Useless Advice Mondays: Location

If you're thinking about starting your own business, heed the time-tested advise when choosing a storefront: Location, Location, Location! This is especially true if you plan to sell items that the general public might consider to be perverse, crude, or just generally unacceptable by sound moral (lame) standards. These items may include: very revealing latex Catwoman suits, ball gags, exceptionally large "adult playtoys", barbed wire thongs, shirts that have fancy slogans like "Suck my Cheney", or any number of items that display your gayness...or if you want to open a store called "Gay Mart". In these cases, you can't go wrong with opening your store in the nearest gay area of town. There are many of advantages, as I will expand upon below. I speak from experience, as we currently live approximately 3 skips and a smootie from Boystown in Chicago.

Advantage #1: Window Displays

Most other stores are limited to what they can put in their window displays. These limitations are based on what is generally considered acceptable by the general public. In the gay part of town, throw that out the window. You want to have an overweight late-middle aged male mannequin wearing a leather thong in the window? Go for it! Assless chaps? Latex Nurse Outfits? Swing & Chains? Party. Hell, you can sell assless chaps in one store and comic book figurines in the next store....nobody will bat an eye. Want to set up a whole ass-slapping, leather dominatrix/super hero theme in the window? This is your place.

Advantage #2: Store Names

For the most part, stores have names that are pretty lame. "The Gap"......WTF is that? How does that relate to the products they sell? Is that a reference to the Gap between the price paid and the expected quality of goods? Now, in Boystown, they have stores like the automated female companion store named "Batteries Included". Now THAT gives me an idea of what is for sale in there. (Note: The gay part of town isn't limited to men only). Or the afore-mentioned Gay Mart. I've never been in Gay Mart, but in the window they have everything from Wonder Woman action figures, to statuettes of Judy Garland, to Felix the Cat wall clocks, to assorted faux-vintage T-Shirts.......which seems about right.

Advantage #3: Advertising

When your store is located downtown, or in a strip mall, your signs read something like "Holy Cow! Jeans 20% off!!". Or maybe even "Golly Gee we're cool! Shorts $20". Lame. Choose to own and operate your business in the right area and you can have signs like: "Sunglasses - $6 You Cheap Whore!!" or "Cheap-Ass $20 Shoe Sale". Now that's advertising!

So you see, if you want more freedom with your storefront and what you plan to sell, this is the neigborhood for you. Anything goes and everything's accepted. What a Country!

What a Wonderful.....Word?

Last night, Ms. HFJ & I attended our very first Cubs game at Wrigley field. For those that don't know, we've lived approximately 1/4 mile from Wrigley for the past 2.5 years. We have largely regarded it as the bane of our existence since doing ANYTHING around our apartment becomes impossible during a game. But we decided that we should go because we're moving away soon and it seemed pretty ridiculous to have lived that close and never have gone. That being said, it wasn't as bad an experience as I had thought and I actually had a pretty good time. Since I don't care about the Cubs as a team, it didn't matter that they lost.

While there, I noticed a certain sub-group of the female population that all had something in common, and a new word was spawned to describe this sect: The Skank-O-Matic. These ladies basically seemed like they were standing in front of the mirror, just before leaving, and a thought rose up in their mind...

"Damn...I look pretty hot, but just not.....I don't know.....how do I say this.......I just don't look like I could be bought for a half-eaten tuna sandwich and a bag of crack yet. How can I remedy this?"

Insert the Skank-O-Matic. I imagine the Skank-O-Matic to looks somewhat like a Ratchet & Clank gun...for those who have no idea what that means, here's some help:

This device, upon activation, automatically makes the average person looks like they would  gladly perform any required sexual service for the sum of a bag of M&Ms and a bottle of model glue. Some of the ladies in attendance last night took a full on, di-rect blast or 7 from the Skank-O-Matic, where some simply looked as if they only took a glancing blow. 

There were two ways that Mrs. HFJ could tell that a victim of the Skank-O-Matic was approaching:

1. I would nudge her an whisper "Skank-O-Matic"
2. The two middle-aged guys sitting next ter her would begin to comment about the hot chick walking up. The more heated their comments, the more blasts from the Skank-O-Matic.

Reality

Useless Advice Mondays: Bulletproof Glass

About 10 years ago, I made a mad dash from Cali-for-ni-ay to NYC. The reasons for said dash will not be discussed here, lets just say it was a necessary trip. Since I like to  drive long stretches, and since my arrival and return from the Golden Apple was time sensitive, there were not many non-danger-of-pants-crapping stops involved. Needless to say, upon my arrival at 2:30am, I was, as Austin Powers puts it, spent.

I feel that it is necessary to point out here that I had never been to NYC....or east of the Mississippi (and I did just sing the little song to spell that), well, not counting that one trip to Atlanta.....but I flew in and out of there, so we won't count it. So please keep in mind that I may not have been privy to certain metropolitan charms.

Having arrived (arrove...arriven....a rivet?) at such an ungodly time of night into an area with which I'd only known from movies and sitcoms where people with no jobs live in apartments I could never afford, I was a bit unsure of what my next move should be as I was not scheduled to arrive until 10 am....the next day (like I said....few stops were taken). I decided that the best course of action would be to check into a motel for a while.

