action potential » moron alert

something i learned today

whitney — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:16:14 +0000

you know how it’s impossible to carry a food tray and still look cool? well, today i discovered that it’s also impossible to carry a plastic gas can on the street and not look like a complete loser and failure.

what’s more embarrassing is that when my car wouldn’t start this morning, i immediately thought it must be the fact that i’m 500 miles overdue for an oil change. the fact that i haven’t put gas in my car in over a week didn’t even occur to me.

granted, my gas gauge is a little wonky so i have to estimate a bit, but nonetheless, a person who lets their gas dwindle to fumes and then acts puzzled when their car doesn’t start is to me just as much of a failure as someone who goes into work and forgets that they left their child in the car all day.

ok, ok, so being a loser or a complete failure is one thing, hopefully a private thing. but when you’re at a gas station and inserting a gas nozzle into a red plastic can instead of a gas tank, when you’re standing there carless in a spot where a car should be, you have learned a very public shame. and then, when you’ve dispensed your two gallons and you’re walking to your car past a bunch of people in their responsibly-fueled cars and you’re holding the bright red proof of your failure and negligence, there is absolutely no way to make yourself seem even the slightest bit less of the raging loser you so obviously, irrefutably are.

this is what i learned today on an otherwise gorgeous day in LA: gas tanks have a limit, but humiliation can be bottomless.

talk like a pirate day

whitney — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:05:38 +0000

anyone talks to me like a pirate today and i will slap you all the way back to march 16, 2002, the last day that something pirate-related was not annoying.

unless of course you’re a somali pirate, in which case you’d still be cool and not contrived.

winner of the car-masquerading-as-state-flag challenge…

whitney — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:52:45 +0000

is eric brown from sunny california who submitted this photo of a car draped in the unofficial flag of california for the “are there any other non-texan douchebags that like state flags out there” contest. i swear i just saw this car in california dragging a bunch of tin cans with “JUST MARRIED” written in white shoe polish in the back window. oh wait, maybe i was just GAYDREAMING.

eric brown has won a truly amazing and rare People Magazine promotional scarf that i found at a thrift store in Berlin last year. i’m not quite sure how it ended up there but through a truly selfless sacrifice on my part it is now in california, around the neck (or face) of dear reader ERIC BROWN.

congratulations, eric!

back from vacation!

whitney — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 05:39:52 +0000

here i am in sunny san francisco.

everybody loves a tourist in a visor, right???

i missed you guys! wait til you see all the chinatown trinkets i got for you to throw away!

look at this texasshole

whitney — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:28:40 +0000

how many millions of dollars do you think he spent on this paintjob to let everyone in texas know that he was from texas?

i challenge one person to find and photograph a car that so prominently features any other state flag than texas. i don’t think anyone can do it. only in texas.

world’s stupidest woman talking about god-knows-what

whitney — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:22:24 +0000

oh my god, somebody please kill me before i get any stupider listening to this woman talk! you’d think the city council meetings would first screen speakers to ensure they actually had a brain before they went out and strung a completely uninteligible combination of words together in front of a microphone.

i challenge one person to transcribe everything that she says and try to locate one coherent thought or sentence in this speech.
something to get you started: “and we can make things; we can make things, cars. the machine can make it for us…and we can make things and put them in the stores.”
if anything, this video is proof that vegetables can talk about vegetables which is so meta it’s kind of blowing my mind.

via thedailywhat

Woman unknowingly tosses $1M stuffed in old mattress

whitney — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:15:06 +0000

well, now i’m conflicted. For years, we’ve been urged not to pick up furniture, particularly mattresses, off the curb for fear of spreading bed bugs (a very real threat that I am obsessed with). but yesterday in israel a woman threw out her mother’s mattress only to find out later that her mother had secretly hidden close to a million dollars in it! it could very well be that that mattress you walk by on your way home from work is a padded vault containing a fortune, which could easily pay for the extermination you’d need if it also contained a few bed bugs.

i’m seriously going to start re-thinking my avoidance of salvaging furniture from the street. pick up the right piece and you may be able to actually buy your next piece of furniture. you know, from an actual store.

read the full article here.

your fortune awaits you. BUT YOU HAVE TO WANT IT.