Fictionlet

"Um, excuse me," Greg said to the guy behind the bar. "There's a problem."

"Hmm?" said the bartender. "What's wrong?"

"This place is a 'sports bar,' right?"

The guy blinked. "Uh ... yeah?"

"Well you've got the place littered with big-screen TVs, but they're all showing the same thing -- basketball!"

The bartender looked confused. "Basketball's a sport."

"Well, yes, it's a sport. But it's only one."

"What do you mean?"

Greg gave an exasperated sort of half-gasp, and pointed at TV after TV. "Look. Basketball. Basketball. Basketball. Basketball. Basketball, basketball, basketball! What about all the other sports out there, that are so much more interesting? Why can't you show some of them?"

The bartender shook his head like Greg had just told him his nose had fallen off. "What sport is more interesting than basketball?"

"What sport isn't more interesting than basketball?" Greg demanded. "You could show baseball! You could show archery! Team rowing! Motocross! Billiards!"

"Billiards isn't a sport."

"Billiards isn't a--??" Greg rubbed his eyes. "Okay, fine. How about inter-style martial arts competition? Or even just kickboxing? Surely that would be interesting! College wrestling! High diving!"

The bartender narrowed his eyes. "You're one of those people who actually liked to watch curling when the Olympics was on, aren't you?"

"What is that supposed to mean?" Greg demanded.

"Okay, fine," said the bartender, as if to a wayward child. "Just to please you, I'll put this TV on something else, okay?" He produced a remote and clicked in a command.

Greg looked at the TV with a flat expression. "Women's basketball," he said.

"It's a whole separate league and everything," the bartender said.

"Women's basketball is still basketball!"

"All right, all right, geeze!" The bartender clicked the remote again.

"Soccer!" said Greg. "Oh for crying out loud. Soccer is like basketball after stripping out all the interesting bits!"

The bartender produced a baseball bat. "Get outta my bar, ya freak," he said. Greg just had time to notice, as he headed for the door, that the bat had been signed by Michael Jordan.

-The Gneech

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Putting the "Cull" in "Cubicle"

Just spend ~2 hours cleaning up my cubicle, which seems to spontaneously generate piles and piles of papers that I neither want nor need -- despite the fact that my recycling bin is always filled to capacity.

I tossed into the bin three copies of "what charge code to use for printing" (updated every six weeks whether needed it or not), two dozen printouts of entire websites just to mark up one text change, an article by Ben Forta from 2004 about a technology that was slated to take over the world but which nobody uses now, three diagrams of where the fire exits are (updated every six months whether needed or not), and lots and lots of memoranda from H.R. explaining the forms I had to fill out with my full name and address to tell them that my name and address hadn't changed in the past six months.

I also finished off the office's last can of compressed air blowing a metric boatload of DUST off of everything.

It's nice and orderly now. :) I give it until about Thursday.

-The Gneech

EDIT: Oh, I also found my thumb drive. How it ended up in the "NIMH website" pile, I have no idea. 0.o

Random Weirdness

Inspired by a woman at Tysons Corner mall, wearing one of those behind-the-ear blinky blue cellphones:

I am Trisha of Borg. You are like SO TOTALLY going to be assimilated. Resistance is like totally futile, m'kay? Ohmygawd, you so totally did NOT just shoot that phaser at me.

-The Gneech, m'kay?