So I'm technically in or around Weehawken, NJ (New Yorkers just chill out.....the rest of the world would consider this NYC) and I find a motel. Now, I'm not fully alert at this time, so some of the parts of the check in process that should have alerted me to what was coming went unnoticed until latter pontification. I walk up to the clerk, who is standing behind probably 4-inch bulletproof glass, and begin to arrange for a room. He asked me if I wanted the hourly or nightly rate (that's a key that I also missed). I opted for the nightly with some confusion. Keys and cash were exchanged and badda-bing I had a room.

I go into this room and immediately I realized that I had made a tragic error. The bed had an imprint of a roughly 5 foot 7 person in the center. By imprint, I mean that if the sheets were plastic, I could have filled it with water and bathed. OK....no problem.....old mattress. So I decide I'll pop on the tellie to see what's on....you know relax a little.

The TV had 5 channels. Each and every one of them were ass-slapping porn. Not just your run of the mill "Oh my pizza boy, do you have something ELSE you'd like to deliver?" porn. I mean the get the camera lens moist during close-ups, pull the sheets out of your ass porn. 

OK....so TVs out. Maybe I'll just take a quick shower and then go to sleep. Go into the bathroom and there is some kind of arachnoid hobgoblin that has set up domicile in the bathtub. Since I didn't have an arc welder or a low-yield nuclear bomb, I decided the shower wasn't the best idea. 

Out of options, I literally stood in the center of the room for a solid 30 minutes marveling at the various stain patterns on the floor, walls and (gulp) ceiling. I finally decided that there was no hope and walked out of the room to check out. When I went outside, it had lightened up somewhat...and I could really get an appreciation for the pit of rhino dung that I had checked into. Norman bates wouldn't check into this joint. It made Ed Gein's house look well kept. 

Now, in retrospect, I can see all of the little indictors that should have sounded the alarms in my head. I have stored them all in the cabbage salad that I call a brain, but I'll just give you the only one that you ever need to remember:

Advice: NEVER check in at a hotel through bulletproof glass.  If the hotel clerk is behind bulletproof glass, there is a reason, and you just need to leave.

Observations: Post Life-Changing Event Edition

Last week, the Legandary Mrs. HappyFlapjacks and I returned from Mexico. For those of you keeping track, you will note the absence of the "Soon-to-be" portion of her name, which explains the title of this post. As always, I noticed several things during the trip and upon our return that require a quick mention here.

1. Once you go on a few international trips, you become used to things that really freak people out when they're not used to being out of the country. My mom could not get over the fact that in Mexico (and in every other country I've been to), they have armed security people in the airport. By armed, I mean real-life, bitch-betta-have-my-money sub-machine guns, not your average mostly concealed pistol. She kept commenting on it...and on the truckloads of army guys driving around (armed of course, but it sounds wierd to say "Armed Army Guys"). I guess once you've been severly scolded in German by a guy holding an Uzi for trying to feed his police dog a hamburger in the airport, you're just kind of immune to these things.

2. We stayed at a fairly fancy resort. Whenever you asked for anything, the response was "It's our pleasure." It actually became a joke. Any time one of us would ask the other for something, the appropriate response was "It's our pleasure". The best part about this is that you could call room service or housekeeping, ask them for something, know with 100% certainty that they had no clue what you were talking about, but they would still say "It's our pleasure" and then hang up. Example:

Me: "Hi. Our TV isn't getting any channels. Is there something wrong with it?"

Hotel Worker #216: "It's our pleasure!" *Click*

3. There seems to be a very loose set of driving laws in Mexico. Probably enough so that you don't frequently get run into, but not enough to actually warrant enforcement. On our way to the hotel, the driver actually sped up to about 20MPH over the speed limit to pass a cop....and barely missed getting whacked by a bus in the process. Not a moment of concern on his face, the cop's (actually cops, it was a truck with two in the fron and about 4 in back...all with BBHMM Sub Machine guns), or even the bus driver's. But, to be fair, traffic does seem to flow much more smootly, and nobody was honking or flipping one another off.

4. On my way home from work, I pass many cemeteries. I'll probably post more on that later, but what caught my eye today was that one of the headstones looked just like the Wu-Tang Clan logo. I'm hoping that this monument to the dearly departed was erected pre-Wu, but you can never be sure. Of course, maybe it was post-Wu. Maybe someone died and those left to concern themselves with a proper burial thought: "He's going out ODB style......bitchez."

5. Underneath Casa CrapStain (our apartment), are three dumpsters for the disposal of our fellow resident's trash. While taking out a nice big bag of cat litter, used,  (which reminds me of this Onion Headline), I noticed that someone had decided to toss out a bunch of trophies. But they didn't just toss them in the dumpster; they lined them up on a little ledge for all to see. It's like "Yeah, I'm still kinda proud of my little league trophy from 1983, but I've got other shit to decorate with.....why don't you look at them for a while?" It seemed really funny....and kinda sad at the same time. For this, I shall provide a photo: