times, it gets eerily quiet – for the most part. There may be the sound of the keys clicking on my keyboard. There may be the sound of someone shutting a door at the other end of the building. However, there is always a squeaking sound coming from the ceiling.

The first time I noticed the sound, it was at a slow and steady pace. Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. I listened for a few minutes and kept thinking I had heard that sound somewhere before. It squeaked. I listened. Then, it hit me. This was the same sound in the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West, a Sergio Leone Western. The scene lasts forever and shows three gunmen waiting for the train to arrive at an isolated depot. Throughout their wait, an old windmill constantly turns and squeaks.

It squeaked so bad that this guy killed himself. Don’t believe me? Look it up.

To get the full effect, you should watch a portion of the scene. That windmill noise is the one outside my office. I should add that I don’t drink water from my hat or trap flies in the barrel of my gun.

At times, the squeaking noise speeds up, and the entire dynamic changes. Instead of sounding like a rusty windmill in a Western, it sounds like a squeaking bed from a porn movie. This is a family site, most of the time, so I will not include any porn images. However, I found a link that recreates the sound at my end of the hall.

As the title says, sometimes it’s a Western, sometimes it’s a porno. Other times, I turn iTunes up to 11.

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The Great Pumpkin Carving Escapade

30 Oct

Tonight, I carved a pumpkin for the first time in years. It was great fun, and mine turned out quite well considering my lack of expertise. My handiwork was not worthy of being immortalized on the Internet. Therefore, tonight’s festivities will be honored with pictures of some of my favorite things carved into pumpkins. I have no idea who made these, but they are great artists.

AC/DC

Hell’s Pumpkins

University of Tennessee

Touchdown Pumpkins

John Wayne

Pumpkin Cogburn

Elvis Presley

Ladies and Gentlemen! Elvis Has Left the Pumpkin!

Marilyn Monroe

Pumpkins Like It Hot

Darth Vader

Luke, I Am Your Pumpkin.

Clint Eastwood

The Good, the Bad and the Pumpkin

This is an incomplete list, but I couldn’t find one with Barney Fife.

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Questions of Great Importance

28 Oct

Why do Country artists sing about being Rock stars?

Elvis Presley – The King of Rock n Roll

Roy Acuff – The King of Country Music

Hint: You guys aren’t Rock stars.

Whatever happened to Gary Hart?

Yes, you mean more to me than being the president.

Why is it Hardee’s in the east and Carl’s Jr. in the West?

And, you thought the country was split between Red and Blue.

Who was the better fighter – Rocky Balboa, Apollo Creed or Clubber Lang?

Or, was it Drago?

Why do people believe that there is an invisible man in the sky?

This guy has been the reason for a lot of conflicts.

Who thought red light cameras were a good idea?

I’d better not run that yellow light, so I’ll just slam on my breaks and get hit in the ass.

How many bloggers are there?

I think there are more bloggers than people.

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Unsolved Mystery

13 Oct

I’ve had a posting idea in my mind for a few days, but it will have to wait a few days longer because something else cropped up. Yesterday, I looked at the Stats page and saw “Robert Stack Sex”. Somebody actually typed “Robert Stack Sex” into a search engine and found their way to this blog. Now, this brings up a couple of concerns. First, why would anyone search for “Robert Stack Sex”? Second, why would that bring them to the SBI Universe?

Many of you are probably asking, “Who is Robert Stack?” He was an actor who made several good movies in the 1950s, but he found fame and a pop cultural legacy on television. In the early 1960s, Stack played Elliot Ness in The Untouchables.

Elliot “Sex Machine” Ness

Stack gained renewed fame a few decades later as host of Unsolved Mysteries.

Robert “Sex Machine” Stack

In the late 1980s, almost everyone watched this show and heard Stack say “what you are about to see is not a news broadcast”. Well, it may not be a broadcast, but I have some news. Somewhere in the world is a person who wants to know something about Robert Stack and sex. I contemplated this fact as I stared at the screen and the words, “Robert Stack Sex”, were burned into my eyes and concluded that what the searcher was looking for should remain an unsolved mystery. With that in mind, here are a few theories in an attempt to solve the mystery of the “Robert Stack Sex” searcher.

1. The searcher gets off on watching bad actors reenact crimes.

2. The searcher thinks the promo photo of Elliot Ness is an accurate representation of Robert Stack’s, uh, machine gun.

3. The searcher missed the “un” on The Untouchables and believes it is a porn movie about people who are constantly being “touched”.

4. The searcher is waiting the Unsolved Mysteries version of Robert Stack to open his trench coat and flash the screen with his machine gun.

5. The searcher is turned on by people who star in shows that begin with “un”. They imagined the letters in front of words like dressed and zipped and inhibited.

Whatever the case, someone has “Robert Stack Sex” on their mind, and they came here for help.

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Interweb Alphabet

10 Oct

When I was a kid, it was a family tradition to take a road trip every summer. We would get in the car with a semblance of a plan and drive across the country. It was a great way to travel and allowed me to eventually visit each of the 50 states. Of course, we had to fly to Hawaii.

Sometimes, the drives would get boring for a kid, so we would play games along the way. My favorite was the Alphabet Game. My mom would come up with a category, and we would take turns naming things in that category in alphabetical order. If the category was Cities, then it would go from Albuquerque to Baltimore to Chicago. We would do that until we made it to Z. I didn’t realize that it was probably educational.

Tonight, I have been at a loss as to what to write about. In fact, I’m not really in the mood to write anything, but that feeling is going to be pushed aside. Anyway, I came up with another version of the Alphabet Game. I am going to Google each letter and see what pops up first.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

A – the Twitter account for Andrei Zmievski

B – the Wikipedia entry for the letter B

C – the Yahoo summary of the stock activities of Citigroup, Inc

D – the homepage of D Programming Language

E – the online version of the E! Network

F – shockingly, it’s FaceBook

G – the Wikipedia entry for G-Force

H – the official website of the 4-H Club

I – a site called “I Am Bored”

J – the website for California’s J Vineyards & Winery

K – news of the music made at K Records

L – beautiful faces on the L’Oreal website

M – the M Resort of Las Vegas

N – a puzzle game that involves ninja and homicidal robots

O – the site for O: The Oprah Magazine

P – the Wikipedia entry for the letter P

Q – Q the Music entertainment depot

R – the R Project for Statistical Computing

S – the Yahoo summary of the stock activities of Sprint Nextel Corp

T – the website for T-Mobile

U – the history of the U-Boat

V – the website for V Magazine

W – the site for W Magazine

X – the music of X-35

Y – the rabbit hole that is YouTube

Z – the Wikipedia entry for the letter Z

I hope you didn’t find this post as boring as I did. I promise that I will never do numbers.

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Logically, It’s for the Poet

8 Oct

When this blog began, the front page of WordPress was a listing of those blogs which had been chosen as “Freshly Pressed”. I found several blogs to follow by squeezing the melons in that section. Now, the front page of WordPress has changed to some sort of sliding pictorial format.

Example, “For the Foodie” slides into “For the Photographer”. I suppose that the slides show potential bloggers the variety of things they can write about in the WordPress world. It’s an alright front page, but there is one thing that I have a question about.

Why does “For the Poet” have a picture of Spock in a wig?

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Thank God for Gas Pumps

24 Sep

All of us bloggers like to look at our stats. At least, I assume all of us bloggers like to look at our stats. I know that I do, anyway. It’s not like I look at them all of the time. Wait, I do look at them often, but that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to point out an anomalous point in the stats. I have pointed it out before but feel the need to point it out again.

One of my earlier posts, The Problem With Gas Pumps, completely dominates this blog. In fact, it makes up 17% of the total page views in the SBI universe and outnumbers the next 30 posts combined. Undoubtedly, some of its popularity is due to the excellent writing exemplified by the post. However, I believe most of the popularity comes from the fact that it includes this picture:

This picture drives more page views than a topless picture of a princess.

Don’t believe that gas pumps dominate? Here are the top 15 search terms for Surrounded by Imbeciles.

1. gas pumps

2. gas pump

3. gasoline pump

4. pictures of gas pumps

5. josey wales

6. gasoline pumps

7. dumas brothel

8. mount rushmore conspiracy theories

9. outlaw josey wales

10. pump gas

11. picture of gas pumps

12. the outlaw josey wales

13. images of gas pumps

14. gas pump image

15. picture of a gas pump

The only things that bust the monopoly are people looking for old prostitutes; people looking for hidden meanings in stone-faced presidents; and, people who are fans of Clint Eastwood’s best movie.

Bloggin’ ain’t much of a livin’ boy.

In honor of The Problem With Gas Pumps and to gratuitously promote other posts, I present the ten posts that are eating the most dust.

Victorian Brothelese – There are the whores that people are looking for.

Greetings and Salutations – You can always count on the About page.

Dirty Deeds and Thunder Chief – My ode to lyrics that people mess up.

Movie Wisdom – Burt Reynolds Edition – Watch some Burt Reynolds movies. It will make you smarter.

A Requiem for Josey Wales – “To Hell with them fellas. Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms.”

The Good, the Bad, and the Presidential – There is more bad than good in this post.

It’s a Conspiracy – If you think things aren’t as they seem, then read this post.

John Wayne and Edgar Allan Poe – What? You didn’t know poetry could be learned from a John Wayne movie?

Memories of a Day in September – My thoughts on the anniversary of 9/11.

A Totally Not Funny Account of My Trip to New Orleans – It’ll make you cry.

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Alternate Versions of Me

19 Sep

I have often heard people say, “You should Google yourself and see what it says.” Apparently, a lot of people do this, so I decided to do it, too. Now, I have a simple name that is probably common. It not common like John Smith, but it’s not Engelbert Humperdink, either. With a decently common name, I found a lot of alternate versions of myself.

The first version is a singer who has a MySpace page. Heck, I didn’t even know MySpace still existed. Anyway, he has a list of songs that can be listened to. My favorite is a cover version of “He Ain’t Heavy”.

I don’t know, but I bet a metal kid is kind of heavy.

Another version of me is the executive director of the AIA chapter in New York. Apparently, it is an architecture thing because he is a registered architect.

I hope he designed this because it’s cool, and he has a cool name.

The next version is a lawyer in Sugar Land, Texas. This guy has a long resume filled with numerous awards and a long list of professional organizations. My parents wanted me to be a lawyer. I guess that would have made me an alternative version of myself.

On second thought, maybe they wanted me to have another job. I can’t remember.

There is also a version that is a State Farm agent in Chatfield, Minnesota. I know what you are thinking. That is the most exciting thing you have ever heard of.

Dressing up as a bear might make it more exciting.

Somewhere in the list of alternatives, I found the real me. There I am in all of my glory – historian, lecturer, member of the Rotary, a regular jack of all trades.

Overall, this Googling myself thing was a weird experience because it’s a little strange to read about people with the same name as me. I wonder if there would be an explosion if a couple of us ran into each other. I don’t know about that, but I know that I would hate to be named John Smith. Wait, I would hate to be named Engelbert Humperdink, too.

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YouTubing

14 Sep

I don’t spend very much time on YouTube. Sometimes, my nephews get me to look at funny videos, but that’s for their amusement more than mine. However, I started playing around with it the other night and quickly realized why I have avoided it. YouTube is like following Alice down the rabbit hole. It’s like Hotel California where you can check out but never leave. Each video takes you into a maze of other ones until you can’t remember how it all began.

After several hours, I escaped when my iPad began to run out of battery. I tried to sleep, but the videos replayed through my mind. That’s when I had a blogging idea. I would search the first thing that came to my mind then choose the seventh video on the list. When that video was over, I would choose the seventh video in the list of videos that pop up on the side and see where this YouTubing adventure would take me.

So, here we go. Oh, I know this would be a better experiment if Surrounded by Imbeciles had video capability. Other cool blogs have it, but this site really isn’t that cool.

Hopefully, the site is cooler than this shirt.

Ok, the first thing that pops into my mind – The Eagles. I guess the Hotel California thing inspired me. The seventh video is….Hotel California with lyrics. Shocking, I know. What are “colitas” anyway?

I googled colitas, and this picture came up along with lots of photos of naked Latino women.

Now, on with the show. The seventh sidebar video is Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger with lyrics. There are no images of Rocky, Apollo or Clubber. It’s just a black screen with white letters.

To make up for that omission, here are the three boxing legends.

Going from tough guys to a not so tough guy, we have Michael Jackson and Beat It with lyrics. I’ve always wondered what he was beating exactly.

Hey kid, beat it!

Caught in a Michael Jackson loop, we get the disco era version and Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough. Man, the lyrics really take on a different meaning when you read them.

From here, we go to Hopsin and something called Ill Mind of Hopsin 5. He’s a rapper, and he’s pretty good.

The Man. The Myth. The Hopsin.

Alright, up pops one of my favorites, Eminem. Except, he isn’t rapping. It’s a comedy skit called Eminem Goes Back to High School.

The Oral Presentation

The next video is pretty funny. It’s called White Boy Drops Sick Beat. You have to watch this one.

From here, we get Top 10 Worst Infomercials. I didn’t watch it all, but it starts by showing the advantages of having a Tiddy Bear. Watch, and you will see.

And the Tiddy Bear said, “Hmmph. Urgggh. Mmamm.”

I’ll be honest. I don’t think I can top the Tiddy Bear, so I will just stop there. To recap, we went from Hotel California to Eye of the Tiger to Beat It to Don’t Stop Till you Get Enough to Hopsin to a scholastic Eminem to a white kid beatbox to the Tiddy Bear. Was the YouTubing experiment a success? I don’t know, but it ran my battery down again.

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No Idea Whatsoever

4 Jun

I have no idea what to blog about this evening. Nothing funny has happened over the weekend. I have no profound thoughts to expound to the world. There is not a list that I find fascinating enough to create. It seems that I have come to a stumbling block in my blogging path. I have noticed while perusing WordPress that a lot of people write about absolutely nothing, but I determined a long time ago that I would not resort to that. I want this space to have meaning, or at least have meaning to me.

However, here I sit writing about absolutely nothing, and I am not happy about it. So, here are a few things.

I just watched the season finale of Game of Thrones. It was pretty awesome, In fact, I liked it better than last week’s episode that everyone said was the episode-to-end-all-episodes. Now, I am watching Devil in a Blue Dress, a Denzel Washington movie from 1995 that has a great soundtrack. A few of the cuts from the album are:

“West Side Baby” by T-Bone Walker

“Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Wynonie Harris

“Chica Boo” by Lloyd Glenn

You may recognize “Good Rockin’ Tonight” because it was covered by Elvis. No last name needed. Wouldn’t it be cool to be famous enough to be known by one name? Elvis. Madonna. Fabio. You can’t put a price on that kind of fame. I saw on a site dedicated to blog tips that a picture should always be included. It makes the page look better and breaks up the reading. I will type in one-named celebrities and see what comes up.

Now, there is a real threesome. Takes me back to the glory days of the 80s, the days of parachute pants and my Camaro Z-28. Man, those were the days. I would cruise the Main and make my turns at Kroger and Sonic. Speaking of Sonic, I wrote a post about that place a long time ago, and I still haven’t gotten a good answer to my question.

There are other questions that I would like to know the answer to. For instance,

What was in the case in Ronin?

What was in the case in Pulp Fiction?

You know what? I know what was in them. They were filled with McGuffin’s, something used to drive a plot. That shouldn’t be confused with McGuffey’s Readers, books used for almost 100 years to teach kids how to read. The stories usually had a Biblical theme which kind of blew the old separation of church and state thing out the window.

Speaking of windows, I believe that I am reaching my window of opportunity to end this rambling post about nothing. If you made it this far, then I congratulate you. Next time, I will write a post about something.

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